[Raiders Army]

From Warcry's unofficial FAQ:

After reading through many many interviews I’ve come up with a few points from many different sources. Below are questions raised from here at Warcry, as well as from HomeLAN, GameSpot, IGN, The Guild Hall, RGPVault, GameHelper, Game Banshee and The WarGamer.

What is some background information about ArenaNet?

Over three years ago a few members of Blizzard Entertainment broke away from the company to form their own group, ArenaNet. Their first game; Guild Wars has been developed in a shroud of secrecy. Guild Wars was finally revealed the first details to the public a few years ago and is still currently being worked on for its final release. The founders of Guild Wars, Patrick Wyatt, Mike O'Brien and Jeff Strain will be having Guild Wars published by NCSoft.

The FAQ on GuildWars.com has listed Guild Wars as a MMOG instead of a MMORPG. Can you give us a bit more insight on this?

According to the ArenaNet Team, they think of Guild Wars as more of a CORPG, or competitive online role-playing game. They don't want people using the term MMORPG because it makes people think of games such as EverQuest, Guild Wars isn't about spending hours and hours leveling your character, its not about spawn camping, or hours of running across a vast world to get to where you need to go. A new unique style of game play will provide all the good parts of an MMORPG without the tedious hours spend leveling or running to where you need to go to only to find the place camped by a group or more of people.

Can you give me a more in depth explanation on how the leveling system will work in Guild Wars?

As you compete in quests or slay monsters you gain in experience and acquire gold, as in other games. The experience points and the gold can then be used to obtain skills. The difference between Guild Wars and other games is that the skills you obtain are not variations on a few basic abilities, and do not grow more and more powerful as your levels rise. Instead at higher levels you will find more unique skills to choose from. This means that as a lower level character you wont be weaker, you will just have less skills to use. It will take good strategy and skillful playing to defeat a higher level character. Guild Wars also supports dual professions, and there will be a maximum to higher levels which is 50, but that may change during further development. Maximum character level will be able to be achieved faster in Guild Wars than in most other RPG's

The title "Guild Wars" implies PvP or player versus player, How will this aspect work, and will players have the option if they want to participate in it or not?

You will always have the choice to participate in PvP, and will never find yourself being random player killed. Guild Wars is a mission based game, and the choice is yours whether you would prefer to enter into cooperative or competitive missions. You will never find yourself attacked by surprise by another player, which will eliminate much grief. After you've learned the game and have built up a character through questing you may choose to participate in battlegrounds, where teams of players engage each other in combat, and then beyond in casual team warfare. The unpleasant character costs associated with death in other games, such as experience loss, item decay or loss are not a factor in Guild Wars.

Will there be any sort of PvP practice between just you and guildmates?

Yes, you will have something where you and your guildmates can test out your new skills before a big battle.

What will the items be like such as armor for example?

Items really won't unbalance the PvP aspect of the game; they will have abilities like 'more damage to undead' or something like that. The monsters in the missions really don't care how powerful you are, they are just there to try and stop you. In Guild Wars as things get more powerful, they become more specialized." Such as armor that helps you with protecting against fire damage, but is less resistant against cold.

Are we going to see a wide variety of strategic missions, like in E3, mission three had a catapult, and you would use it too win the match, will we see some more missions like this game?

Yes, you will see lots of maps you would have to thoroughly think out in order to win

Will there be a lot of focus on Guild Hall customization?

People should enjoy having a guild hall, so yes, there will be, and you will be able to upgrade and buy different decorations for it. You will also be able to buy archers, fighters, and casters to defend your guild.

Will you be able to join a guild with each character?

Yes, however, there is always the danger of spying, but you will be able to see every character of a person's when they are on your list, so they won't be able to sneak too easily.

What about guild tabards and color customization?

The players won’t be able to upload any designs because of the lack of security in that. You will get to design your own logo from a tool that will be provided in game. You will have your own banner.

Will all guilds get a guildhall?

Yes, but they will be customized with money so not all guild halls will look the same

Will there be guild ranks?

There will be a set number of ranks, but you will be able to name them. There will also be several permission levels.

Will there be a ladder system?

Yes there will, it has not been decided yet on how it will be shown to the public but there will be some sort of statistical system. You will be able to become the "best in the world" and that competition is something that the developers want, and think is an important part of the game

How will tournaments work?

You will have to go through all the missions before you are able to participate in the tournaments, however we will have PvP arenas along the way so you will always be able to get your fill of PvP. Once you have gone through all the missions you will be able to reach ascension around level 15-25. The benefits of ascension will be more skills, skill points and equipment. There will however be multiple ways to acquire ascension.

What will the single player campaigns be like? Can a player be associated with a guild but not need to involve themselves with the guild they are in?

A great deal of effort is being put into the single player quests for several reasons, in Guild Wars you will be able to play the game when you choose, where you choose, and with whom you choose. There will be a significant number of quests that are built specifically for the single player experience. Guilds will form for both social and competitive reasons, but as in the real world if you belong to an organization you will be expected to participate in it. If you prefer to play solo you aren't required to join a guild to play with your friends, you will be able to play with your friends and form ad-hoc teams, even challenge other teams in competitive quests.

What is the primary design goal with Guild Wars?

The primary goal is to create an online RPG that supports truly meaningful competitive gameplay. Guild Wars is a game that offers a full range of gaming choices: competitive play in one-on-one duels, team play and in massive group battles; cooperative play, and single player gaming. This will all be offered on a global network that will allow true world championships, all provided without a monthly fee.

According to the Guild Wars website there will be no monthly charge to North American players, how do you plan on updating the game with new content without having a steady stream of income?

Guild Wars is designed around a network of technology that is very efficient in terms of bandwidth and hardcore utilization. In addition to lower operating cost, The ArenaNet team believes that they can sell a lot more copies of Guild Wars by not charging a monthly fee. Not charging this fee allows larger communities of gamers to enjoy the online role playing game experience. The money earned from game sales will be turned right back to support the game and to develop the expansions which will be called chapters. The ArenaNet team is highly motivated to keep their customers happy and keep them coming back for more, if they've liked what they have experienced they will want to buy an expansion pack when it comes along. It was once believed that you could not offer a gaming network for free and remain financially successful, which Battle.net has proved wrong. A goal of ArenaNet is to prove that you can offer an excellent online game with full support without a monthly fee.

Can you explain what sort of "Death Penalty" system will be found in Guild Wars? What is the philosophy behind this choice?

The philosophy behind the death penalty system is “don’t punish people for having fun.” Losing items permanently is not fun. Losing two hours of accumulated experience is not fun. Searching for hours out in the wilderness trying to find your corpse is not fun. The goal with any death penalty system is for the player to believe that death matters, and to break into a sweat when doom is imminent. However, that goal needs to be carefully balanced against the possibility of player frustration when “reaching” into new areas and risking frequent deaths. Our solution is to impose a death penalty that lasts only for the duration of your current mission. This death penalty reduces your health and energy, but disappears when you leave the mission. We have had this system in place for quite a while, and it has proven to be a good balance between these two goals.

One of the potential advantages of the streaming technology that has been mentioned involves cheat/hack/exploit prevention. Could you explain how the streaming technology will help in this regard? How do you intend to handle cheaters?

Streaming technology is just one tool Guild Wars uses to combat cheaters, albeit an important one. There is no magic bullet to guarantee that a game is cheat-proof. However, in the team at ArenaNet's experience, creating and running large-scale global game networks we have identified a few technologies that are essential to reaching that goal. One is a pure client-server infrastructure, in which only the server holds the authoritative game state and clients simply react to server commands. Another is putting the client on a strict “need to know” basis for all information about the game world. For example, your client knows nothing about monsters that you will encounter or items that may be spawned in a mission until it actually happens. However, even with these structural safeguards in-place, there is always the possibility that someone will find an exploit, and when that happens, we have to act fast, and that’s where the streaming technology comes in. Because we are able to patch individual assets, rather than viewing your entire installation as being at a specific version, and also because we are able to build new versions of the game and very quickly distribute them to our data centers around the world, we are able to address cheats or exploits within minutes. Since the process is built-in and completely automated for the player, we avoid “patch paralysis,” in which necessary updates to the game are delayed for months while the developer frets about breaking something. Our alpha testers often joke about the fact that a problem is fixed before they can finish typing in the bug report and this ability to respond rapidly will one of our most effective tools to ensure a balanced game with a fair playing field.

What kinds of gamers do you see as your core target market, and what will make Guild Wars stand out in their eyes relative to other fantasy RPGs of the same generation?

We've always tried to develop our games to be approachable to the largest audience of gamers we can. Initially, the game should be easy to play and help players learn what they need to know to overcome later challenges, while providing a depth of play that will keep them coming back for the long term, which we call "emergent complexity."

In order to attract this broad audience, we made the game easy to learn by building an intuitive interface for Guild Wars. We made it mission-based so people can have fun and achieve a sense of accomplishment even if they don't have three to five hours to play in one sitting. We designed the character system so that the outcome of combat is determined by which player is the most skilled, not by which player spent the most hours building up his character.

We also designed Guild Wars from the ground up to be a competitive game so that players of different experience levels can compete against each other, and as a side bonus of that system, enabled friends to continue to play together even when they have characters with different experience levels. Finally, we created new server technology so that Guild Wars will not have a monthly subscription fee. We believe that all these aspects of Guild Wars will make it stand out, and give players a game that they'll want to play for a long time.

What kind of personal Storage will Guild Wars offer?

You will have a shared storage that any of your characters will be able to access, which makes it easy to share items that you think your other characters will need. Now we are still tossing around the ideas of Guild storage, and we think it would be hard to do guild money banks.