Guild Wars Mini-Interview #12

ArenaNet has answered another small batch of questions about their upcoming Guild Wars, and this time the interview is over at Stratics. Here’s a bit to get you started:

Q: In E3 for Everyone we saw that you could easily add game content when you introduced a whole new mission on the last day. Unfortunately with that we saw a bug emerge in the mission allowing for players to more easily obtain a very powerful item. In other on-line games an exploit of this nature would likely sit around in game for weeks or even months before it was corrected. With your ability to easily modify content what is your goal turn-around time in addressing exploits?

A: Our goal for exploit closure? “As soon as possible, if not sooner.” 🙂

I’m sure every gamer has a few unpleasant patch stories to tell. For instance, some of us still talk of the title that was released a few years ago and then required an 80 MB download in order to play. With most players using dial-up, this was a horrendous burden. I know many of us have waited for what seems an eternity for a patch to be released for a favourite title, all the while watching the in-game economy slide into ruins and the gameplay experience being irreparably harmed by unfixed exploits and rampant cheating.

The advantages of intelligent streaming technology are many, and primary amongst them is the ability to close loopholes, remove exploits, or solve issues that arise with the game or servers. There are other advantages, of course, like receiving content on the fly, so that you start downloading assets for the next mission even while you’re playing, and experiencing new seasonal elements and temporary game events that can be added at any time. But the ability to offer a stable gameplay experience and to maintain a meaningful game economy is paramount, and in Guild Wars, streaming technology will allow us to address issues immediately and work quickly to bring about a resolution.

There’s something I wanted to share with you about our streaming technology, something that I found utterly fascinating: With the patching system in most games, anything that has been changed at any time since the game was released needs to be included in every patch thereafter. For instance, if three files are patched one time, and another two files in the next patch, you will be required to download all five with every subsequent patch. This is because the files aren’t “flagged” as efficiently as they might be, and the system doesn’t know if you have the newer ones or not. Therefore, you are required to download materials that you may, indeed, have gotten earlier.

With the ArenaNet technology, you only download the files that have been altered since you last played. The system knows that you received those first three files, and only sends you the two that were newly modified. As someone who has connected to start a download and realized that due to the download size she can’t play until the next day, I find this a great leap forward. Wouldn’t we all rather play than download a patch?