A little over one week into the launch of Heart of Thorns, and we caught ArenaNet's Colin Johanson napping long enough to coerce some answers out of him about the current state of the Guild Wars 2 expansion and how things are going inside the walls of the Bellevue, Washington based developer. MMORPG: Well, where to begin? First, I want to thank you as a player for listening to your users and “nerfing” the amount of Hero Points needed to fully unlock Elite Specializations. Colin: You’re welcome! We’re really happy to see the positive reaction that change has received from everyone.
MMORPG: Have you guys found any similar instances where you might need to iterate since launch? I know folks were decrying the XP needed for Masteries at first before they realized they were account wide, and before you took out the requirements for the one blocking people in the story missions.
Colin: At this point the big bullet point features and content for the expansion all are functioning as intended and we’re really thrilled with the feedback we’ve seen, folks seem to be just having a great time playing Heart of Thorns right now.
There are plenty of small things we’ll want to keep working on, for example the other day we added a bunch of the crafting materials to the material storage to just streamline that experience a bit more. One of the current places we’re discussing iterating on is fractal dungeons. The reaction to the core changes to make fractals more approachable by playing one at a time has been really positive – but there is some work to be done still in the smaller details like balance, XP, and reward rates. We’ll continue to evaluate all the areas to look for other things we might need to make some tweaks to, but in general we’re just really happy right now with the reception and stability of the launch.
On top of everything the expansion has already provided, we’ve still got more features of the expansion activating here soon as well! Raids, new legendary weapons, our enhanced squad UI, PvP leagues and our professional PvP league are all coming shortly. So we’ll keep an eye on those as they activate and look to what kind of iteration might be required early on based on the feedback we see on those features as well.
MMORPG: How does it feel to finally see Heart of Thorns in the wild? Are people reacting the way you expected? I imagine it’s got to feel a lot like releasing the game all over again with how people’s desire for it was pent up.
Colin: It feels amazing to get this game out the door! Its been three years since we launched a major product to market and as a game developer, there really isn’t anything better than those final moments before launch – and the first moments after launch when everyone pours into the game to play. I love this time in game development where every detail is new to players and they are all sharing their discoveries with one another. I just want to stay in game all day and talk with people and play the game! It really does feel like the original release week all over again- though this time infinitely less stressful with how smooth the launch of Heart of Thorns has been so far.
We took some risks on this expansion, and ultimately no risk was bigger than saying we’re going to step away from traditional gear and level progression and chase something more uniquely Guild Wars in our mastery system. That risk has absolutely paid off and I think we delivered a system that’s both resonating with players and gives us a bright future for meaningful progression for Guild Wars 2’s PvE in the future. Masteries is just one of many systems we focused on in HoT to build a true foundation for which we can regularly expand Guild Wars 2 in the future and solve one of the biggest complaints about Guild Wars 2 (the lack of a real end game) – the reaction we’re seeing to all of those features tells me we made the right choices and we’re exactly where we want to be. We can now focus on building content on the stable foundation we’ve built for our future.
MMORPG: There’s a long thread on the forums right now about the way Fractals are now set up, and how players believe that they’ll be abandoned once folks hit level 100 in Fractal progression. Are there further plans to adjust fractals to keep them as the game’s primary source of small group “dungeon” content?
Colin: Fractal dungeons will absolutely not be abandoned, no! We’re just getting started with the work we want to do with Fractal of the Mists as our end-game five-player dungeon experience. The most important part of the update with Heart of Thorns was getting them to the point that Fractals can be consumed in smaller “bite-sized” amounts of time so they are more approachable content-wise, which makes them available to a much larger audience of players. We’ve already seen a really positive response to this change and a much larger array of players stepping into Fractal dungeons which was absolutely our goal.
In the short term, we need to take a look at iterating on some of the issues with rewards, XP, and potentially some scaling issues on the higher tiers of fractals. Longer term, we have a lot of plans for our fractal dungeons – but we’ll talk more about that when we’re ready to discuss our plans for the live cadence for Guild Wars 2 in 2016. For now – we still have raids, legendaries, squad UI, PvP leagues, and Guild Wars 2 pro PvP league to kick off!