10 Years have passed since Guild Wars 2 first hit shelves, but that time doesn’t just account for a long lineage that led to this iconic MMORPG. During Gamescom, we had a chance to talk to Bobby Stein, Narrative Director at ArenaNet, and Aaron Coberly, Art Director at the studio, about the quest to bring Tyria to the masses, for a second time. Looking back at ArenaNet now, it’s difficult to believe that this long running adventure would have ever had the same longevity if it had spun out he way the Bellevue Studio initially expected. After introducing themselves to the assembled press struggling to survive Gamescom 2022, Bobby and Aaron kicked off their own retrospective with the revelation that Guild Wars 2 was not expected to get a whole new engine. While I can personally remember talking to Isaiah “Izzy” Cartwright, now ANet alumni, about the moment that two bobbing character models first raised a fist in anger across the unremarkable box that would become the Mists, it never occurred to me that initially development on Guild Wars 2 started all the way back in the Guild Wars engine.
Aaron: “Guild Wars 2 had a very interesting development cycle. After Guild Wars, we made the decision to make Guild Wars 2, but in the Guild Wars engine.”
This wasn’t an easy decision either. It took ArenaNet a year of production before the team dropped development on an engine that is largely in maintenance mode now, to start constructing and even bigger hill to climb. The two long term team members showed gave us an early glimpse at the prototypes for Guild Wars2, just a sampling of the work already put in place that ended up having to be dragged into the modern age without losing the core of the original game.
Bobby: “Yeah, the original technology, there’s so much of the original framework that had to be evolved and pulled into the future. A lot of us wanted to decide where do we go from Guild Wars, how do we evolve it. For example, if we’re going to add the Z axis for jumping, like, it has to be meaningful.”
I still want sit jump back, a bug that was patched out back in the very dawn of Guild Wars 2 that, yes, allowed players to sit down and jump, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what the team meant when adding more impactful changes to jumping. Instead, Guild Wars 2 brought in a innovate new way for the world to work. The NPCs no longer sat by and tasked players to kill ten rats, the world moved on around you and the term Living World was an imminent arrival. The idea that this could be achieved on the original Guild Wars engine seems laughable now we’ve seen how influential and entirely game changing Guild Wars 2 turned out to be, but ideas about how to craft a living world didn’t wholly come out of nowhere.
Boby: “Rockstar is really good at creating these kind of vibrant environments with people walking around and talking and there’s just a lot going on. So, we though, if we’re going to make the world bigger and more interactive, we need it to sound that way.”
With games like Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto Series creating quite the impression on the console market, and to his admission Bobby himself, the expectation that the target of creating a live environment for players was never seemingly just a case of NPCs that could shuffle around the map, but this certainly seemed to strip back the evident amount of work that a Guild Wars 2 was going to be. Bobby described how 5 playable races eventually led to 22 voices er race, with 10 actors on call every time a player needed to voice anything. Just in case that isn’t enough numbers, that spins out to something in the region of 90,000 lines of dialogue after more than three years of pre release work, just for the base game. Lets not even think about expansions.
Drawing a Line
Guild Wars 2 always had massive scope, with new tools, new stories, new audio techniques. It still does. We’ve talked to Maclaine Diemer about them in recent times and faced the sound of impending doom. This brave new world of adventure has incredibly passionate people behind it, and the impression we got was that given the opportunity, ArenaNet would have kept on pushing the boundaries, and they were definitely going to add more maps at launch.
Bobby: “The game that you’re playing now is actually smaller than the game was planned to be. There were additional maps.”
In the end, there has to be a line, and it’s astounding how popular the game ended up being. I can remember the Gamescom booth being closed the year guild Wars 2 launched because ithe crowd of eager players became a fire hazard. I remember watching Community Manager at the time, Martin Kerstein, being stomped by Tequatl at an early preview while one of my own guild members sat helplessly downed in front of Twitch and assembled press, and I remember the massive success it was shortly after. We asked is the team knew Tyria was going to be as huge as it was, not expansive but popular, and Bobby replied:
Bobby: “This might sounds arrogant, but the game took us 5 years to make. We had to abandon an entire engine, adopt a new one. It took 3 revisions of the tools just to get things right and the art too was iterative. I think that we were in the mindset that if we can just get this thing finished, I bet people will enjoy it.”
That’s the thing I take most from 10 years of Guild Wars 2. The enjoyment that it’s brought to so many of its player base. From our own little corner of Metrica Province out into the Windswept Sands and far beyond, it’s astounding to think that the launch didn’t even bring everything that ArenaNet wanted to include and that this studio has such a wild imagination makes us hopeful that the next major step for Guild Wars will be even more innovative then the Living World was when it landed. You can find out what the culmination of that work was now by trying out Guild Wars 2 for free via https://www.guildwars2.com/en-gb/ or over on the newly launched Steam client.
