Guild Wars Mini-Interview #35

ArenaNet has answered another small batch of questions about their upcoming Guild Wars, and this time it’s over at Guild Wars en Español. A snippet:

Q: Guild Wars impressive graphics quality and fame statistics are a great attraction for roleplaying gamers. Do you plan some kind of features, scenarios or a world for roleplayers?

A: You are right about the interest amongst roleplaying gamers. Judging from questions I’ve spotted in various fan forums, it’s clear that there is a lot of interest in playing Guild Wars in full roleplaying fashion. There have been suggestions that we offer a completely separate roleplaying world or set aside an area of the existing world for roleplayers only. I’m not sure what percentage of players would choose such a world; it could quite a large number would enjoy investing themselves into the roleplaying experience and that such an opportunity would be very popular. I do not believe that we’ll have a separate world for such players. But I think those who suggest that we need a separate server or a different world may not completely understand one of the great benefits of the instanced missions of Guild Wars.

With instanced or private missions, you and your party can choose to engage in the roleplaying experience to any degree that you desire. With instanced missions, you pick your party. This means that you can choose to invite only guild members or only roleplayers to go on the missions and undertake the quests. Based on how you form your party or your guild, you can set all sorts of standards of dress, speech, gameplay, etc. The world in which you live in your mission is your world alone. If you choose to speak in Chaucerian English or Medieval French or Yi-Dynasty Korean, if you want to use strict naming conventions or modes of dress or gameplay, the choice is up to you.

Now, it’s true that you will need to visit towns and outposts between missions. But it occurred to me that it is possible that by the time Guild Wars is released, or soon thereafter, there may be a means to squelch those not in your party and to carry on all game playing within private chat mode. The use of the Party or Guild Chat feature would keep the focus on that roleplaying theme. This broad squelching isn’t something I’ve asked about. It’s simply an idea that seems to meld nicely with the concept of the roleplaying illusion, and it could help avoid (breaking the mood) by keeping all player interaction in the appropriate mode. So with instanced missions, and particularly with the possibility of chat interface selections, roleplaying should be easily sustained within Guild Wars.

I wanted to share a new bit of information about guilds, and I believe that this will be of particular interest to roleplaying guilds, which can have a lot of members: We have raised the guild cap for Guild Wars to 100. This should allow more flexibility in party formation, and will surely be good news to all kinds of guilds! 🙂