GW2: The Living World Game
In order to continue to build on the pillars of Guild Wars 2, our focus for the game needs to be on these concepts of building up community and events. We’ve shown some of the promise of a truly living world, but we still have so many ideas on how to take this to the next level. Put simply we’ve barely scratched the surface.
We will accomplish this is by building a world that has truly unique storylines and event experiences that play out over extended periods of time, that shape the future and world of Tyria, creating stories for everyone to tell about the game for years to come.
We attempted to do this with varying degrees of success with our Halloween, Lost Shores, and Wintersday events. Thanks to each of these events and your feedback, we’ve learned an incredible amount about how to ensure big events like this are successful moving forward.
Our Wintersday event was an example of applying a lot of the lessons learned from the earlier events to ensure we create content that is inclusive, community driven, and most importantly fun. From Wintersday, we discovered still more areas we can improve for future world events to make them even more exciting.
To complement this concept of regular world events with strong stories and themes, we also need to build on and strengthen our existing open world and its persistent content. The more persistent events we can provide in a specific area, the less often each of the events in that area needs to occur, which in turn adds to the sense of an ever-evolving open world.
This means we need to give reasons for players at all levels to explore these areas, to reward them for their time, and to encourage them to play in locations where they will run into each other and experience the community-driven features that make Guild Wars 2 shine. Before we expand our world more, we need to make sure our existing world is as strong as possible, and gives reasons for people at all levels to go back and play and explore in the entire game we have built.
So how are we going to do that?
Systems and Rewards Supporting the Living World
To make playing in our open world worthwhile, we’ll make it rewarding enough for players to spend their time there across all levels. It’s extremely important that we stay true to our philosophy that you should be able to play Guild Wars 2 the way you want to play the game in order to reach the most powerful rewards.
One of our focuses is expanding and leveraging our achievement system. The concept behind this is to allow players to earn new rewards for achievements, as well as progressing down achievement paths that take advantage of the open world experience. We’ll add tokens for your achievement you can turn in to select from a list of rewards, including new reward types like ascended gear and infusions. We’ll add support so daily achievements will be different each day of the week, which will help drive players to different areas of the world and play together. Later, we’ll also be adding a system that lets you complete a subgroup of achievements to fulfill your daily. For example, if there are 6 daily achievements available, you’ll only need to do 4 of the 6. So you can choose the achievements that you’re most interested in.
We’ll continue to offer cosmetic rewards such as titles, medals (map complete), unique skins, etc. which will remain prizes earned for completing specific parts of the game. These will show off the prestige of your character, but will not make your character more powerful than other characters.
As we look at developing new types of rewards further into 2013, we want to develop systems that are uniquely Guild Wars 2. Our reward systems need to be exciting, and include things you want to earn over time, but we don’t want to force our players on endless gear treadmills for new tiers of gear we add every 6 months. You won’t see another tier between ascended and legendary in 2013 for example. Our goal will be to use our existing reward systems and build new ones that are fun and exciting that step away from the stale gear grind reward systems you see elsewhere. Later in 2013, we’ll begin to introduce more of these systems once we’ve finished rolling out the remaining ascended gear and infusions.
In order to continue to build on the pillars of Guild Wars 2, our focus for the game needs to be on these concepts of building up community and events. We’ve shown some of the promise of a truly living world, but we still have so many ideas on how to take this to the next level. Put simply we’ve barely scratched the surface.
We will accomplish this is by building a world that has truly unique storylines and event experiences that play out over extended periods of time, that shape the future and world of Tyria, creating stories for everyone to tell about the game for years to come.
We attempted to do this with varying degrees of success with our Halloween, Lost Shores, and Wintersday events. Thanks to each of these events and your feedback, we’ve learned an incredible amount about how to ensure big events like this are successful moving forward.
Our Wintersday event was an example of applying a lot of the lessons learned from the earlier events to ensure we create content that is inclusive, community driven, and most importantly fun. From Wintersday, we discovered still more areas we can improve for future world events to make them even more exciting.
To complement this concept of regular world events with strong stories and themes, we also need to build on and strengthen our existing open world and its persistent content. The more persistent events we can provide in a specific area, the less often each of the events in that area needs to occur, which in turn adds to the sense of an ever-evolving open world.
This means we need to give reasons for players at all levels to explore these areas, to reward them for their time, and to encourage them to play in locations where they will run into each other and experience the community-driven features that make Guild Wars 2 shine. Before we expand our world more, we need to make sure our existing world is as strong as possible, and gives reasons for people at all levels to go back and play and explore in the entire game we have built.
So how are we going to do that?
Systems and Rewards Supporting the Living World
To make playing in our open world worthwhile, we’ll make it rewarding enough for players to spend their time there across all levels. It’s extremely important that we stay true to our philosophy that you should be able to play Guild Wars 2 the way you want to play the game in order to reach the most powerful rewards.
One of our focuses is expanding and leveraging our achievement system. The concept behind this is to allow players to earn new rewards for achievements, as well as progressing down achievement paths that take advantage of the open world experience. We’ll add tokens for your achievement you can turn in to select from a list of rewards, including new reward types like ascended gear and infusions. We’ll add support so daily achievements will be different each day of the week, which will help drive players to different areas of the world and play together. Later, we’ll also be adding a system that lets you complete a subgroup of achievements to fulfill your daily. For example, if there are 6 daily achievements available, you’ll only need to do 4 of the 6. So you can choose the achievements that you’re most interested in.We’ll continue to offer cosmetic rewards such as titles, medals (map complete), unique skins, etc. which will remain prizes earned for completing specific parts of the game. These will show off the prestige of your character, but will not make your character more powerful than other characters.
As we look at developing new types of rewards further into 2013, we want to develop systems that are uniquely Guild Wars 2. Our reward systems need to be exciting, and include things you want to earn over time, but we don’t want to force our players on endless gear treadmills for new tiers of gear we add every 6 months. You won’t see another tier between ascended and legendary in 2013 for example. Our goal will be to use our existing reward systems and build new ones that are fun and exciting that step away from the stale gear grind reward systems you see elsewhere. Later in 2013, we’ll begin to introduce more of these systems once we’ve finished rolling out the remaining ascended gear and infusions.
2012 was an amazing year for Guild Wars 2, with the release of the game, the fantastic sales and login numbers we’ve seen on a daily basis, the fun we have had both playing with and listening to our community, and all the great awards the game has received over the last few months.
You’ll earn these brand-new laurels as a reward for daily and monthly achievements!
We’re adding a wide range of new gear that can be purchased with the new laurels.
It’s a new year, which means all-new items and a redesigned favorite in the Gem Store!
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