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With the first anniversary of Guild Wars 2 happening today, we had the chance to interview Mike O'Brien, president of ArenaNet, about the first year of the game and get a glimpse of where it is going in year two. Mike answered almost all of our questions and was joined by Chris Lye, global brand director for ArenaNet.

To begin the interview, Mike talked a little about getting into the Living World and where it is today.

"The Living World and our commitment of a two week cadence is a difficult thing to live up to, so we have been gearing up to be able to do that. I think if you see some of the recent releases we have done, look at clockwork chaos as an example, players are banding together. I think you really do get a sense that the world is changing all the time.

I wrote in my blog post that for me where it really comes together is where we have dynamic events that we shipped the game with and then we have living world events going on. I think where it really feels right is when you are just fighting for the world and you don't even think about the fact of whether this was always in the game or if this was an event that was added in recently. You don't think about the mechanics of how all this is happening; there is just something going on in the world and I'm going to fight for my world.

So it's great to see players really coming together to fight for their world. We really want to make their actions have a persistent mark on the world, let players leave their mark on the world and let them direct where the world goes through the living story. You saw that with our Cutthroat Politics release and we are really excited to deliver content this rapidly and keep the world alive."

What is the single biggest lesson you have learned in the first year?

"I'll start with the single biggest challenge which was delivering content at the pace which we wanted to deliver content. We released the game and a common question from players was if we would be able to support the game without a monthly subscription fee. Internally we thought subscription or not this was a living world game and we wanted the world to feel alive. We wanted to release content more rapidly than anyone else and not have a business model dictate our frequency of content.

The biggest challenge to increasing the frequency is the mechanics to be able to do that. You don't think about that, and as a player you never should, but in order to do rapid content updates you need many teams creating content in parallel, because any one team cannot go from conception to release as fast as we are releasing new content. Then, in order to develop all of this in parallel, you need the underlying technology and work-flow to be able to support it so teams can create content without stepping on each other’s toes while still being able to assume the existence of content that would be released before it.

Then you need a team that is practiced at it. You start this and it is a really new challenge for everyone that is doing it, but over time our teams get better and better at delivering this kind of content. I said in the blog post that I think this is just an amazing tool. We started doing this and we started carefully because this is a really big thing to ramp up. You saw in the early Flame and Frost updates that we were treading gently in how much content we released and how world impacting it was. Then as we got into it, the teams got better and now we have more power to be able to make substantial world changing content every two weeks.

I think it is just an amazing power that we have now to keep the game constantly changing. So it has been a year; a year since we were able to build our company to be able to do this. It has been a reworking of a lot of our underlying technology and production processes, but we did it! What I think about is, look at the most recent release then think about an entire year of those world changing releases every two weeks. That's the kind of power we have in our grasp right now and that is what gets me excited."

Is the living world going to be a replacement for expansions, specifically adding new zones to the game?

"First, I hope we have been clear to the players that we are really focused on the Living World and not on expansions right now. We think there is so much that we can do through the Living World and, in terms of adding new zones, we have already done that through the Living World. We added dungeons including the endless dungeon Fractals of the Mist and we added Ascended gear. I know that was a controversial thing, but that was a major new type of advancement that we thought the game needed. We didn't wait for an expansion, but added that through the Living World.

So my general answer is yes because we will and have already done a lot of that. I guess the thing I will say is that Guild Wars 2 is a big game and I don't think players should judge the Living World by whether there is more and more landmass being added to the world. I don't think players should judge an expansion this way either. So while we have done it and added Southsun Cove, I don't think that is the focus or distinguishing mark of what makes great new content. I think the distinguishing mark of what makes great new content is that there things to do in the world that are new and challenging and that bring players together to learn new skills and defeat bigger and badder challenges than they ever defeated before. That's what we are focused on, but absolutely we are going to do that and you have been seeing us do that through the Living World."

Why are you putting the pressure on yourselves to keep this release schedule when players have a lot of content to do outside of the Living World releases?

"It's kind of funny, right? We come out with these updates and you'll see a lot of players consuming and loving the updates and looking forward to the next update. Then you see some players saying 'ArenaNet slow down. I have this and that to do in the game and you are giving me even more content!' It is just a bit funny to step back and think, when was the last time you heard MMO players saying they had too much to do in their game?

The philosophy is we came out with a game that is not about continual vertical progression and gearing up for one raid after the next. Our game is about going out into the world and taking on challenges together. We even have the inverse motivation against having that continual gear grind as it would separate players so they wouldn't be able to do these things together. If there is a dragon attacking in the open world, with a vertical progression would it end up being too easy for some people and too hard for others?

Our big focus then is to give people more horizontal progression, different things to accomplish and rewards from accomplishing those things. So when we think about the kind of things we can do to update Guild Wars 2, the more traditional way would be to lay out more runway for players. You would have players at a certain level and tier of loot and you see that players are running out of things to do so you lay out more runway: more gear progression, more raids, more grind. This works for some games and for some players, but I think that players are starting to mature past the point of wanting to be on that treadmill, of being in that obvious pattern of every time I catch up you are going to put another carrot in front of me.

Then from a game standpoint, I don't think the runway approach is good for the game. I will recognize and concede that some games have done and had very long lifetimes doing that. But what does that leave behind? Does that leave behind populated content with players wanting to do that content with you and the whole world feeling alive, or does it leave the new shiny that everyone is focused on and husks of what people were focused on years ago and are not really focused on anymore? We didn't want Guild Wars 2 to be about that. Especially if you look at our goal, to make Guild Wars 2 a truly living world then ask yourselves these questions.

Why did we get rid of quests? We got rid of quests because it forced the world to not change. Every new player that comes into the game has to do the same quests in the same order. How do you try to do that and have the sense that a player's actions can change the world? Sure my actions can change the world to a certain degree, but not in the sense of ever changing a quest or the circumstances that are causing a quest-giver to say they need your help. So we thought that the kind of content that you release into the world needs to be the opposite of that. It can't be something that when players run out of things to do we give them more challenges that they need to grind out to do and that add another 100 hours to the game. It just doesn't work. If you want to be able to have players impacting the world around them, not just progressing and leaving the old stuff behind, then all of your content needs to be about impacting the world."

"So we think about the content differently. The content is not about laying new runways in front of people, it is about players are changing the world as they play the game. We start to think about it as layering it into the stuff we already made. This is kind of a thought exercise, but you could layer in new events all the time and to some degree players wouldn't even know that you are layering in events all the time because they are just playing the game. Now is an event one that has been around since launch and a player just hasn't seen it before, or is it one that was coded into the game a couple of weeks ago and this is the first time it is getting triggered?

When we think of it that way, our job is just to keep things happening in the game and then from that is how often things should be happening in our game which gets back to the question. We released the game and we thought that doing updates every month would be a pretty powerful thing to do. Other games are only releasing content every three months, but it is content that players can grind against for three months before the next content. But we looked at the past at games which tried to do it every month and we thought that having it every month would really make the world feel fresh. So we did it every month, we did our Halloween event, Lost Shores and Wintersday and it did feel fresh. I think we could do it every month and it feel exciting, that as we play the game we are exploring this new content with our friends and it is very exciting.

You kind of measure it in different ways, like everyone is talking about it on forums and fansites and your guild is doing this new content while players are trying to add everything to the wiki. There is that moment where there is that excitement of discovery. Then there is that excitement where you know the world is about to change. You have that kind of water cooler talk in the community where ArenaNet has released something and players are wondering if it is going to be this or if it is going to be that. Then there is the time in between where the excitement has died down. You can see this really tangible excitement in the community of new things changing.

Then we thought, why does there have to be that gap in between where things aren't changing? This is a game about a living world and we took it as a challenge upon ourselves so that the world always feels like that, where the world always has something going on. So we decided internally that we thought we could do that and geared up and built out these teams to accomplish that. It is a huge challenge and it has taken us a while to get it right, but I think it does have the effect. I look at it now and every week really is the excitement of either the week leading up to something or the week that something happens. You look at the forums, fansites and in-game and every week really is like what those few good weeks used to be, so that's why we do it."

How do you feel about player comments of temporary versus permanent content?

"I think when we were starting that was a totally fair comment. Again, it is not an easy thing to constantly do things to keep the world alive. So from a player perspective we don't want them to have to think about the details and they shouldn't need to think about them, we just want to entertain the players. From our perspective we need to make sure everything is at a level where we are happy to leave it in the game and keep impacting the world going forward. Then we need to be sure we are not leaving players behind.

With 25 or 26 updates a year, imagine if each update we added a dungeon so we end up adding 25 dungeons in a year. Then after a year, a player is trying to run a dungeon but other players want to run some newer dungeon. Then if we do that another year there are 50 dungeons. Players don't need to think about those things, but behind the scenes we are thinking about them. The Living World should feel like they are permanent and it is changing the world, but we need to make sure we are getting it right and not make mistakes that leave behind content that isn't right or is fragmenting the player base.

Flame and Frost: Retribution I thought was a good release. Players were really looking forward to the Molten Weapons Facility, but it got blown up at the end of it. Players really liked it and said they ran it many times during the two weeks of its release, but it got destroyed at the end and they didn't like that. I think that is totally valid, but it takes time to gear up.

Now it is not like that anymore. Now Scarlet is attacking the world and launched these invasions. Those invasions aren't going anywhere. There will be a new pacing to it and we have talked to players saying there will be a different pace than it's at now, but that's the kind of permanence I think you want. You don't want permanence to the degree that nothing will ever change, but you want the permanence so if you like something you can continue to play it and it is not being taken away every two weeks. We are gearing up to give more permanence in this way. If we just kept doing what we did before with everything leaving after a couple weeks, then I would be complaining too. If we are doing thing where players are voting and their choice is changing the world and if a bad guy shows up and is invading where the player must combat this new enemy; that is the kind of world changing, leaving a mark on the world that we want to see. What I personally want to see is a year later, after 25 of these releases, the world feels like a completely different world. That's the level of change I want to see and that is what we are doing now."

With changing the world, does the personal story prevent you from being able to change too much? Like with Orr, new players would still need to experience the risen through their story instead of an Orr cleansed through the Living World.

"At the beginning we steered away from things that would affect the personal story because we wanted to keep this clean and simple. There is no way it should be the case now that anything which is touched upon in the personal story isn't fodder for the Living World as that would go against what we want to avoid in Guild Wars 2, which is the world being too solidified that it can never change. So we are going to start changing that stuff."

With the Living World content updates being free, will this be a sustainable model?

"Guild Wars 2 has this unique business model. We love our business model. You might have seen our earnings reports and can see that we have a stable revenue base. So we are funding the Living World through our revenue base."

Toward the end, Mike was asked about how many copies of the game they were expecting to ship in China, but was not able to give any detailed information. Other similar games that did well in North America and Europe went on to China to sell well and ArenaNet hopes for a similar outcome with Guild Wars 2. I followed up asking if the free trials have been successful for the game.

"Actually yeah, numerically they have. We are not going to get into numbers, but in general we have seen a really strong uptake in players trying the free trials and then purchasing the game.

Chris Lye: On the marketing side, we continue to see the number of people who come into our free trials grow over time. We have kept them discreet and focused over a single weekend, but we definitely plan to expand them in a number of ways. The free trial is a great way to get people into the game and we have found, speaking as someone who has done free trials for other projects, the conversion rate of free trial players to buying the game is very much higher than the industry average."

We want to thank Mike O'Brien and ArenaNet for taking the time for this interview. Check out the announcement reveal for next week's content, where ArenaNet kicks off year two with the return of the Super Adventure Box! ArenaNet also released an infographic showing off some statistics from the game's first year. Wonder which race is most popular or what monster has been racking up the most player kills? Check it out to find answers to these and more.

Matt "Mattsta" Adams