Every great game starts with a simple question: What do we want to playnext? If you aren't passionate about the game you're working on, it isalready doomed to mediocrity. And the best way to make sure you'repassionate? Make something you want to play.
For the team at ArenaNet, the idea of making Guild Wars 2 started with a single conversation about all the things we wanted to do in the next Guild Wars Gold campaign. Very quickly it became clear that we could move the gameforward by leaps and bounds... but only if we were willing to rebuildit from the ground up. Here's what we thought we could accomplish:
Give players immense freedom of movement. The underlying systems in Guild Wars Gold allowed us to make a very responsive, yet hack-proof game, but theyalso prevented us from giving players the ability to jump and swim andexplore their environment freely. We’ll still keep movement hack-proof,but we want players in Guild Wars Gold 2 to simply enjoy moving around.
Allow players to encounter each other in common, persistent areas. The instancing of Guild Warsgave us a ton of story-telling and gameplay advantages over ourcompetitors, but instanced areas and persistent areas each have theirstrengths and weaknesses. We want to give players the best of bothworlds.
Let players choose from multiple playable races(including our own unique addition to the fantasy genre, the Charr).Our team takes a lot of pride in the look and feel of each of theprofessions in the game, but some of the early technical choices wemade for them prevented us from even considering introducing playableraces. Now we have a chance to make new choices that give players moreoptions.
Give players deeper options for character advancement.We knew this would be the most controversial of our new goals. Could wedo this without creating a game full of grind? As avid fans and playersof RPGs, massively multiplayer or otherwise, we saw many untappedopportunities for making this work.
Make everything about Guild Warsbetter. When you look back honestly on a game you've made, there arealways things you wish you could have done better. Could we create astronger economy with better options for trading? Definitely. Could weaddress player concerns about the relationship between PvP and PvE?With a new system, yes. Could we give players more and better storage?Yes! The list goes on and on.