Guild Wars Interview, Part Two

FileFront has published the second installment of an interview with ArenaNet’s Jeff Strain, in which they discuss PvP and other design features of Guild Wars.

Q: I want to talk a bit about the PvP in the game. What models did you base it on, or did you come up with something completely new?

A: There is a lot in Guild Wars that is inspired by Magic: The Gathering the card game. I’d say the flavor and the speed of combat is most influenced by action-rpgs like Diablo, but the underlying skill system is very heavily based on some of the principles of Magic: The Gathering. We have six professions in the game, and those professions map to (colors) in Magic, if you analyze those kinds of things. But most importantly, what inspired us about Magic was, here’s a game that somehow stays balanced over time with some minor glitches from time to time. But fundamentally if I buy a lot of cards, if I buy 100 cards a week, and I’ve got 5,000 cards in my collection, it would kind of suck if that meant that I always won because you didn’t buy as many cards. Again I’m getting back to the whole (how much time you have) point. But that’s not the case with Magic. If you’ve got a couple hundred cards and I’ve got 5,000 cards, I’ll have more choices, I’ll have more tactical diversity. But if you play the game better than I do, then you can win. It’s not a mathematically derived outcome. And the reason is because, first of all, every card in Magic is designed so that it’s balanced with the other cards. There’s no one-card that is strictly more powerful than any other card. Combine that with the fact that when you and I sit down to play a game of Magic, we both build a hand out of our deck. And even though our decks may be different sizes, our hands are always the same size. So if you were to just come up with some scoring system and score the power of each hand, it should always be the same. At that point it becomes how do I play? How much strategy have I built into my hand? How can I respond to what my opponent is doing? How can I most effectively play the strategy that I tried to play in my hand? That’s exactly the tactic we took with Guild Wars. There’s an enormous number of skills in the game, like I said over 450, but you only choose 8 when you go into a mission, either cooperative or competitive mission. So in terms of raw power, everybody is on the same playing field.