Game Director Colin Johansen discusses the past, present and future of GW2

Were you busy this weekend? Perhaps partaking in some festivities of the season with family or friends? Well, if you were there's a good chance you missed this little Guild Wars 2 tidbit. But not to worry, as usual ZAM has you covered!

Game Director Colin Johansen took some time to sit down with Gamingbolt and discuss the game's launch and future. In the piece, Colin discussed everything from inspiration to PvP to monthly updates to expansions. It was everything a good Guild Wars 2 player could possibly want for Christmas.

While the breadth of the interview is great, there were a few points that stuck out. First, if we didn't know it officially already, we do now - ArenaNet plans monthly content updates. And they're to be the size, or bigger than, what we've seen so far, especially come January and February:

"But our big goal, what we wanted to do, is really kind of do something that no one’s ever done before in an MMO after it came out. And that’s every single month, adding giant updates to our game and do a huge release that really gives the players the sense that they’re paying their monthly fee, and every four to five months, they’re getting free expansions’ worth of content as part of logging into our game."

Monthly content vs. monthly fee. Sounds like a pretty good trade, don't you think?

Of course, monthly free content isn't the only thing that ArenaNet has planned. Bigger things are in the works, though perhaps not as frequent as in the original Guild Wars:

"We will also have paid expansions. In Guild Wars 1, there were really big ones, as often as every six months. I think we will not have them be as frequent in Guild Wars 2. It’s really hard to work on an expansion for six months odd, and then turn around and work on another one and another one and not burn the team out. I think we would rather focus on doing monthly live updates with which we can specifically go after parts of the game that we know we need to make better, and yes, the big expansions will on slightly longer of a time range. To expand the game out larger from there. But we definitely will do paid expansions down the road."

It's a really good interview that, among other things, shows what a grounded company ArenaNet is, and what a down-to-earth kind of guy Colin Johansen is. Do check it out!

Bill "Lethality" Leonard

Source: Gamingbolt