Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns Interview

PC Gamer has chatted with ArenaNet’s president Mike O’Brien and game director Colin Johanson about Guild Wars 2’s first expansion, Heart of Thorns. If you’re interested in ArenaNet’s philosophy concerning the new areas added by the expansion, endgame content, and the mastery system, among other things, this is a good place to start. A couple of snippets:

PCG: How big is the new region, Heart of Maguuma?

Colin: You know, we picked a different philosophy for building out this region. We’re really focusing on doing less broad development and more deep development. I think historically you’ll see expansions for MMOs do a bunch of maps that players progress through very quickly and leave a wasteland of empty worlds behind them. We’re really focusing on doing less total maps and instead making them really, really deep, filled with a ton of replay value; a ton of content to explore and see. A lot of content that, as you progress through it, you’ll see for the first time and you won’t be able to get there, or you’ll encounter challenges that you can’t overcome the first time that you see them. As you progress and build through our mastery system, you’ll be able to return and overcome those challenges and get to those places you couldn’t get to the first time through. And so we’re really focusing on: let’s do a little bit in the grand scheme of things; let’s do a smaller sized area for total scope, and focus really on depth. Make maps that have an incredible amount of replay value, so every time that you log in you can go back in there and have a new experience. Have an incredibly deep experience and enjoy playing over and over again in that content.

I think in a lot of ways, philosophically, you look at what makes a lot of games have really good replay value, and often times you look at competitive games where a lot of them have a game mode and people will play it over and over again for years. We’re really trying to take that concept and that experience with our PvE and provide that same type of experience where you don’t have a ton of maps that you tear through and go away. Instead, they have really deep experiences that you can play over and over again and have an amazing time with.

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PCG: Looking at the masteries, one thing you said was that mastery points were account bound. Does it follow the World vs. World system, where you expect characters to specialise in masteries rather than trying to collect them all? So you have one character focused on a particular thing, and another maybe another?

Colin: The World vs World ability system is in some ways a template for what the masteries system provides. But I’d say the mastery system is a more advanced, more expansive system than that built on things we’ve learned both for what we want to do with PvE, and some of the things we learned from the World vs. World system as well. And we’re actually going to make some changes to the World vs. World system to make it a little bit more like the way the masteries system is going to function. At its core, exactly how you progress is something we’re going to come and talk about later between now and the release of the expansion. The most important message we want to get across is you do it once, and when you’ve earned a mastery point you’ve got it for every character, and you’ve earned those abilities for every character. You don’t have to go back and grind on every one of your characters to get all this.

PCG: Oh, so an ability you purchase for one character is applied to all of them?

Colin: That is currently the plan, yes.