Guild Wars Interview, Part One

In the first installment to a new interview on IncGamers, John Stumme from the Guild Wars Live Team chats about the content that was added in the game’s “Winds of Change” updates. Here’s a sampling:

GWOnline.net: Hard Mode for most of the Winds of Change quests is a lot more difficult than Hard Mode experiences for Guild Wars players so far in Factions, as is vanquishing after you have driven the (original Factions inhabitants) away. Was that the intention of the Live Team, and if (yes), why did you decide to do it?

John Stumme: The increased difficulty was an intended decision. The idea being that Winds of Change is post-game content. We had the opportunity to take zones like Shing Jea for example and increase the challenge of the content in this zone to increase the number of playable zones for players in the end game. Of course, that’s the official explanation. The unofficial one is that Andrew just likes to balance things in a way that makes people suffer. He takes a lot of pride in that, too.

As I’m sitting here and writing this, Andrew is looking at revising the spawns for some of those zones. As a matter of fact, I’m actually listening to Joe give him a hard time about Minister Cho’s Estate. There’s a lot of griefing of each other that goes on in our room, and that, ladies and gentleman, is how work gets done here on the Live Team.