Next week marks the fourth anniversary of Guild Wars, easily one of the most popular and successful MMOs, thanks to the overall quality of design, and its lack of subscription fees. To find out more about the state of Guild Wars four years after release, and to find out more about the upcoming sequel, Guild Wars 2, we recently talked with ArenaNet founder and Blizzard veteran Mike O'Brien. 

IGNPC: It seems a bit surreal that we're talking about the fourth anniversary of Guild Wars already. It must be longer for you, though, as the game was in development for a while before its launch, and a concept before then. Just how old is the franchise, technically?

Mike O'Brien: We started developing Guild Wars Gold shortly after founding the company in 2000, so we've actually been working on it for about nine years now. We invited the first external alpha testers to start playing the game with us in April 2002, so they've been playing the game for seven years.

Another fun statistic is that we did the first full build of the game in October 2001, which was 2,750 days ago, and since then we've done 27,500 builds.

IGNPC: What were the origins and inspirations for Guild Wars? Blizzard games are an obvious example, considering the roots of ArenaNet. But what were the driving thoughts behind the game's formation?

Mike O'Brien: Before Jeff, Pat, and I left Blizzard and founded ArenaNet, I was working on Warcraft III and Jeff was working on World of Warcraft. We often commented about how the two game genres borrow from each other. A strategy game is more fun when it's infused with roleplaying elements that give the player an emotional connection to the world, and a roleplaying game is more fun when it provides ways to compete with your friends and see whose character is better. It was natural for us to look for a game that could blend both genres.

At first it seemed like an impossible task, because online RPGs are all about persistent character progression, and persistent character progression seems like the last thing you want in a strategy game. We used to compare it to a chess game where whoever had been playing chess longer got to start the game with two queens. Who would play a game like that?