Guild Wars Mini-Interview #3

ArenaNet has answered another small number of questions about Guild Wars, and this time the interview is over at OGaming. A snip:

Q: Of all the features implemented within the world of Guild Wars, which do you believe is the most innovative?

A: That’s a really hard question to answer, and I know that try as I might, I’m not going to be able to pick just one feature or one facet of Guild Wars as the answer. I mean, start with the Guild Wars art it’s simply stupendous. Then consider the game design that offers players the chance to be truly competitive, which rewards skill over (the leveling grind,) which removes endless traveling and other un-fun things like standing in line to wait for monster spawns. If I think back to the feedback from the E3 for Everyone Demo, another thing that sticks out in my mind is how smoothly the game functioned and how few bugs or problems there were, particularly for a game still in alpha state. I think everyone would agree that inviting 200,000 to play our alpha was pretty innovative!

Another feature that makes everyone sit up and take notice is our intelligent streaming technology. On the final day of the E3 for Everyone event, we seamlessly streamed content to each player as he or she joined the game. Suddenly, Prince Rurik was in town telling us all of the Stone Summit Invasion, begging us to accept just one more quest. That extra quest was a great way to show the innovative nature of streaming technology.

Ultimately the real innovation lies in being able to take all those features the art, the game design, the gameplay, the technical performance, and the streaming technology and offer it without a monthly fee. That is a real innovation!