ArenaNet's game director lays out price cut, update schedule and more to come for GW2

The amount of upheaval and the ambition of putting out content so quickly must have been daunting. I asked Colin, jokingly, if there were any members of staff who cried when the move to the new fast cadence was announced.

“Yes, there were definitely a lot of people around the office who were a little nervous, scared – me included in that – when we said “Let’s try it” but we’ve been really successful so far; we’re excited about what it’s done.

It changes everything that we do, from how we localize to how we record V.O. to how every person in the office works and what they do, we had to change all of that to be able to change to a faster cadence like this. We spent a lot of time in the background in the last four months building out the capacity to do these releases faster. It’s definitely something where the fans’ feedback of Flame and Frost was that they wished it would go a bit faster. We didn’t have the teams oriented or the technical capacity to do that.

We do now.

We’re not quite ready to promise this will be our regular cadence but we’ll see how it goes.”

With that much effort put into increasing the efficiency of output by ArenaNet’s staff and the noticeable distinction it gives Guild Wars 2 in comparison to other MMOs on the market, I think fans can expect to see fast updates for quite some time.

With such constant updates one might think that expansions would be dead in the water. Colin wanted to clarify that the team is not ruling out expansions as something that could happen in the future, even if ArenaNet is knee deep in Living Story and all the WvW and SPvP updates it has been rolling out.

Other topics of conversation included the large amount of API development going on, including the new thread where website and IOS developers can interact with the ArenaNet developers. Some quite exciting possibilities exist for websites to develop new ways to interact with the game. Who knows, perhaps ZAM and Guildhead might be working on something right now…

As always it was a pleasure to chat with Colin Johanson and you can expect, with utter certainty, that all the Guild Wars 2 news you can shake a skinny Sylvari at will be right here at ZAM.com.

Scott “Jarimor” Hawkes, Editor in Chief