ZAM interviews Chris Whiteside, Design Director at ArenaNet, about Guild Wars 2's Living World.

Base Camp

The Super Adventure Box was added under the living world umbrella after the huge success it had during its release in April. I asked Chris how the Super Adventure Box came about and its addition to the living world.

At ArenaNet there is a division called Base Camp which is a side project outside of the normal team structure. The idea behind base camp is to be a research and development branch within ANet. Members can use base camp to be mentored by their peers and allows a longer time period to flesh out ideas for future content. In a way it is a proving ground for innovation, where an idea can be built up before it is just completely turned down.

This is how the Super Adventure Box started. It was a side project that started within base camp. The base camp leads decided that the content was good enough to be released on the live servers, then after the huge success and support for the community it was added as part of a continual release under the living world.

The base camp also functions as a consulting firm for the other teams in the studio. If deadlines are approaching and a living world team needs extra hands, the base camp can mete out consultant work to help the living world team.

Hunger Royale

At the end of each Beta Weekend Event there was a special event; the most notable event being the Hunger Games-esque event called Hunger Royale. I asked Chris if we might be seeing any of these events make a return on the live servers.

With the living world everything is on the table. Chris noted that they are consistently putting mini-games and activities into the game. There are, however, no plans for Hunger Royale to return. The closest thing was the first Southsun event, which was an exceptional idea but had major latency issues. He said they learned a lesson with that content that it needed to be as balanced and as much fun as possible and that the content is the same and good for every player.

Expansions

The last thing I asked Chris  was how the living world was going to interact once an expansion comes out. Specifically I asked if we would be seeing the living world lead up to the story included in the expansion and if there would be a blackout period around the expansion where there is some breathing room for players to explore the new expansion content before more living world content is added.

Chris said the almost expected lines, that he couldn’t really talk much about expansions. He did say that they wouldn’t go dark and stop the cadence of living world content just because of an expansion. One thing that they enjoy about having this cadence is that it allows for them to interact more with the community. If something gets put in that the community doesn’t like, it isn’t months before new and improved content comes out which allows for a quick course correction to build a better world.

Chris wanted to point out that even though ANet has its heads down working on all of this content; it’s still looking out at the community. He even said that there were a couple of the forum sections where he reads everything on the main page a couple times a day to keep informed on what the community is thinking.

Although he couldn’t talk much about expansions, he did have one little bomb to drop. He mentioned that there are the expectations of what an expansion adds with content, features and systems. Instead of having one massive drop of all this new content as is seen in every other MMO, ArenaNet might release their first expansion over the course of a month folded into the living world releases. The living world wouldn’t be stopping around an expansion but, instead, the living world releases would be the expansion itself.

We want to thank Chris Whiteside for taking the time to talk with us about the Living World content that ArenaNet releases every other week. If you are excited for the content patch due out next week, check out the release teaser right here on ZAM.

Matt "Mattsta" Adams