Guild Wars 2

Hi Reddit,

I'm here today to answer some questions and to share some news.

The news is that I'm taking over as the game director of Guild Wars 2 for a while. Colin will be leaving us. Colin is a personal friend, leaving on good terms, and I wish him all the best.

Game direction is a big job. I have a lot of talented people helping me in the role, and we're all here to answer questions today. Steven Waller continues to direct Living World and Raids. Stephen Clarke-Willson, another long-term veteran of the company, will be directing WvW. John Corpening and Hugh Norfolk are here to talk about PvP. We have Crystal Reid, Paul Ella, and Jon Olson here to talk about Raids, Nellie Hughes representing Living World, Sean Hughes representing Fractals, Shuai Liu and Tyler Bearce representing WvW. We've got Leah Hoyer here to talk Narrative, James Ackley here to talk Audio, Steve Thompson here to talk Cinematics, Roy Cronacher here to talk Creatures, Ester Sauter and Lance Hitchcock representing QA and QA engineering, John Smith representing Megaservers, and more devs joining us as we continue!

I'm excited to be back in this role. I'll say up front that I do eventually have to hire to replace myself. Believe it or not, running a company is a lot of work too.

But in the meantime I get to lay down the path I believe in. One thing I believe is that a game director represents the players. So I think it's only natural that my first official act as game director is to hang out and talk shop with the players. And that's what we'll do today.

To kick it off, I'll give some updates on what we're working on and how we're going about it.

We recently started PvP season two and we're about to launch the next raid wing. After that we're packaging up and preparing our next big quarterly update for April. The April update is about reducing grind, clearing away some tedium, getting quickly to the fun, and improving rewards. We've always said that Guild Wars should be about having fun rather than preparing to have fun, and this will be a back-to-our-roots kind of update. After the April update, we'll start live beta-tests of improvements to WvW. Our goal is to be very incremental and visible with the changes we're making there, so that players are involved every step of the way. Further on, we'll launch the next raid wing in May or June, then Living World and the next quarterly update.

You've seen in past years that we went through times when the whole company worked on one thing. In 2013, the year we shipped 21 Living World updates, pretty much the whole company was working on Living World. In 2015, we were all working on the expansion. Going forward we're putting ourselves in a more sustainable mode where live and expansion don't compete with each other.

We have about 120 devs working on the live game, 70 devs on Expac2, and 30 devs on core teams that support both. Within these groups we have cross-discipline teams with focused missions. For example on Live we have the PvP team, the WvW team, the Fractals team, the Raids team, the Living World team, the Legendaries team, and a couple others. The teams are charged with carrying a feature from inception and design through completion. When they finish, we typically package work from multiple teams into a single release, then we hand it off to release teams for final voice integration, localization, QA, and release management.

The final thing you should know is that we're working hard to avoid having a default assumption that "this thing will ship on this date," or even, "this thing will ship," and instead we're proactively deciding to ship things when they're done and polished and we've played them and love them. So if you ask us for a list of things that will ship in April, we'll probably be coy because we think it's nice for you to have presents to unwrap on release day, but more than that, the truth is we don't even know. We're working on a lot of potentially great improvements for April, all themed in the direction of less grind and more rewards, and they won't all make the cut, but any reasonable subset will make a great release.

And with that, let's get to the AMA! It's a big game and there's a lot to talk about. I'll be here for about three hours this afternoon, with other developers coming through for shorter periods.

Mike O'Brien

Edit: Well we went over our allotted time, but I do have to wrap it up now. Thanks everyone for the great questions and conversations! We typed furiously and answered everything we could.

I'll be back here to chat again periodically. Not all the time, because then that would change this subreddit from being a place where players talk to each other into a place for players to post to devs, and we'd lose what we all love about this place. But periodically.

In the meantime, you know my email address.

I get a lot of email, so I can't reply to it all, but I do read any letter I get from a Guild Wars 2 player.

See you next time!

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Mike O Brien_sl said:

Hi all,

In the upcoming Spring 2016 Quarterly Update, we'll launch the new legendary short bow, Chuka and Champawat. The team outdid themselves on this one. This new precursor journey takes you through a memorable experience inspired by a real-world story, and the bow you craft at the end is the perfect commemoration of that journey. I hope you all check it out.

Last year we talked about plans to gradually build out a second set of legendary weapons through live content updates. That's a big responsibility.We have a team of six developers working on that, who could work on it for years to come.

As game director I have to make tough trade-offs. One thing I believe is that we have to focus on the core game first before taking on additional responsibilities. I wrote in the Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto in 2010 that our vision was to create a living, dynamic world, where there's always something to do. Let's ensure we succeed on that front.

So, after shipping Chuka and Champawat, I've asked that we indefinitely suspend work on new legendary weapons. This team of developers will instead shift their efforts back to Living World style content, building new journeys and events for everyone to participate in.

I know this will be a controversial decision. I'll hang out with you here on the forums for a little while today to discuss it. And I'm always available by email.

Mo


Nero and Onevstheworld, you asked if this means that LW can come sooner than July.

Full story episodes have a long lead-time. But I don't think LW content has to be all about the episodes. So. maybe.

But I'm not here today to make predictions or promises. I'd rather we start by shipping, then talk about what we shipped.

Mo


Obviously I go into this knowing that some players will be very upset. That's why it's such a tough decision.

Ankdarkwolf, Darkmikau, Ballads, Spira, Caerbannog, Cysgod, you each posted a variant of an accusation I've seen many times over the past few months on the forums, something along the lines of, "AN shipped half an expansion with HoT." I take issue with that. We shipped a new region full of content, a new mastery system, gliding, guild halls, a new profession, nine new elite specializations for existing professions, and more. Then we shipped precursor journeys for existing legendaries, and said, "We've been working hard on new legendary weapons, the first handful of which will be introduced in Heart of Thorns, with more to come in subsequent updates." While I fully get that you're disappointed today, this is not about us shipping half an expansion pack.

Mo



Thanks for all the comments. I know there's nothing I'm going to say that will make you feel better, but I'll share some final thoughts for the night.

I said three weeks ago I'd focus on sustainability and quality. I want to reiterate the part about sustainability. Be angry about legendary weapons, sure, but how about the recent drought of content? That kind of thing happens when we spread ourselves too thin, and when we let the content development pipeline empty out so we can fight fires. What I think we actually owe you is sustainable, predictable, high-quality content. I'm making a decision that's painful in the short-term so we can position ourselves to deliver that.

Akuni.8604:
Consider this. HoT currently has: 3 new maps (which are still buggy looking at DS) which are grindy as hell, Elite Specs which are heavy powercreep (pay to win in PvP.), a Story which is short but at least good (if you ignore the myriad of bugs f.e. in the Mordi battle), Guild halls, 2 Raids with 5 1/2 bosses, a new PvP map (which is quite unbalanced) and now only 4 legy weaps (3/4 being rarely used thanks to being underpowered or buggy). That's it?


I previously addressed the "half an expansion" thing, and I can point you to pages like this one and this one (Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns - Guild Wars 2 Wiki (GW2W)), but that doesn't matter because it's just arguing. My job is to entertain you, not to argue with you.

I strongly believe that we will in fact entertain you. We're a team of people who love the game that you love, and are working on things we're confident you'll love. But I'm not here to convince you of that, and I wouldn't expect you to take my word for it. You can make that judgment in April, and each subsequent time we ship. I will work to make you happy, and I'll do it by making you happy with what we ship, not with what we promise to ship.

Mo

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Mr Creed_sl said:

That's probably the reason for the recent changes though - the old game director that "left to pursue other interests" was responsible for HotS and the old production schedules, the new one is trying to right the ship.

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