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Il y a quelques jours nous avons demandé à la communauté de Guild Wars 2 des questions qu'ils aimeraient soumettre, cette année, aux développeurs d'ArenaNet lors de Gamescom. Nous avons reçu une réponse étonnante, et avons pris les meilleures d'entre elles pour mettre sur le gril Matt Wuerffel et Devon Carver. Un grand nombre des questions posées portaient sur un nouveau patch de fonctionnalités, qui a depuis été annoncé, ou une extension. Alors que les développeurs n'ont pas voulu commenter les questions concernant une éventuelle extension, nous nous sommes concentrés, à la place, sur d'autres sujets très demandés : réalisation quotidienne de succès, champ de vision (FoV), vue à la première personne (FPV), artisanat des précurseurs, Super Adventure Box, Tengu et les obstacles et l'immersion dans le Monde vivant.

Nous avons également posé des questions concernant l'équilibrage des professions et le jeu compétitif ; dans les prochains jours, nous allons publier la deuxième partie de l'interview, qui couvre ces aspects ! Vous trouverez l'interview ci-dessous, ainsi que la transcription. Amusez-vous !

Retranscription

DAILY ACHIEVEMENT CAP

GuildMag: Il y a quelques mois vous avez ajouté un hard-cap pour les points de succès quotidiens, et dans quelques jours certaines personnes vont atteindre ce plafond. Quel est le raisonnement derrière cette limitation et allez-vous la modifier ?

Matt Wuerffel: Yeah… donc en fait quand nous avons modifié cela, il y avait un seul joueur au monde qui était déjà très proche d'atteindre le plafond, dans les quelques jours suivants le moment où nous avons fait ce changement. Une partie de la raison pour laquelle nous avons fait ce changement, c'est quand de nouvelles personnes entrent en jeu, et vous avez cette capacité à gagner des points de succès - tous les jours, de manière répétée - ceci crée une situation très difficile pour les nouveaux joueurs qui arrivent et disent: "Hé, je veux aussi essayer de rivaliser". Nous voulions donc à la fois donner l'occasion aux gens qui ont joué d'être en avance dans les classements, et aussi donner de nouvelles possibilités, aux personnes arrivant sur le jeu, de dire: "Hé, c'est encore possible pour moi". Ceci est en réalité une petite raison pour laquelle nous l'avons fait. Je pense que la raison principale est que nous ne voulions pas faire des quotidiennes une tâche nécessaire. Ils existe des choses qui sont destinées à être "Hé, dans le cadre du jeu, vous avez la possibilité d'accomplir ces choses au moment où vous vous connectez et en ayant une session normale de jeu" - et il y a des quelques récompenses associées, et nous avons eu beaucoup de rétroaction. Même pour des personnes qui étaient dans la partie  supérieure des classements ; elles se sentaient contraintes ou ne pouvaient pas manquer un seul jour et devaient y aller et jouer quotidiennement, encore et encore, ce n'est pas vraiment ce qu'est Guild Wars 2 - nous voulons que ce soit un jeu dans lequel vous pouvez rentrer pour jouer le jeu que vous voulez et vous engager dans la voie que vous voulez. Et donc, le plafonnement des succès était la décision que nous avons fait et il est possible que nous l'étendions à l'avenir, mais pour le moment nous ressentons le sentiment : "Hé, il y a certainement de l'intérêt à se connecter et faire les quotidiennes", mais nous ne voulons pas forcer les gens à se sentir comme : "Oh mec, je dois y aller et faire de ces dix quotidiennes", il faut que cela  soit quelque chose d'amusant et qui ne consiste qu'en une partie de votre expérience de jeu régulier.

FIELD OF VIEW

GuildMag:  Alors que vous avez fait quelques ajustements pour le champ de vision en jeu, certaines personnes se demandent si vous allez leur donner plus de liberté pour le changer avec un curseur ? Par exemple, laisser les gens augmenter le champ de vision au cours des combats contre les boss?

Matt Wuerffel: So we have the ability to kind of override your camera during boss fights and provide you with a much broader view or let you zoom out further, and we try to be judicious with when we apply that and say ‘Hey, this is content where you really need to have this kind of perspective’. There is always a tension there because we spent a lot of time… and we’re very proud of the art that we do, and we have a fantastic art team and they are spending a lot of time making things look really, really good up close, so that’s part of the tension that we see and we want you to be immersed in the world and see all the hard work that they’re doing. I think we’re always experimenting with different things. In the dev client we have different things of tweaking the camera, and it is something that we are aware of, and we always are thinking about how do we improve the camera, how do we get players more control while still kind of having this space where you can see how pretty Guild Wars 2 is and… so, it is a balance. I would not rule anything out, but beyond saying that we are looking into camera, we don’t have anything specific that we could announce that we are doing with the camera.

FIRST-PERSON VIEW

GuildMag: De même, certaines personnes se demandent qu'elles est votre position concernant l'ajout d'une vue à la première personne ?

Matt Wuerffel: I think it falls into the realm of, you know, that is not something that we would rule out, we do play around a lot with different camera views and controls and I think even in the betas you’ve seen… like, some people found out ‘oh man, there is like, kind of an eagle view, a top-down camera view’. It is something that we explore and we think about how would this work in the game and what would it make the game feel like, and what does it add for players? But, off the record, there is nothing we can say at this time.

Devon Carver: Yeah, the one thing I would say is… the first person mode which we’ve had, we used to kind of toggle in and out of it on our dev client before, the biggest reason to stay away of it is that the sense of direction in combat is really important in our game, as well as positioning – positioning is really important. So, when you go into that first-person mode, you really completely lose the understanding of anything that is going on behind you, which can make our combat really difficult to understand and just difficult to play. There is some PvE scenarios where probably it wouldn’t be a big deal, but certainly in PvP or World versus World, it becomes very difficult to actually understand what is going on in combat. Which means that it really handicaps you as a player at that point; it makes it difficult to know what is going on and for that reason it is something we probably won’t be doing much work with, because we have really done a lot of work and continue to do a lot of work to make combat as readable and understandable as possible, and, like I said, direction and positionality is really important in our game, so not being able to say all that playable space is really valuable.

PRECURSOR CRAFTING

GuildMag: Au cours de votre première année, vous avez parlé de l'artisanat des précurseurs. Pouvez-vous nous donner des nouvelles à ce propos, et verrons-nous quelque s'en rapprochant au cours de la période à venir ?

Devon Carver: So, we don’t really have anything to announce at this time, it is absolutely something that we’re, you know, fully aware of, and it is part of a system that we want to be making improvements upon so it’s something we’ve been putting a lot of thought into and then kind of been trying to figure out what the best solution to that problem is. But we don’t have anything that we can say right now about changes to the precursor system or the legendary system at all, but, like I said, it’s definitely something that is on our radar, it’s something we hope to be making improvements to and to have more to talk about sometime soon.

GuildMag: Bientôt ?

Devon Carver: “Soon”.

SUPER ADVENTURE BOX

GuildMag: Certaines personnes sont vraiment déçus que leurs parents aient enlevé leur Super Adventure Box. Y a-t-il quelque chose que vous pouvez leur dire pour leur remonter le moral avant de retourner à l'école ?

Devon Carver: Tu veux... Tu veux délivrer des nouvelles ?

Matt Wuerffel: Sure. Yeah, I mean, when we are talking about the Living World and the Living Story, you can see that we are moving towards a much more focused narrative, and that is focused on your relationship with Braham and Rox and some of the other characters that we have introduced. And that means that there is less, one, there is less space to do something where you kind of take a break and say: ‘And now for something completely different’ – which is what Super Adventure Box was. I think the other part of it is that we look very carefully at how much people played and how much people enjoyed certain portions of content that we put out, and so that also weighs into the factor of ‘Well, okay, what are we going to do, and when are we going to bring back things? What do we do, how much time do we put into different festivals, Halloween and Wintersday.’ And so, Super Adventure Box has a ton of people that were really excited about it, and it also has that difficulty of, it is something that’s really different from Guild Wars 2 in a lot of ways, and it doesn’t easily fit into the narrative structure of Living World. And so, I think it would be very unlikely that you would see it as part of a Living World season release, as to whether or not we come back to it, whether or not in some other form, you know, I can’t really say, I don’t know how likely that is and that is really all I can say about it. We know that there are a ton of people that really enjoyed it, and we had a lot of fun playing portions of it, but it’s difficult to fit in within the narrative structure that we have now and I think that makes it very much less likely that it will appear in a Living World season going forward.

GuildMag: Mais reviendra-t-elle après l'actuelle saison ?

Matt Wuerffel: We can’t really comment about what our long term plans are for the game, and so, you know, it is a similar answer if you ask me what was gonna happen in the upcoming episodes of season 2. Like, I really can’t say. But it is a very much different game in a lot of ways than Guild Wars 2 – a game within a game – and we’re trying to focus already in World v. World and PvP and PvE and Fractals. There are lots of systems that we have and we want to focus first on getting those to a state where we’re really happy with them and we’re fully supporting them and then we could look into… ‘All right, now that we have those up to a quality that we’re really happy with and fans are really happy with, what other projects can we take on, and what things can we look at doing?

THE TENGU

GuildMag: Nous savons que les tengu se cachent derrière le mur, attendant le moment pour sortir. Pouvez-vous nous dire quelque chose à leur sujet ? Comment ont-ils vécu les catastrophes récentes et allons-nous les voir furtivement derrière la porte prochainement ?

Devon Carver: Whether or not we will see them soon is certainly not something I can say. I mean, we try to keep the tengu involved in a lot of the things that we are doing. In terms of the way that the tengu would experience any of the recent events, it is going to be very similar to how they experience a lot of things. You know, they’ve kind of hold themselves up in their city to keep themselves safe. So you see them come out every once in a while. They’re certainly aware of some of the stuff that has been going on, if not seeing the effects at the same level as everyone else is. That being said, you can definitely keep your eyes open, and I’m sure there will pop up more in the future, but more specifics than that I can’t really give you. I don’t know if Matt has anything else?

Matt Wuerffel: I can’t add much else other than, we know that people are excited about the tengu and you can see some reactions to the things that have been going on in the world. Typically those reactions don’t have a lot of empathy because they have hidden themselves up behind the wall and are not very interested in allowing people to come in and take shelter there, but definitely stay tuned and it’s something that… it’s a thread that we are intentionally exploring and so it is all of the overall story of Tyria and it will have payouts as we go on.

BARRIERS OF THE LIVING WORLD

GuildMag: Quel bonheur en général ressentez-vous avec la manière dont le Monde vivant permet d'étendre l'univers de Guild Wars 2 ? Êtes-vous capable de faire tout ce que vous voulez, ou butez-vous contre des obstacles êtes qui ne peuvent pas être surmontés avec le système actuel ?

Matt Wuerffel: Yes, so I’d say in general we have been really happy with the Living World, particularly looking at Season 2 versus Season 1. You can see we made a lot of strides. We put some systems in place that help us to engage with players who maybe had to take a break because life happened, and now they can come back in and kind of easily re-engage with the Living World through the Living World Journal. I would say, it is clearly a learning experience for us and we are still figuring out what kinds of things we can build in the Living World and what kinds of things we need a little bit longer scope or timeframe to do, but it is pretty exciting to see some of the epic stuff towards the end of Season 1, and we learned a lot from that, and we learned a lot from the feedback from fans on what kinds of things they like to see, what kind of things they want to see. We’re not there yet, there’s obviously a lot that we still have to learn and get better, but that’s one of the things we really pride ourselves on as a studio, is the opportunity to iterate on content and figure out how exactly we want to tell these stories and what kind of stories we can tell in the Living World and what kind of things we need to do as part of the Feature Pack.

I mean, I can’t say that we haven’t found anything that we just can’t do. Sometimes it’s a matter of schedule and scope, and obviously there are a lot of things that we are doing as a studio at the same time and so kind of prioritizing how we do some of that stuff is always a difficult decision. But we try to leave a lot of room for the teams to take on kind of the high level goals and challenges that are presented by Colin and the directors, and then they can approach solving that problem in a lot of different ways. And that is part of the reason why in Season 1 you saw so many different kinds of content coming out. Sometimes it was Fractals, sometimes it was reworking a dungeon, and a lot of those things are options for the team to say ‘Hey, this is how we want to approach solving this problem. So there are definitely things that are difficult to do, primarily because of scope and timeframe, but I don’t know that I’d say we found anything that we just can’t flat out do. I think we found things that would make more sense to move into Feature Packs, things that kind of effect the game as a whole, as big general system are difficult to do in the Living World seasons, and it makes more sense to separate them out into their own kind of delivery.

IMMERSION AND THE LIVING WORLD

GuildMag: Avec le Monde vivant, vous changer également le paysage de certaines cartes et instances, par exemple avec les lianes de Mordremoth. Dans le même temps vous avez encore des gens qui jouent leur histoire personnelle et qui rencontrent ces changements. Certaines personnes craignent que cela occasionne une rupture de l'immersion - comment allez-vous lutter contre cela le cas échéant ?

Matt Wuerffel: So there is kind of two answers to that question. One is that with the release of the Living World Journal there is more of an established timeline of when things happen and so you can see very clearly, and we are trying to communicate very clearly ‘Hey, this is the order in which things happen’, and if you choose to play these things out of order, then you might see things that… there is a little immersion breaking, but we feel giving you the opportunity to go back and play content is really important. The other side of that is that we have to think about when we’re building this content and we are aware of some of those difficulties and some of the spots where it is going to create kind of, if you are in the open world it looks one way, and when you’re playing through an instance it looks a different way. We went through that evaluation when we destroyed Lion’s Arch and… it’s an interesting question and I’m not sure where we are exactly going to end up on. But it is something that we think about a lot and we try to engage with that question before we decide exactly what we are doing because we know it is important for us to have a world that feels alive and exciting and lots of things are changing, but it is also important for us to keep the world immersive and… so it’s a balance and I think we’ll get better at that as we go along and build things, but definitely an interesting question and a hard one to take on.

GuildMag: Est-il possible d'utiliser la carte originale associée pour une étape de l'histoire au lieu d'utiliser la carte modifiée ?

Matt Wuerffel: Yeah, that gets into some of the technical side of it, which I won’t really dive into, but there are times for us when that is possible to do and there are times when it’s difficult for us to do. I think what you’ve seen with the Living World Season 2, which is that we are releasing a new space, and that new space is permanent and there are episodes that are build that go through that map and tell the story of that map. That is much more the direction that we’re kind of leading and the solution that we came up to with that…, for that problem. So, Season 1 had a lot of things that were out in the world and we were kind of experimenting with like ‘what does this do to immersion and how does this feel?’ And Season 2 is a little bit more judicious of when it does that kind of stuff. Definitely want to still have that epic feeling and that the world is growing, but we’re learning that ‘oh, we can build content in a way that supports both a very rich, immersing storytelling, and also kind of changes the face of Tyria.’

GuildMag: Êtes-vous capable de garder une carte pour une étape spécifique de l'histoire personnelle ?

Matt Wuerffel: Techniquement, je pense que c'est possible. Cela rentre dans le cadre d'un grand nombre de questions sur l'espace et la bande passante et un tas d'autres choses. Donc, il y a beaucoup de facteurs lorsque nous prenons des décisions comme celle-la et, c'est au cas par cas en fonction de si oui ou non nous voulons essayer de faire quelque chose comme ça et si oui ou non nous ne voulons pas le faire. Ce que je veux dire par la c'est que nous essayons de nous concentrer sur : comment allons-nous trouver une solution à ce problème dans le style construit pour le contenu ? Alors que nous n'avons pas fait ce choix, nous n'avons pas à dire "Oh, nous allons faire de cette façon ou de cette façon, et chacun a des inconvénients", et trouver à la place un moyen de construire du contenu qui contourne ce problème et simplement fournir le contenu que les gens peuvent jouer sans jamais connaître une déconnexion.

GuildMag: Allez-vous effectuer une mise à jour des étapes de l'ancienne histoire personnelle pour qu'elle corresponde aux changements dans le monde ?

Matt Wuerffel: Je ne connais pas la réponse à cette question. C'est évidement quelque chose dont nous parlons et disons "Hé, si nous allons sur une carte qui a du contenu de l'histoire actuelle, combien de profondeur vont s'accumuler et existe-t-il un meilleur endroit pour le faire ? Y a-t-il un endroit sur la nouvelle carte où l'on peut raconter cette histoire sans avoir à retravailler un tas de vieux trucs correspondant". Cela dit, vous savez, ce que nous avons fait avec l'Arche du Lion, nous avons aussi fait beaucoup de travail sur certaines étapes de l'histoire afin de donner du sens avec le contexte "Maintenant, l'Arche du Lion est détruit". Il est donc possible que nous revenions et faisons cela, mais c'est certainement une question relevant de : étant donné l'ampleur et le calendrier de l'équipe, que pense-t-elle de l'histoire et du contenu qu'elle peut construire le plus efficacement ?

La deuxième partie de cette interview sera publiéz plus tard cette semaine - assurez-vous que vous suivez nos pages Twitter et Facebook pour être le premier à savoir quand ! Nous aimerions également dire un grand merci à Matt Wuerffel et Devon Carver d'avoir répondu aux questions ci-dessus, et celles à suivre !

Yesterday we published the first part of our interview with ArenaNet developers Devon Carver and Matt Wuerffel at this year’s gamescom. This first part covered questions about both the Living World aspect of the game, as well as the game in general. Today, we’re publishing the second part, in which we take a look at some of the competitive and balance-related questions that have been proposed by the Guild Wars 2 community. In this interview, we discuss the recently unveiled Siege Disabler, underwater content, plans for World versus World and last but not least, the new mode for structured PvP.

SIEGE DISABLER

GuildMag: “We heard that in the Feature Patch, there would be some kind of grenade that would disable any and all siege weapons when thrown. How far is the reach of this new item, and will it do friendly fire as well?”

Devon Carver: “It will definitely not be friendly fire. I believe the range is 1200 units, so it’s a decent range. It’s not… it’s certainly not, say, across a whole map, but it’s something that… it will be strategic use, certainly to run out into a field and use it, you’d be putting yourself at risk but it may be worth the pay-off. I personally have thought of doing that instead of running out and dying, to try and do damage to a catapult that’s trying to take down a wall, so I’m excited about it, but we’ll also be showing more of that in the demo so you can see a little bit more of it.”

UNDERWATER COMBAT

GuildMag: “Will we be seeing underwater combat making a comeback to PvP, or in general to World versus World and PvE?”

Devon Carver: “Not really. The biggest issue is that underwater combat is something that requires a lot of skill, and the system… our system just requires a lot… you need to be very, very cognizant(?) of everything that’s going on with underwater combat. We felt like for PvP it just wasn’t…, for the majority of players it was just too confusing so that’s the reason that we pulled it out of PvP. For World v. World, it’s a little bit of a different story; that’s more of a question of, you know, if we were to say do additional maps or make any other changes to the maps that we have in place, I wouldn’t say that we would categorically say “no there won’t be underwater”, there’d be very much a case of “is this a map that it feels like underwater makes sense, is it a place where there’s a good reason to have water there?” So it’s definitely not, you know, completely off the table for World versus World, but we don’t right now have plans to say like “add a giant lake back”, or “turn everything into an ocean” or anything crazy like that.”

GuildMag: “And are we going to see more underwater combat come to PvE?”

Devon Carver: “It’s kind of the same answer. I mean honestly, it’s very much a map-by-map basis, so you know you look at Dry Top; not particularly well-suited to underwater combat, but that being said, you know, if future Living World updates took us into more of… like the asura territory, or even, you know, areas like Bloodtide Coast or some of that, then it’s absolutely possible that we would do more underwater combat. So it’s not a system that we’re saying like “no, no more underwater ever”, but you know, it’s very much what makes sense with the content that we’re building.”

WORLD VERSUS MODE

GuildMag: "What can we expect to see coming for World versus World in both the short and long run? We’ve seen that commanders will be adjusted with new colors and such, but will there be more?"

Devon Carver: "Yeah, so, I mean, that’s another thing we’ll be showing in the demo. So, we’re adding multiple colors to the commander system; the commander system is moving to an account-based system as opposed to a character-based system. There’s this trick, the siege disabling trick that we’re going to be showing, I think it is going to have… I think it is something that is going to have a lot of knock-on effects, so, you know, it is a small thing, it is one item that we’re introducing. But we expect it is going to introduce a really broad tactical shift to the game. So in terms of kind of making multiple changes, we want to… we’re more focused on making a change like that and seeing how things shake out before we make additional changes, because, you know, for example, people have asked about ‘Hey, can we make defending, and power-defenders more… find better ways to make defence stronger’, and we think that this trick is going to have that effect. So we don’t want to do too many things at once and have, you know, kind of unintended consequences. So… I mean, long-term we’re going to continue to evaluate the way that the tactics shift and make changes that we feel like are appropriate for the direction of the long-term of the game."

NEW STRUCTURED PVP MODE

GuildMag: "Recently you’ve again pointed out that you’re working on different types of sPvP, next to the current Conquest system. Which systems are you currently trying out and what can you tell us about the process behind working on these new systems?"

Devon Carver: "So, I mean, I can’t give too many details on the specifics of the mode that we’re working on right now, but I can explain a little bit of the process, quickly. So basically what we do is, we start brainstorming an idea for the baseline of… ‘Okay, what are.., what sounds like a cool PvP mode, something that would be good for our game?’ And so, we get to a very basic level of a map and just start playing through with the barebones mechanics. And we play a few times and we say ‘Okay, does this feel like it is fun, does it feel like it is heading in the right direction, or does it feel like we are just coming up with something that is not working?’ So for the current mode, which is a lot of fun, we made a lot of progress on. You know, we’re been through multiple, multiple, multiple iterations of it. We’ve been through multiple versions of the map. We made very significant changes from the first version of what we thought was going to be fun, to the version we have now, which is a lot of fun. It’s a, it’s a constant…"

GuildMag: "Is it different than Conquest?"

Devon Carver: "Yeah, it is definitely different than Conquest. It is, it is not capture point based, it is different, and that’s… I mean, that’s really as far as I can go details wise. But the process is very heavy on the iteration side, you know, we talk about iteration a lot, but for PvP game modes, it is very, very important. Because, there are a number of kinds of changes that you can make, that can make it better or worse, so we just try and really rapidly move through those things, until we find that sweetspot."