Guild Wars 2 Beta Development Update

Following the much-touted beta testing weekend, Guild Wars 2 lead designer Eric Flannum, designer Devon Carve, programmer Randy Knapp, and designer Jon Peters have all taken to the ArenaNet blog to give us an update on the game’s progress and to clarify some of the lesser known mechanics that we’ve been reading about.

When a player is defeated, it’s important that there to be some sort of penalty associated with the defeat.This can serve several purposes, including reinforcing to the player that whatever they’re doing may be too difficult for them, as well as providing a little bit of extra excitement by upping the stakes. In the builds we’ve previously shown, when a player was defeated, reviving at a waypoint cost twice as much as traveling normally would. This approach had several drawbacks. Since every player in our game can revive another player, and since we do a lot to encourage a sense of teamwork and camaraderie among players, this penalty was almost never meaningful as it only kicked in if there was nobody around to revive the player. When the penalty did kick in, it tended to only impact players who were playing solo at off-peak times.

With the removal of potions from the game, we also found ourselves lacking a long-term attrition mechanic. An attrition mechanic does some of the same things that a death penalty does, particularly in reinforcing to players that they shouldn’t be playing in an area they’re not ready for. One of the most important things an attrition mechanic does, however, is provide players with a way to maximize their efficiency through skillful play. Since both attrition mechanics and death-penalty mechanics tend to have a lot of things in common, we started looking at how we might accomplish both things with one system.

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Boons and conditions are positive and negative states that can be manipulated by player skills. This is an important system in Guild Wars 2 for a variety of reasons. It helps us keep things simple by limiting the number of states in the game that need to be displayed and understood. It also helps us maintain a balanced system by making sure that when you grant regeneration to an ally, for example, it is the same regeneration available to other professions.

We’ve spoken about this system in the past, so why am I writing about it again now? Well, we had designed this system to have a lot of power and flexibility, but quite frankly, it just wasn’t interesting enough. We found that players didn’t know and often didn’t care when a particular condition or boon was affecting them.

This late in the development process, it can be hard to make the call to revamp something like this, but we felt that the current list didn’t live up to our expectations. We knew that we had to be very careful with how we revamped the system; we couldn’t just scrap it all and start over. With that in mind, we took a long, hard look at each boon and condition and tried to modify them into something more interesting that wouldn’t undo all of the skill design work we had done to this point.