In a recent interview with Gamerzines, Guild Wars 2‘s Lead content designer Mike Zadorojny talked a bit about future updates for the game and how the development team’s plans are shifting as updates continue to roll out at a fairly quick pace. The overall goal, interestingly enough, seems to be to push out content even quicker than we’re currently seeing. Here’s a quote from the interview:
“We’re doing three weeks [updates] currently, but now we’re pushing to two weeks,†he told us.
“It’s a marathon not a sprint and we’ve been getting better with each of our releases, in terms of how we budget, how we plan it out, how we manage personnel etc. Now we have four full ‘Living World’ teams that are building these content updates, so that we can stagger releases and make sure that people [developers] can decompress and get the quality time necessary to build a good design document before going back in and trying to implement it all over again.â€
He went on to compare Guild Wars 2 updates to content that’s a little more episodic in nature, almost like a television show. Check out the full interview here, and keep reading for our thoughts.
The comparison between an MMORPG and a television show is definitely interesting, especially with games like Defiance on the market that are trying something similar but with an actual television show progressing aside it. There’s also no doubting the fact that most avid fans of MMORPGs love frequent content updates, even if they are a little smaller in general and more focused. Content that’s episodic in nature also gives players a reason to check out the new content when it’s still around. This development philosophy seems similar to world events.
The downside to episodic story and dungeon content in Guild Wars 2, however, is the fact that a large percentage of it– especially right now– is temporary. Is temporary content a good or bad thing for Guild Wars 2? Can there ever be too much temporary content in a game that doesn’t require a subscription? What do you think?
