[Ynot]

Guild Wars Interview by Andrew Serros on 11/25/2004 :

Q: So how are you doing today?

A: Doing allright. Yeah, doing really well, actually. It’s really fun to see the game live and see all the people playing it.

Q: Is that a real rewarding experience?

A: Oh yeah. My god, you know, the only analogy that is as apt is the birth of your child. When we threw the switch yesterday early, we had over 5,000 players within 10 minutes. Clearly people were just sitting there pinging it, just waiting for it.

Q: What do you think about the excitement of the game? What do you think has drawn people to this game?

A: I think, first, you know I kind of regret to say this, but I think the no monthly subscription fee is really appealing to a large number of people. These kinds of online games, there’s a lot of people who want to play them and don’t just because of that. So I think that from that standpoint alone people are excited. I think the thing that they may be wary of is thinking, “Oh… how are they going to pull this off?” “Is there going to be advertising in the game?” “Is it going to be a “budget” title, and not feel like a full big production?”

With an event like this it’s obvious that that’s not the case. It’s over the top in terms of its production value. People are going to like that.

Q: So how did you manage to pull of the no-subscription fee model? Or is that a company secret?

A: No, it’s not a company secret. It’s kind of surprising to us that it has taken this long for somebody to do it. I think the reason most MMOs charge subscription fees is because they can, you know? The way we do it is, first of all, when you’re running an on-line game like this, other than development expenses your biggest expense is obviously bandwidth to host people on your servers.

So the first thing we did was bring our experience in creating Battle.net to bear on the task of making a game that could host thousands of players but use a very small amount of bandwidth. One of the things that is going on behind the scenes that people don’t realize is this technology that we’ve developed to mask latency so that you’re using a very small amount of bandwidth as you play.

The people who are playing from modems report that once they are in the game and playing, they have every bit as good of an experience as everybody else. Not only is that good from the standpoint of reducing our costs and making this model feasible, but also because it means that more players with a wider range of hardware and connectivity qualities are going to be able to enjoy the game.
The second way we do it is that we support the game over time and ensure that we have a revenue stream that allows us to continue to develop and expand the world by releasing new chapters to the game every six months or so. It will be a new product that tells the next chapter in the guild war story.

In terms of scope and content it will be roughly equivalent to the first game. This is an expansion pack where you’re getting a couple more of this and a little more of that. It’s a full on release, almost a full game. So the—

Q: So does this come at additional cost?

A: Yes, yes. You purchase the game, play it online for as long as you like, and every six months or so there will be a chapter in the game and you can either purchase it or not. If you do, you get all the new toys, if you don’t, that’s fine too. Using our streaming technology, we never have to force you to upgrade. Maybe you’ve bought chapters 2, 3, and 7 and your friend has bought chapters 1, 4 and 7. That’s fine, you can still play with your friend. You don’t have to go back and buy everything that he has that you don’t. It just means that whatever content that he can play in chapter 3 and you can play in chapter 2 you can’t play together. But all the chapters you’ve purchased that are the same, you can go to all those missions together, all those quests together, you can trade items from those missions freely, etc.

Q: The interactivity lies in which chapters you’ve managed to gather over the course of the releases?

A: Right, right. And we’re very careful from a development standpoint—there will never be a time when a chapter is required in order to be competitive in the PvP or in the outlying PvE. We’re not going to make some “uber” item that is only available to players in mission X, that if you don’t have it, you’ll never be a good player. I think that that would be a pretty crappy thing for us to do. So we work hard to make sure that every chapter is truly optional—you know, what content is compelling to you. Having said that, we’ll obviously work hard to make sure the content is compelling, too.

Q: How did Guild Wars begin as a game? How did it come about as a concept?

A: As you know the founders of Arenanet were previously employees of Blizzard Entertainment. Mike O’Brian who is handling our design chores right now was the team leader of Warcraft III. Patrick Wyatt who is our network engineer was the Vice President of R&D at Blizzard for 8 years and also the original architect of all the “craft” engines. And then I was—

Q: Warcraft and Starcraft have stolen, literally, years of my life.

A: Good. They were great games! I was the team lead in World of Warcraft. I actually started that project. What happened was that Mike O’Brian over on the Warcraft III team at the time was calling it “Heroes” of Warcraft. He wanted not to just do Warcraft 3d. He wanted to bring a lot of new play elements into it and have a fresh and innovative game. He was really focusing more on the heroes and the strategy of a hero-based game, so more of a rpg element. Similarly, I was on the World of Warcraft team to not just make Blizzard’s take on Everquest, to do something that was truly innovative and kind of take the genre to the next step.

What we found was that when we started talking, his ideas of what he wanted to do with Warcraft and my ideas of what I wanted to do with World of Warcraft kind of met in the middle. This bringing strategy elements to an rpg, or bringing rpg elements to a strategy game, there’s kind of this hybrid that he and I were both talking about a great deal. And ultimately we made a decision to leave Blizzard and pursue a unique project that embodied both of those ideas and that’s how Guild Wars started.
Q: What were the first conceptual stages like? I’m trying to get an idea of the chronology of the game and the events of the development of the game.

A: Well, we started with a huge engineering task in front of us. We knew we wanted to do some different things. We wanted on the client side a 3d engine that was truly unique, that would allow us to adopt a visual style that was unlike any other. You see a lot of the glow technology and a lot of the extreme environmental technology that we have. That’s our own proprietary engine that we have. So that was a large undertaking that we had to face.

Q: So you had to develop an entirely new engine for yourself?

A: Absolutely. Also of course, we intended this to be a, and I hate to use the phrase, a “next-generation global tournament network.” For us, this is Battle.net 2.0. It’s the evolution of what these global networks are. So we had tournament servers and challenge servers and game servers and cashing servers and distributed database servers to write for us to be able to engineer a network that was truly global. Guild Wars will be unique, when it ships it will be the only game that has ever been released worldwide to support, with a single client, all the worldwide customers.

In other words, we’re not releasing Guild Wars in the U.S. and then making a Korean version and then making a French version and then making an Italian version. There’s one game, one Guild Wars game. All the language support is built into it live. So it goes live around the world simultaneously. If you’re a player in France, and somebody else is a player in Canada, and somebody else is a player in Korea, they’re all interacting with the exact same game and can play with and against each other through the international tournaments or any mission that they want to.

Q: So a guy talkin’ crap in French will be translated into English?

A: That’s… yeah. We’ll do auto-translation. But that required a substantial amount of engineering work on our behalf right up front. So we spent a good couple of years building all of these technologies that we needed to pull this off. And then of course we turned our focus to the game content itself. We built an absolutely world class art team and world class design team. We have James Finney who was the lead designer of Starcraft, and have spent the last couple of years bringing the gameplay into existence around all this technology.

Q: So tell me, were there any problems in your development team that cause friction? Or did everything run smoothly in the development team?

A: That’s an interesting question. We have probably the best culture I’ve ever experienced at Arena Net. In the early days we adopted an office infrastructure that—we said “No cubes, no offices, no echelons.” Everybody sits out in large development pods, including the founders, including a lot of the business guys. We keep it really open. And I think that it’s really fostered an atmosphere of camaraderie and teamwork. We’ve had very few problems since we started this game. Anything beyond somebody having a disagreement over a design decision and kind of getting irritated with each other for a day, maybe it’s 12 hours before they go out and have a beer together and get it resolved. We really have not had any issues at all.

One thing is that when people come to work at Arena, they don’t leave. We’ve had essentially zero turn over.

Q: What were the peaks and the valleys of design? Were there things that clicked and ran horribly smooth, and were there trouble spots?

A: In fairness, there were definitely points that we reached where we really had to sit down and think our way through it. What we tried to accomplish at first seems impossible. Because a role playing game, the entire design of a role playing game is to progress, is to level. Is to reward you for the amount of time that you’re playing it. In a traditional on-line role playing game, if you’re level 15 and I’m level 7

... a suivre la semaine pro

[Llys]

Si quelqu'un aurait la gentillesse de nous traduire ça

[Ynot]

bon je m'y colle mais à la va vite

[Habemus Papam]

c'est qui la personne interogée je ne le voie écrit nul par

[Ynot]

Q: commet va aujourd'hui?

A: ca roule, en fait ca va meme tres bien, c'estvraiment sympa de voire le jeu prendre vie et des gens y jouer

Q: est ce vraiment une experience gratifiante?

A: Oh oui, si tu savais, a vrai dire la seul analogie qui me vient à l'esprit serai la naissance de son bebe. lorsque l'on a alumer le serveur hier matin en moins de 10 minutes nous avions 5000 joueurs. les gens sont clairement derriere leur jeu a le lancer et essayer de voir si c'est on.

Q: tu penses quoi de cette exitation autour du jeu? a ton avis qu'est ce qui attire les gens comme cela

A: Je pense, tout d'abord, meme si je regraitrai surement d'avoir a le dire, mais le fait qu'il n'y ai pas d'abonnement attire beaucoup de monde. dans ces jeux enligne, il y a bcp de personnequi aimeraient y jouer mais que l'abonnement rebute.Alors je pense que rien que cela (pas d'abonnement) fait que bcp de personne sont seduite.Je pense que cela fait aussi que certain se demande:" mais comment font il pour qu'il n'y ai pas d'abonnement?","y aura t'il de la pulicité dans le jeu?""gw sera t'il un jeu bas de game? qui n'aura pas tout le strass des grosses production?"

maintenant au regard du wpe on as bienvue que ce n'etait pas le cas et que gw n'a rien a envier de ce coté la (traduction vite faite)

a suivre

[Ynot]

Citation :

Publié par emanuelle

c'est qui la personne interogée je ne le voie écrit nul par

ah oui c'est vrai je l'ai mis sur mon site .. mais pas ici, c'est Jeff Strain mais tu aurais pue le deviner au regard de ce qu'il dit

[Comic's]

Je lis ça.

[Ynot]

Q: Alors comment vous avez fait pour concocter un model economique sans abonnement? c'est un secret de fabrique?

A: Nan, ce n'est pas un secret.d'ailleur ca nous ettones plus qu'autre chose que personne n'ai fait ce choix ou n'y ai pensé.. depuis le temps.. Je pense que la raison pourlaquelle la plus part des MMO font payer un abonnement est parcequ'il en on envie, vous savez. Le coup principal au dela du developpement est lié a la bande passante.
La premiere chose que nous avons faite fut d'utiliser notre expereince de Battle.net pour imaginer un jeu qui pourais acceuillir des millier de joueur mais n'utiliserai que tres peu de bande passante. une des chose qui se passe en coulisse et dont les gens ne se rendent pas compte est la technologie utilise pour masquer la latence (lag) de fasson a minimaliser la BP necessaire pour jouer
Les joueurs jouant avec des modems, nous disent qu'une fois le jeux installé, il beneficie de la meme qualite de jeu que les autres.c'est non seulement bien de notre point de vue et nous permet d'avoir un model viable, mais c'est aussi bien pour les joueur car cela permet de de toucher une plus grande base de joueurs.
La seconde chose est le suport du jeu qui nous permetra de continue le develoenet et d'agrandir le monde en sortant des nouveaux chapitre tout les 6 mois ou du genre. cela sera un nouveau produit qui racontera le prochain chapitre de l'histoire de guild war.
Les extension auront un contenue globalement equivallent au jeu original

[Ynot]

Q: Comment est né guild war? comment vous est venu le concept?

A: comme tu le sais les fondateurs d' Arenanet travaillaient avans chez blizzard. Mike O’Brian qui dirige le design, etait le chef d'equipe pour Warcraft III. Patrick Wyatt notre ingenieur reseau fut 8 ans vis president du R&D de blizzard, et aussi a l'origine du moteur "craft". et il y avait moi aussi


.. pour la suite.. euh j'ai la flême..

[tfh]

Citation :

Publié par Ynot

.. pour la suite.. euh j'ai la flême..

Bon aller j'ai jamais mis un accent de ma vie et vaut pas tripette en grammaire/orthographe francaise mais voila la question suivante:


Q: Cela aura t'il un cout supplementaire?


A:
Oui, oui. Vous achetez le jeu, y jouez en-ligne autant que vous voulez et, tout les 6 mois environ, un nouveau chapitre du jeu sortira, vous aurez alors le choix de l'acheter ou non. Si vous l'acheter vous aurez tous les nouveaux jouets, sinon cela n'est pas grave. Grace a notre technologie 'streaming' [ Le fait que le monde et le client est mis a jour en live pendant le jeu] nous n'aurons jamais besoin de vous imposer une mise a jour. Si par exemple vous achetez les chapitres 2, 3, 7 et votre ami achete les chapitres 1, 4 et 7 cela ne pose aucun probleme vous pourrez tout de meme jouer avec lui. Vous n'aurez pas a acheter les chapitres qu'il a acheter et qui vous manque. Cela signifie seulement que vous ne pourrez pas jouer ensemble au contenu[quetes, objets, missions] du chapitre 2 ( aucquel vous pouvez jouer seul) et du chapitre 3 (aucquel il peut jouer mais pas vous car vous n'avez pas acheter le chapitre 3). En revanche vous pouvez jouer ensemble aux chapitres que vous possedez en commun [ exemple chapitre 7] c'est a dire faire les quetes et les missions ensemble, vous echanger librement les items de ces missions, etc .

[Loum]

Il parle surtout du dévelopemment et des personnes, les seuls question parlant du jeu, du coût en faite, ont déjà été traduites.


Je ferais ça peut être plus tard, mais là j'ai pas trop de temps^^

[Sleepy Fitzcairn]

J'avais lu cette interview et je dois dire même si on apprend rien de neuf elle est intéressante sur les ambitions et le passé des devs et c'est pour moi une interview référence pour ceux qui auraient encore des doutes sur les capacités de Guild Wars