Guild Wars 2 - Going Forward

Game Director Colin Johansen discusses the past, present and future of GW2

Were you busy this weekend? Perhaps partaking in a number of festivities of the season with family or pals? Well, if you were there is a good chance you missed this minimal Guild Wars two tidbit. Yet not to worry, as usual ZAM has you handled!

Game Director Colin Johansen took some time to sit down with Gamingbolt and discuss the game's launch & future. In the piece, Colin tackled everything from inspiration to PvP to monthly updates to expansions. It was everything a great Guild Wars 2 player could potentially need for Christmas.

While the breadth of the interview is superb, there were a couple points that stuck out. First, if we did not know it officially already, we do now - ArenaNet plans monthly content updates. & they are to be the size, or bigger than, what we have seen so far, especially come January & February:

"Although our big goal, what we wanted to do, is sort of do something that no one's ever done before in an MMO after it came out. & that's every single month, adding giant updates to our gw2 gold game & do a enormous release that honestly gives the players the sense that they are paying their monthly fee, & every 4 to 5 months, they're getting free expansions' worth of content as part of logging into our game."

Monthly content vs. monthly fee. Sounds like a pretty good trade, don't you think?

Naturally, monthly zero cost content isn't the only factor that ArenaNet has planned. Bigger things are in the works, though perhaps not as frequent as in the original Guild Wars:

"We will also have paid expansions. In Guild Wars 1, there were genuinely sizeable ones, as commonly as every 6 months. I think we will not have them be as frequent in Guild Wars two. It can be challenging to work on an expansion for 6 months odd, after which turn around and work on an additional 1 & a different 1 & not burn the team out. I think we would rather focus on doing monthly live updates with which we can especially go after parts of the game that we know we want to make better, & yes, the immense expansions will on slightly longer of a time range. To broaden the gw2 gold game out bigger from there. However we totally will do paid expansions down the road."

It is a really fantastic interview that, amongst other factors, shows what a grounded company ArenaNet is, and what a down-to-earth type of guy Colin Johansen is. Do check it out!