Ex-Blizzard lead men, Strain and O'Brian, Profiled

obchrisj writes "Wondering how Guild Wars came to be? FileFront profiles the conceptualizing, trials, and tribulations of ArenaNet's MMORPG, slated to be released sometime early this year, in an article titled, "F! True Game Story: Guild Wars". In case you're not in the know, Guild Wars was started by well-known ex-Blizzard employees, Jeff Strain and Mike O'Brian."

Comments

Well Known...

[Kjuib]

If they are so well known how come I have never heard of them? The only Blizzard Employees I would say are well known are: Kerrigan, Thrall.

I miss "Tagu"

[bonch]

I miss "Tagu." That is all!

Honestly, the voices of the previous games were sorely missing from WarCraft III's lame "can the formalities" dialogue and phrasing. Most of the humans and Orcs were missing that vocal quality we loved from before.

Anyway, I don't think Blizzard has really been the same company for years. Not since StarCraft. There's a paraphrased story about one of the programmers for StarCraft whose wife went into labor. He checked out a laptop and headed to the hospital and continued working on the Campaign Editor in the lobby. When he was invited into the room with his wife who was giving birth, he continued working. His wife looked at him and said, "You're missing the birth of our daughter to work on that damn game?"

His response: "It's not some damn game! It's StarCraft!"

I don't think that passion is still there, especially with the influence of Vivendi. :)

Re:I miss "Tagu"

[megaversal]

As a person, he's not that great. Of course the birth of a child is far more important than just a job. However, from the point of view of a customer/client/user, it does seem kind of cool to know there was that much dedication toward the product you're using (even if it is a game).

Re:I miss "Tagu"

[TychoCelchuuu]

You obviously don't miss "tagu" enough to realize it was actually "dabu."

This game is gonna shake things up in 2005

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been following this game for over a year now and it certainly has lots of potential.

Unlike Blizzards pay-to-play World Of Warcraft game, Guild Wars does not require a monthly subscription fee.

Guild Wars has streaming patches which makes the game up to date on a daily basis. No more having to wait weeks or months for a patch like other games on the market.

Emotionally crippling?

[Sheepdot]

/"We took a game that only had 100 or 200 players at one time and had over 200,000 people play over a 24 hour period," he said. "Watching thousands and thousands of people play the game and join the world was emotionally crippling."/

Having 200,000 people play wasn't just emotionally crippling. I imagine it would be "server" crippling too.

Text of article

[Anonymous Coward]

True Game Story: Guild Wars by Andrew Serros on 01/03/2005 :
Overview: Wondering how Guild Wars came to be? We profile the conceptualizing, trials, and tribulations of ArenaNet's MMORPG, slated to be released sometime early this year.
When Blizzard Entertainment began development on World of Warcraft, a few of its employees had other things in mind.

"Blizzard is a phenomenal developing company," Jeff Strain, lead designer for Guild Wars, said. "But we decided to leave and form ArenaNet to pursue this unique game."

ArenaNet is the result of two men getting together with a certain discontent and a desire to see their own visions of an MMORPG come to life. The other man responsible for starting ArenaNet is Mike O'Brian, team lead for Warcraft III. Their meeting might have been more than a coincidence.

Back in 2000, Strain and O'Brian met through their respective work within Blizzard, and found that they had a lot in common. Strain was one of the original leads for World of Warcraft, but found that he did not quite want to design just another MMORPG based on the Warcraft series. And O'Brian's ideas for multiplayer were really motivational.

"The more we talked, the more we found that there was this great game in the middle," Strain said. "The original goal was [to] make an MMO that is truly unique and avoids the classic design elements that only makes it fun for hardcore players."

ArenaNet's list of key designers read like a who's who of classic Blizzard titles, including Starcraft, Warcraft III, and now Worlds of Warcraft. Along with Strain and O'Brian are James Phinney, who was the lead designer of Starcraft.

"We brought on James [Phinney] because he was the one that was responsible for balancing three different races in Starcraft," Strain said. "We had a great deal of confidence that he could take the game with thrity different professions and 450 unique skills and balance it so that it really puts together this concept that Guild Wars is a game of skill."

Another key component to the design team was Steve Hwang, who formerly worked at Lucas Arts as a level designer on titles such as Dark Forces and Jedi Knights. With all the experience on the team from many successful games and backgrounds, it was a hopeful start for ArenaNet. But what it did not have was a guarantee.

"As a new studio, we did not form a publishing relationship," Strain said. The usual route for game development is that publishing companies set up a line of funding for the development to get done, but sometimes this means creative control may end up in the hands of the publishers. "We decided to self-fund so that we could be completely independent for a few years," he said.

The article continues below..
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ArenaNet started development on Guild Wars in the summer of 2000, and Strain said that while it was not a great time to be a developing company, they managed to stay on track with their development as they had planned. However, there was always pressure to stay on track because, as he said, they did not have a safety net of a "big fluffy developing contract from day one."

However, it was not long before they found financial backing. Well, actually, they did not find a company to publish their game, a company found them because they had been tracking their progress since they left Blizzard.

NC Soft was anxious to see exactly what ArenaNet was up to, but the developing team held off until two years after they started development because they wanted to be able to show NC Soft exactly what type of game they were going to be publishing. During the summer of 2002, ArenaNet agreed to begin talking to NC Soft and by the fall of that year they agreed to publish Guild Wars. Strain said the company saw the originality of the game, and appreciated the fact that it was "not just another MMO."

"We were really excited working with NC Soft," Strain said. "They share a lot of the same goals and vision that we do. We've never heard

Personal experience

[steeef]

I've played Guild Wars during the World Preview Event and two of the Beta Weekends. All told, it's a great game, and combines the cooperation of MMORPGs with what I enjoyed about games like Neverwinter Nights and Diablo II.

Since the last Beta Weekend though, I've been playing World of Warcraft. Certainly WoW is more of an MMORPG in the traditional sense than Guild Wars, but it makes the same effort to ensure casual players get as much enjoyment out of it as hardcore players.

I'll still probably buy Guild Wars when it's released, but I think I'll skip the next Beta Weekend. I don't think I can split my interest between two RPGs just yet.

This is not competition for MMORPGs.

[Viewsonic]

It is basically a visual Battle.Net where people can walk around and talk and create groups with each other. However, at the core of the game, it is still groups of 5-6 players doing missions, not much different than multi-player Diablo, Neverwinter Night, etc .. It is very slick, and Diablo fans will simply love it. It is the next step for multiplayer games (A visual gameworld to walk around talk/create groups in) ..

But it is an entirely different beast than a full-on MMORPG like WoW, which are geared to having groups of 40 players fight dragons and such at the same time. Or huge PVP battles with hundreds of people in the same location just battling it out. You simply cannot compare Guild Wars to games like WoW, EQ 1/2, etc .. Totally different games entirely.

Beta Weekend

[Buzzard2501]

The next beta weekend is this weekend (8th - 9th). You can grab the client from http://guildwars.com/ and a beta weekend key http://www.fileplanet.com/betacenter/guildwars/ (reqs email + dob)

Re:Beta Weekend

[b00jah]

The beta weekend will start on the day preceeding the Beta Weekend (January 7th). They started doing this since the last Beta Weekend to enure players from other countries will get time to play aswell. For us in North America it just means another extra day to play the beta!

Re:Blizzard

[torchdragon]

Blizzard didn't develop StarCraft: Ghost. Nihilistic Software started development on it and now Blizzard is "taking over" and publishing it. A: Not in-house software. B: Any time a product switches hands you can expect a huge increase in the development timeline.

Play GW this weekend (morning of Jan 7)

[randallschleufer]

Don't worry, WoW, EQ2, etc. will still be there when you get back.

I've played every beta since the WPE, and it has always been an enjoyable experience. Even though the game is in Beta, it is thoroughly playable and remarkably stable. Most developers would have been satisfied and launched already- ANet wants to be sure the final game is satisfactory AT LAUNCH, despite the fact that they can fix bugs almost immediately and stream patches to the clients.

I hate MMORGPs. I really do. But a few things that drew me to Guild Wars were:

1) No Monthly Fees. EVER
2) No grinding.
3) No 1337 uber-skills and items.
4) extremely balanced, EVERYTHING literally has a counter and no one player is overly powerful.
5) extremely intuitive and clean interface.
6) elimination of PKing and KSing.

Straight from their ads:
An open Promise to gamers from the Guild Wars team-
- Guild Wars will not require a subscription fee.
- Guild Wars will reward playing SKILL, not hours played
- Guild Wars is an Online RPG to be ENJOYED, not endured

Guild Wars is an important step in gaming for me, because I don't have the time to dedicate to a subscription-based service. I don't have the time to play for hours on end- with Guild Wars I can jump in for 15 minutes or 5 hours. It doesn't matter, I always have fun.

Re:Play GW this weekend (morning of Jan 7)

[FinchWorld]

If Guild Wars rewards playing skill, I'll play it. Somehow, though, I think my character's damage, or chance to dodge an arrow or a sword, is going to be based on invisible dice rolling and not my actions

You might want to play it first, yes there is invis dice rolling, yes it depends how high oyu're skills are, point is though you're capped on skills, as soon as you hit level 20, bang, no more point to improve you're skills in, ex now only earns you points with which you can buy skill/actions (Of which you can only use 8 at any given point) and pointless that let you rearrange any attributes you currently have.

As for clicking on someone and attacking you can do that, however people who are actively using there skills will own you all the time, they'll be tripping you, hexing you, cripling you. You'll be lamely tring to hurt them in the most basic way. You'll need to use all you're skills, and how you use them depends enitrely on ou're role, you may be a warrior, so trying to d more damage, necromancer, raising minions and stealing health, monk, healing, smiting undead for lots of damage, protection spells, elementalist, magic damage like tradition wizard, mesmor, hexing, enchanting, and breaking them to, ranger, well bows, training an animal to use it battle, setting traps.

And thats not even mention team composition and the fact you have a primary and secondary class....

Re:Wake me....

[Rudeboy777]

Guild Wars is being developed on and will initially be released for the PC

Now is that PC 2000 or PC XP?