A New Twist for Guild Wars

April 30, 2007

While you won't find me on the servers night after night, I've always been a fan of Guild Wars, which I fire up now and again to get my fix of its unique gameplay and gorgeous landscapes. It had always seemed to me that ArenaNet had stumbled on a Good Thing, with a capital G and a capital T. A massively multiplayer game with no monthly fees, Guild Wars enjoys a great community buzz and terrific sales of each successive stand-alone expansion. ArenaNet has found a business model that the community loves, and the company has a great product. The graphics still look cutting-edge. I just assumed they'd ride this one out for years, squeezing out regular expansions every six to nine months.

I was wrong.

GameSpy's Latest Guild Wars 2 Preview spills all the beans. After the upcoming Guild Wars expansion Eye of the North, ArenaNet is going to stop development on the original game (Don't worry - the servers will continue to run indefinately.) Beyond that, the whole company will be focused on Guild Wars 2. Why chuck aside something that was working? ArenaNet Co-founder Mike O'Brien lays it out:

"In looking at the design [of Guild Wars], we got a lot of things right. The problem was that after two years we also saw a lot of ways in which the core gameplay could be improved. These weren't things that could be addressed by adding new layers on top of the original game, though. They involved going in and making upgrades and improvements to the fundamental gameplay systems. In the end we made the decision that in order to truly make the ultimate version of Guild Wars we were going to have to make Guild Wars 2." -Mike O'Brien

I'm surprised, but I also like what I'm hearing. It's not often that companies have the cojones -- yeah I said it -- to take chances with a great product in order to make it even better. So often the games industry is too conservative, afraid to change what works. Hats off to both ArenaNet and NCSoft for being bold with Guild Wars yet again.

Read the GameSpy Guild Wars 2 Preview and Interview for more.

      -Fargo

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