Guild Wars Factions E3 Interview

The Adrenaline Vault has published a three-page interview they conducted with ArenaNet’s Jeff Strain during this year’s E3.

Q: There are new game play elements that are being introduced. The PVE and PVP sections are getting merged together a little bit. What was the driving force to bring the Role Playing and Player vs. Player together in parts of the game?

A: You’re talking about the Alliance Battles and the Territory Control feature and how those require both Role Playing and Player vs. Player. Yea, you know, our goal with Guild Wars was always to make a game that really did support competitive PVP, because the cool thing to us with having a role playing game where you had your character and he was all tricked out, had all the skills, abilities and items, weapons and things, looked really cool, then you want to go and kick your friends butt! The problem is in traditional role playing games, it’s just a question of level. You know, whoever’s the highest level is going to win. So what we wanted to do was make a game where the PVP was very skillful. The team that trained together and played skillfully would win. I think that we where successful with that, but the problem I think that emerged from that was with the Prophecies campaign, we had 2 very distinct and separate communities. We had a very strong role-playing community and we had a very strong PVP playing community. But they weren’t really working together. There was no reason, for example, if you were a role-player only, to even join a guild, cause pretty much the guilds were the domain for PVP’ers. So what we wanted to do with Factions was introduce new play mechanics and new features that really brought those two communities together. If you had one community of 100 people vs. two communities of 50 people, the singular community of 100 people is always going to be stronger. So that was really our goal was just to bring those communities together.