Publishers: NCSoft

Price: $49.95

Genre: MMORPG

Release Date: 4/28/06

Extra thanks goes to Kathleen Hays for transcribing this interview.

The Guild Wars franchise has taken a different spin on the MMO game. While most MMO`s are designed to keep players playing as long as possible Guild Wars likes to get right to the game play. No grinding, spawn camping or even long traveling and best of all no monthly fee.

The first expansion to Guild Wars is called Factions and does not require you to own the first game now referred to as Prophecies. Two new classes the Assassins and the Ritualist and a new continent called Cantha. This ship merchant empire that has a distinct Asian look to its buildings. Battling out as members of the Luxon or Kurzick GW hopes to step up their already robust Player vs. Player system.

The 3 founders of ArenaNet were all former important blizzard employees. What made you want to form a new company?

You know really the core of it was we had some new things we wanted to do, and Blizzard wasn’t really at the point where they could kind of take some of the chances we wanted to take. We felt it was time for some innovation on the on-line gaming industry, particularly with online role-playing. Everybody was coming out with their ultimate online clones. There was a little of polish here, and a couple of new ideas there, but fundamentally people were viewing the technology as the game design. Which is exactly what we saw in the early and mid 90’s with 3-D games with the Doom clones. It took a while for maturity for that technology and also some people going and pushing it in new directions before we really saw some 3-D games in other genres and really saw you can do more in 3-D than first person shooter games.

So that’s where we thought where role-playing games was in the spring of 2000 when we left blizzard. We had some bold ideas, and were willing to go take some risks with breaking from the traditional norms both in terms of the game design and the business model and charting new territory. Blizzard was just not in the position to take those kind of risks. That’s basically why we left, was to make Guild Wars.

Speaking of breaking from the norms Guild Wars does not charge a monthly fee. How are you able to stay profitable?

Our basic premise is that over time we are going to make less money per customer but we are going to have more customers. People do not like subscription fees, and everybody knows that. You never hear anybody say, “Oh it’s really cool. I get to pay 15 dollars a month for this game.” What’s happening is that back when we started ArenaNet, there were 80 MMOs in development and every one of those companies thought that they were going to get do well because “Sony is doing it with Everquest, look at how much they’re making. We can do it too.”

What people didn’t realize was that if you’re hard core enough to pay a subscription for a game you’re not going to do it with 2 games or 3 games or 8 games. You’re really only going play one game a year. What we saw was it was kind of stifling people’s ability to –to give them the freedom to go try a bunch of different games like you would normally do. Also once you got into it you were kind of forced to make this choice: either this is going to be a lifestyle commitment for me or I’m going to devote all my gaming hours to playing this one game. And it’s not that I can just put it up for a while, I have to cancel if I don’t want to keep getting billed for it. That just didn’t ring true with us as gamers. That’s not how I like to have to play games. I don’t know anybody who enjoys playing that way. We wanted to shake things up a little and say “It doesn’t have to be that way.” It’s not the case that in order for you to get a true server, hosted, protected, cheat free environment, plus ongoing support from a developer that you have a good relationship with. It doesn’t have to be a subscription based model, it really can be done. Nobody really believed it at the time, and we just said, “Look, we’re going to do it.” Of course the way we do it is rather than charge you per month, we take it upon ourselves to make a bunch of really cool compelling content that would form new campaigns, that would let you choose whether it justifies your money. If Factions looks cool to you and you’re excited about it, go out and buy it. We’ve done our job. If it doesn’t, we haven’t done our job, then maybe we’ll get you back with Campaign 3. We’ll do something really cool for Campaign 3 and pull you back in. It’s fundamentally our job to make sure you feel the money you spent to play Guild Wars is justified. That’s kind of the core difference. That it’s your choice. The option is in the hand of the player. Not me. I’m not forcing you to pay me every month.

You don’t have to own the first game to play the second. Is there any advantage to owning both?

The games are completely stand alone. Let’s say we’re on campaign 5, you don’t have to go back and buy campaigns 4, 3, 2 or 1 to play campaign 5. That’s important to us because we want it to always be easy to get in and try out Guild Wars. If you want to find out what Magic the Gathering is all about, even though that game has been out for 10 years or more, but you don’t have to go out and buy 10,000 cards. You just have to buy enough of what its recent expansion was in order to be able to play the game. That’s cool. That keeps people coming in the game generationally [SIC] because there’s not this huge barrier entering. That’s why it was important to us doing that.