Guild Wars 2 Interview

Forbes contributor Carol Pinchefsky has chatted with Guild Wars 2’s lead designer Isaiah Cartwright on the post-launch additions to the title, and the answers should interest players of the game and MMO aficionados in general. Excerpt ahead, as usual:

Why have there been so many additions to the game?

As we were looking at the play patterns of players, we noticed they were getting through the last step of progression in our game faster than we wanted them to. That would lead them to run out of things to accomplish. We didn’t want to get into a gear-grind scenario, so what we did was add a new tier rarity called (Ascended items.) We wanted to add a step in there to insure that people had a lot to do.

I’ve noticed you’ve added a lot of currencies.

We have somewhere around ten to fifteen currencies in the game right now. There are two main types, basic currencies and tokens. Basic currencies are gold, karma, the new laurels that we added, glory. They exist with you in your inventory at the bottom [of your UI]. The second type of currency we have are tokens. We use tokens in a number of different places, like the dungeons; they each have their own tokens. They show that you’ve beaten this dungeon.

We try to use currencies to split up the goals of players so that they want to do each of the different game types in different ways in order to earn the things they’d like to earn.

There have also been changes to the daily system. Before, you had to complete a set number of tasks in a day (completed dynamic events, plants gathered, etc). What’s changed?

We give you an option of like eight to ten [goals, such as killing enemies underwater or reviving other players and NPCs], and you get to pick five that you want to accomplish. So if you don’t like doing dungeons, you don’t have to choose it.

It only takes twenty to thirty minutes to accomplish these things, and it gives people a taste of different types of content. We try to kind of mix it up to encourage players to go to different maps and try different things out. We feel our system is the most robust one.