Guild Wars 2 Junkies Interview

Eric Flannum, Lead Designer of Guild Wars 2, was interviewed by the community website Guild Wars 2 Junkies.  Both the questions and answers were fantastic, and I think deserve some thorough reading.  While some answers had already been confirmed, there were some new, interesting replies that can be found within.

GW2J: Have you thought of allowing players to choose what their starting weapon is during character creation? Though the game is still in beta, many players have commented that some of the starting weapons might not be the best for a beginning player.

Eric: There used to be a biography question that dealt with that very thing. It actually resulted in some inappropriate weapon choices for new players who weren’t aware that they were making a choice about how complex they wanted their experience to be. Since we didn’t feel that we could guarantee that all of the choices would be equally easy for starting players, we decided to pick the weapon that we thought was best for new players. We’re still taking feedback on this, of course, so players who participate in Beta Weekend Events (BWEs) should let us know if they’d prefer a different starting weapon.

That is a question many have asked while playing Guild Wars 2. Why do we not get to choose our own starting weapon?  It's very interesting that in one of their builds they actually had players making a conscious weapon decision, and actually having this backfiring on the player.  Overall the answer provided insight and a well-thought out response by Eric.

GW2J: With any PvP-oriented game, class balance is extremely important. We realize that things are nowhere near finished yet in regards to classes, but can you comment on where you are right now in this area of development?

Eric: We’ve done some very basic and rough skill balancing up to this point. Now we’re moving into a phase where we will very much concentrate on this. Players should expect to see a lot of skill changes and refinements in the next BWE.

With the release date announced and rapidly approaching, as a relatively serious PvP player, it's definitely nice to see them starting to really focus on class balancing. Here's hoping we can see some (leaked) patch notes on profession changes before the third beta event in late July.

GW2J: We want to play an asura! When do you expect players will be able to get their hands on the two missing races: the Asura and the Sylvari?

Eric: There is a distinct possibility that we’ll see one or both of those races in a BWE, but we haven’t locked down the content yet, so I can’t really confirm or deny anything at this time.

There's still hope my friends.  I really believe that if we weren't going to see either of the races, he would have told us plainly.  This answer is far too mysterious and vague for it not to be entirely plausible.  The problem is that if they don't show us these two races, everybody is going to be creating them on launch day.  It's bad enough on launch day for any MMO, but the population surge is normally split relatively equal amongst multiple races. Imagine that 80% of the launch population confined in between two zones.  Yeah, that's not a pretty picture, and I don't know (even with the stress tests) if a zone could handle that much traffic.

For the full article, click here.