Has 'Guild Wars 2' Become Too Complicated?
When Guild Wars 2 (GW2) came out, I jumped into it enthusiastically and played for several weeks. But life happens, as it does, and I’ve been only able to venture into Tyria intermittently. When I did play, I noticed changes, but I didn’t spend much time examining them. So recently I returned to explore the wealth of new material. And I walked away with the question: Is too much of a good thing still too much?
Within the first few hours of gameplay in the original release, I had a firm grasp on GW2’s gameplay, even though I had never really spent much time in MMOs before. This iteration of GW2 is more of the same: more feature-rich, more complex…and more complicated.
When I returned, I found multiple new forms of currency, a whole new map zone, the new Fractal dungeons in which your character “levels up” to more difficult iterations, and “Ascended” items that took multiple, time-consuming tasks to build.
There are also Heralds, who point the way to current events (they go hand-in-hand with GW2′s new “Living Story”
, and Laurel vendors, who provide an alternate means to buy Ascended items for those who don’t want to explore Fractals. For PvP fans, there’s a new arena that finally breaks away from the “capture point” model of the previous four (if not very far). And thankfully, there are many minor tweaks and improvements, including the ability to bank special event collectibles.
I spoke on the telephone with Isaiah Cartwright, GW2’s lead designer, about the dungeons and currencies, and most recently, the addition of the guild system.
Tell me about the new additions to GW2.
We’ve been reworking on a lot of rewards and giving people lots of goals and achievements to accomplish. We’ve redone the daily system. We added currencies. And we made a new dungeon type called the Fractals of the Mist.
Probably been the biggest change that you’d see when coming back: We’ve been improving the rewards and balance of people’s time versus the things they get out of it.
Why have there been so many additions to the game?
As we were looking at the play patterns of players, we noticed they were getting through the last step of progression in our game faster than we wanted them to. That would lead them to run out of things to accomplish. We didn’t want to get into a gear-grind scenario, so what we did was add a new tier rarity called “Ascended items.” We wanted to add a step in there to insure that people had a lot to do.
I’ve noticed you’ve added a lot of currencies.
We have somewhere around ten to fifteen currencies in the game right now. There are two main types, basic currencies and tokens. Basic currencies are gold, karma, the new laurels that we added, glory. They exist with you in your inventory at the bottom [of your UI]. The second type of currency we have are tokens. We use tokens in a number of different places, like the dungeons; they each have their own tokens. They show that you’ve beaten this dungeon.
We try to use currencies to split up the goals of players so that they want to do each of the different game types in different ways in order to earn the things they’d like to earn.
There have also been changes to the daily system. Before, you had to complete a set number of tasks in a day (completed dynamic events, plants gathered, etc). What’s changed?
We give you an option of like eight to ten [goals, such as killing enemies underwater or reviving other players and NPCs], and you get to pick five that you want to accomplish. So if you don’t like doing dungeons, you don’t have to choose it.
It only takes twenty to thirty minutes to accomplish these things, and it gives people a taste of different types of content. We try to kind of mix it up to encourage players to go to different maps and try different things out. We feel our system is the most robust one.
Tell me about the guild system.
We really wanted to make a system to encourage guilds to get together and play together. It can really help make a guild tighter knit and just enjoy the game together. And so we built these guild missions that you can go on, and we made a variety of different tiers and systems for them to go through.
Because the game is very large and there are lots of different types of guilds, we were looking at systems to make sure smaller guilds and larger guilds can kind of compete in the same space. It’s obviously a difficult challenge to do, because when there’s a lot more people in a guild, they have a lot more resources, people to organize themselves and those types of things. So we build a couple of systems in there to help us limit that.
We made all the guild content on weekly rewards, and we find that longer lock-out timers like that really help the smaller guilds catch up, because what the bigger guilds can do really, really quickly, the smaller guilds take a bit longer to do. We know there was an initial influence cost that was very high that a lot of smaller guilds weren’t able to get into it, so we’re looking at ways that we can improve that, make smaller guilds more able to compete on the influence gathering area.
But really, our goal for the system is so guilds don’t ever run out of accomplishments and goals they can work at together in order to overcome. So we’re going to add to the system and we’ll make sure we’ll add things for smaller guilds to really be able to compete in this space. But the goal of this system is to be rewards and goals and accomplishments for guilds of all sizes.
So…do you think GW2 has become too complicated?
It’s a debate we have here all the time, especially when it come to the number of currencies that are around. It really comes down to when you want to reward someone for doing a specific type of gameplay. Because we’ve been adding a lot of reward systems, we’ve seen an increase in the number of currencies out there.
But we’re getting toward the tail end of the number of systems we feel that we can put in the game. We’ll be really working on improving the current systems we have and making them more robust.
I want us to slow down on the number of systems that we’re adding and polish up and clean up the ones that we have added so they’re easier to understand, with better UI for them, those types of things, that’ll be some of the stuff that we’re focused on in the future. One of the major goals of GW was to allow anyone to jump in and play. We have a team dedicated to making sure that it’s easy, and we’re going to continue to improve that process as much as we can.
One of the things we might do is not unlock the ability to get to some of these currencies until you get later on in the game. That way, they’re not overwhelming in the beginning.
My thoughts:
The fact that Cartwright did not know the precise number of currencies in his own game confirms my suspicion that GW2 has become too intricate.
But Cartwright struck the right chord when he says that ArenaNet might not unlock certain areas of the game until the player has progressed, to prevent new players from feeling overwhelmed. I think that would be a terrific move. That, and a more streamlined UI, would go a long way toward maintaining the playability that I loved at launch.
The biggest reason I enjoy GW2 is that there is a flexibility of play. If I don’t feel like fighting in the sprawling world vs. world mode, I can ignore it; if I want to gather plants and craft food, I can do that. Because of this, I’m particularly enamored with the new “daily” system, which lets me pick and choose my accomplishments. There are still enough tasks that are interesting to me that I get to wend my way across the map and have my own fun doing it.
Cartwright assured me that GW2’s new content was as flexible as the original, and I can play it or ignore it as I choose and stick with what I love. If ArenaNet continues to provide that experience, I will continue to enjoy my time in Tyria.
