Interview with NCNet's Game Director Josh Davis
Interview with NCNet's Game Director Josh Davis
We talked to Guild Wars 2 Game Director Josh Davis about the learnings from the Secrets of the Obscure expansion and what's coming to the MMO
Probably save to assume that they will keep selling half a season of Living World once a year for an almost full full box price, but I'll wait until something is actually released. Maybe it'll be more than 85% cannibalized and recycled mechanics and art assets.
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I've completed my bullshit bingo card not even half through the interview ...
Taken at face value it really doesn't look good, to phrase it mildly, does it? Work/life balance has been the argument for change since 2012, fucking hell of they still don't get it right. There hasn't been a content drought since Season 3 under the old management, and if SotO is what NCNet manages to create with a dev pool as big as the one that created Season 4, then may God have mercy on their souls. All signs point toward End-of-Life milking mode, but I'll wait on their next buy-to-play Living World snippet for my final verdict. Maybe they surprise us.
- Our current team size is roughly what it was during the development of Living World Season 4 and about 15% larger than it was at the release of End of Dragons in 2022.
- From our experiences with Secrets of the Obscure alone, we’ve adjusted development schedules, review processes, dev resource allocations, documentation and communication practices, and more. All of these contribute, to some degree, to improving the quality of what we deliver.
TL;DR: The code is already a proper mess, We are now inflating administrative overhead to further decrease efficiency. Our goal is for every new line of code to produce at least one new bug and involve at least 100 members of staff.
I swear to God the longer it goes on the more I'm convinced that the fight was about GW3 or something. The limits of their heavily modified GW1 code become more apparent the more you start recognizing the patterns, and every year it gets worse.
Yep, that's what I'm saying all along. The GW2 code has become a nightmare to maintain and ArenaNet desperately wanted to start from scratch with a new game (not sure that it actually was GW3), but they weren't allowed by NCSoft.
Releasing GW3 would've lead to a lot of new players and a lot of vets forever abandoning the franchise, myself included in the latter. Imo GW3 is a terrible idea.
I mean, it's possible that they are currently doing all the refactoring and cleanup that has been neglected in previosu years. This would also explain, why they are not able to produce more content at the moment (and why it's so costly). If this is actually the case, then there might be light at the end of the tunnel, i. e. future additions to the game might become less complicated and less likely to produce bugs/regressions.
Also, why would GW3 lead to players abandoning the franchise? This is not what happened with GW2, or did it? I always thought that a lot of former GW1 players are now playing GW2 and some maybe even still play GW1.
My theory is that whatever ArenaNet had in the working during IBS was not good/finished enough or too far off from the current francise that NCSoft pulled the plug and "condemned" ArenaNet to continue releasing content for GW2 (with a much smaller development team on a code base which is increasingly hard to maintain).
This is not what happened with GW2, or did it?
It did actually, but it didn't matter, because GW1 was not a true mmorpg & the influx of new players more than made up for the loss. With GW3 it would be different, GW3 would be another MMO similar to GW2, but with a fresher coat of paint, but without all the amazing content Anet released over the last 10+ years. It would be a new game that's not better than GW2, just -if we are very lucky- less buggy, but very lacking in content at launch & also EVERYONE would know for certain that Anet is going to abandon it for GW4 eventually. MMO veterans like stability, if you abandon them once, they will not trust you again.
I'm not sure whether this is entirely true or rather whether this is true for the more casual MMO player. You are describing the traditional Until Death Do Us Part way of playing MMOs. But GW2's (mostly) lack of vertical progression makes it really easy to return to the game after taking a break or playing something else (another MMO, e. g. GW3), without feeling that you have missed out on a lot.
By the way, this is one of the things I do not like about the new daily system (wizard vault), because it kinda discourages playing something else or taking a break, unless you are able to ...
Emancipate yourself from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds ... 🎶