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Ok, Colin Johanson, "game director" d'Arenanet, est interviewé par le site Gamingbolt (en anglais).
Source de l'interview ici
Voici un bref résumé de quelques éléments clés (je donne un résumé neutre de ses propos) :
* Le PvP est à la traîne question contenu/feature et Anet bosse dessus.
There are certainly some areas that we know we need to grow in, and add more features. PvP is a big one for me. We know that there are some features that we need to have to get the PvP up to where we want it to be. Those were not included in release, and those are all things that we have either already added since the game came out or we have a team of people building right now. So it’s one of the big ones for me, really, growing that competitive PvP feature-base.
* Bien qu'il y aura des add-ons payants plus tard, et ce sur un rythme plus lent que pour GW1 (pas tous les six mois), Anet va bel et bien sortir un patch de contenu (avec ou sans event) tous les mois, et un plus gros patch encore tous les 4-5 mois.
Yeah, yeah, we are actively working on a bigger expansion as well. But that’s something we don’t have a real timetable set on yet. Our major focus now, like most of the companies, is live updates. But we do have a small group of people that is working on expansions and stuff down the road as well. 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.
* Janvier et février contiendront deux gros patches majeurs, plus gros que les trois précédents.
We had a huge Halloween update in October, we just had a big one in November, we have a giant Christmas update coming in December, and all of those have gone over really well, and I think in December people are going to be really excited. But January and February are actually are biggest updates to date. They’re even bigger than all the stuff we did in October, November and December. And I think that when people see how much stuff they’re gonna get for no monthly fee in January and February, they’re probably going to be blown away. These two months combined are basically an expansion’s worth of content for free.
* Le McM est une lettre d'amour a Daoc et aura son gros patch de contenu/feature en février
Our world vs world PvP is highly inspired by the old Dark Age of Camelot Realm vs Realm system. A lot of people that work here, Dark Age of Camelot was their all time favourite game, and the realm vs realm was really what made that game spectacular and amazing. And that system of having three different sides fighting constantly and rotating between the influences of power over this big PvP area, that’s a place where we found a lot of inspiration. And we took it and put our own Guild Wars 2 twist on it. And it’s something where we tried to build on the best elements of that and then make it uniquely and distinctly Guild Wars as well.
And actually, in February, we’re going to do a whole bunch of expansions on top of that world vs world area, to make that experience even more uniquely Guild Wars. But that’s something where we took a lot of inspiration from a previous game, and take that and then build on it and make it something even more.
* GW2 cherche l'équilibre (difficile) entre jeu accessible et facile à prendre en main pour casual et jeu riche et complexe pour hardcore.
I think one of the hardest things about an MMO, to make an MMO really successful, is that you need to be approachable enough that the casual gamer can get into it, but you need to be deep and rich enough that the advanced player can play for years and still find new things and still discover things in the game and continue to grow. That’s a really, really careful balance to walk. I think that you’re always on the risk of upsetting the casual players by making the game too hardcore, and you’re at risk of upsetting your day-to-day hardcore players by making the game too casual.
It’s definitely something that’s really challenging. You see a lot of the MMOs falling into one of the two categories. They’re either really casual games or they’re very niche games, and a really hardcore group of players play it for a really, really long time, but they can’t attract the casual audience, because the game isn’t approachable enough or casual enough. And I think we’ve done a really good job with Guild Wars 2 so far, we’re kind of bridging the gap between those two, providing a game that allows the casual gamer to really get into it and go and have fun and just enjoy themselves and provide depth for the player who’s looking for more. And I think that, in particular for both of those groups, we’re gonna continue to build the game and make sure there’s enough for both of them as we go forward.
* GW1 n'était pas un MMORPG et n'entrait pas en compétition avec WoW. GW2 est un MMORPG et il est en compétition directe avec WoW, pas parce que c'est un wow-like mais parce qu'il propose une approche différente et à gros budget. (je sens qu'on va partir sur 14 pages de trolls avec ça, pitié les gens :/ )
With Guild Wars 1, we decided to not compete with World of Warcraft and we made a game that was very different, that was distinctly different and free-to-play and it was really a completely different game type. We called it a cooperative RPG, not MMORPG. People ended up playing it like an MMO and it kind of adopted that name overtime but we always thought of it as a co-op RPG. And we never intended for it to directly compete with World of Warcraft.
We’re definitely going after a different audience and some people from World of Warcraft would also be interested in this game. But we didn’t just want to make Guild Wars 1 again. So we decided with Guild Wars 2, let’s make a pure MMO, let’s make a giant open world game and let’s try to accomplish the things that people really want to see in an open world MMO, which is a truly living, breathing world that changes and you can just explore to have a great time. That’s really what we set out to do and sure, we wanted to compete with World of Warcraft. We wanted to compete with every game in the genre when we were putting that game out and make a game that basically defines where the genre of MMOs is going. I think the MMO genre had stagnated a lot, and over the course of 7-10 years before Guild Wars 2 came out, there wasn’t a lot of innovation. It was all just ‘Let’s make a game, and World of Warcraft is working, so we should make exactly what they’re making’, and as MMO players, first and foremost, most of us working here were kind of tired with that, because if we wanted to play that game, we could just go play that game. And we didn’t see any reason to make that game again, because there’s plenty of them we can already go and play.
So we wanted to do something different, but we wanted to definitely appeal to that core MMO audience, and that also extends to the RPG audience out there that was looking for an MMO that was more than just an open world quest that you just marauded through. We wanted to make something that was really more like a true RPG, like a Skyrim, where there’s this big open world for all these experiences for you to have. And it just so happens that you can do them with all your friends. I think that appeals to MMO players, it appeals to WoW players, and it appeals to people who play any MMOs out there. Or RPGs.
* Pas d'adaptation du jeu prévu sur Linux, et pour les consoles, une petite équipe a prospecté la possibilité d'un portage mais aucun projet concret pour le moment.
* Non, GW3 n'est pas planifié à ce stade (les questions des fois je vous jure  )
Pour plus de détail et de digressions, je vous conseille de lire l'interview en entier
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