Guild Wars 2's first foray into an annual expansion cadence has wrapped up with the recent Secrets of the Obscure update. It's a major departure from the traditional major expansion the studio has been known for and excelled at, with 2022's End of Dragons expansion being all-around excellent. Yesterday, Guild Wars 2 game director Josh Davis recently reflected on this on the game's blog, but we had the chance to ask him a few questions about the lessons the studio learned during this process, as well as what the plan looks like for future expansions.
What were some of the major takeaways for the team after this first year of smaller expansion/content drops? How has it affected the way you approach Guild Wars 2’s development moving forward?
Josh Davis, Game Director: We’ve learned a tremendous amount over this past year. Our recent retrospective blog post focuses on the high-level aspects that players care about like story, map design, and features, but internally, we've made adjustments across every facet of our production pipeline. This ranges from the seemingly trivial, like how we track and manage work in JIRA (a project management tool and the bane of game developers), to more complex issues like how we communicate and meaningfully collaborate in a hybrid working environment with team members distributed across the globe. Fans might wonder why a seasoned team like ours still has lessons to learn, but the truth is, continuous improvement is vital for even the most productive and efficient teams. I’d be very concerned if we shipped an update and felt that we had nothing to learn from it.
To touch on something that wasn’t mentioned in the blog, one area we were really happy with was the communication and transparency regarding the changes to our content model – not just the “why” behind them, but also the “what.” Before SotO launched last year, we shared a detailed roadmap for the entire expansion, breaking it down by release. Game development is notoriously unpredictable, so committing publicly to a detailed roadmap that far out was…stressful to say the least, even if it was the right thing to do. We were asking the community to trust us through a big change. Accountability establishes a foundation for trust, and that roadmap gave the community a valuable tool for holding us accountable. Reflecting on the past year, I’m proud that we delivered everything we set out to do, and excited that we’re able to turn around and do it even better the next time.
Coming out of End of Dragons (which was in all ways excellent), what was the mood both in the studio and in the community like when you started on this path? How has the dev team and the community both reacted to these smaller, annual expansions and is there any desire to go back to the Living World model?
Davis: Humans are wired to be resistant to change, so it’s no surprise that there was some skepticism for us to overcome. Internally, that skepticism was offset by the conviction that we were doing not only what’s necessary but what’s right for both our community and our developers. But we knew there would be challenges.
My ultimate goal as game director is quite simple: I want Guild Wars 2 to thrive long into the future. Guild Wars 2 is more than a game – players have spent the last decade establishing relationships and building communities in Tyria – and we feel a duty to help protect and preserve that. To do this, we desperately needed a content model that can satisfy our fans, allow our developers to maintain a healthy and sustainable relationship with work, and bring some financial stability to the studio. They’re all very closely related. Looking at the challenges that our industry has faced over the past year, and continues to face, I can’t help but feel that our priorities are in the right place. It would have been very easy for us to fall into a similar trap.
As for fans, I think we’ve come a long way over the past year, but our work continues. Guild Wars 2 has seen its fair share of turbulence over the years. While developers at ArenaNet have come and gone during that timeframe, the community have been there every step of the way, experiencing the effects of that turbulence themselves. It wasn’t a surprise that there was some skepticism or an attitude of “I’ll believe it when I see it” when the change was announced. A lot of those folks have come around over the past year and I think we’ll even see some new believers after next week’s announcement.
As for returning to the Living World model, it’s unlikely. We’re finding success with the annual expansion format. The benefits of timely and consistent content updates, improved sustainability for the studio and our team, along with the improved support for the game’s various systems and modes, have been significant. One of the most consistent criticisms that fans have had about ArenaNet or Guild Wars 2 over the years is lack of consistency – this is us fixing it.
How did player feedback to SotO play into some of the changes you’ll be making for future expansions?
Davis: Any game developer worth their salt, especially those working on MMOs, will agree that player feedback is one of the greatest tools we have at our disposal. We spend a lot of time sifting through it (even when it’s not pleasant) to figure out what all we can take action on. While time and resource constraints are always a consideration, every discipline at ArenaNet, from design to engineering, has been working to integrate that feedback into what we’re delivering with expansion 5 across story, maps, encounters, systems, and more. You’ll have to wait until next week if you want more details than that!
You mention in your blog post that the ambition of the team led to overly complex plots and character interactions “feeling rushed,” - how are you going to address this feeling in future expansions, and could we see these story beats continue across annual expansion releases?
Davis: It starts with a better preproduction phase (the planning phase that happens prior to any in-engine development work). In retrospect, we should have timeboxed planning for the initial release a bit more and spent additional cycles planning the quarterly updates that were to follow. Those future releases felt like tomorrow’s problem, at the time! That said, there’s a balance to strike when it comes to planning – you want to do JUST the right amount – no more, no less. Game development is part art, part science, and the iteration cycles we go through means that even the best laid plans will change – which means wasted work. On the other hand, too little means that you might run into unexpected or unanticipated speedbumps, or find that you don’t have enough time to make a character appearance feel meaningful.
It all comes down to scoping, really. There are a lot of exciting stories that we can tell within the span of an annual expansion, and there are of course stories we shouldn’t tell – simply because we wouldn’t be able to do them justice.
As to whether story beats will continue across expansions, there will be some throughline between each (such as with the Astral Ward), but we are largely intending for each annual expansion to be a self-contained story, making them an easy entry point for new players or a re-entry point for folks coming back to the game after a long break.
Despite the push to maintain and improve existing features, can players expect to look forward to new features coming with this next expansion? If not, is this something that is being planned further down the road?
Davis: Absolutely, we have a very exciting feature in the hopper for our next expansion! I’m really happy about this one because it allowed us to add a new way to spend your time in Tyria, while affording us the opportunity to upgrade a few related systems. Adding meaningful systems, while accomplishing our goal of cleaning up the game, is the wombo-combo.
To expand on that a bit, I don’t have anything against adding new features to Guild Wars 2 – features are cool! What I’d like to avoid is adding features for the sake of adding another ‘bullet point on the back of the box’, as industry folks like to say. Each of those features adds design and technical debt – and new constraints that you must work around for future releases. Those tradeoffs are acceptable when a feature adds a lot of value to the game, but when it doesn’t…it just makes future development that much harder, and it creates a point of dissatisfaction with players, especially if that feature doesn’t get the care and maintenance it needs to be a successful long-term addition to the game.
The new map release schedule is aimed at reducing player fatigue on a map, as was encountered with Inner Nayos this time around, it seems. How do you ensure that content is spread across the whole of the expansion to still give players reasons to re-tread familiar ground while keeping it feeling fresh each time?
Davis: Game development, especially on an MMO, moves more slowly than players probably realize. Sometimes changes we make to a process or pipeline won’t pay off for an entire year(!).
As we started developing SotO, our intention was to take the more balanced release approach that we’re taking with expansion 5 – where we release two maps in the initial launch, then follow with the third map in the second major update after launch. This would have balanced player time over the full expansion a bit better between all the maps introduced in the expansion, rather than putting players in the final map for an extended period. Unfortunately, the production timelines and resources didn’t line up for SotO in the way that would have made that possible, mostly due to overlapping development timelines between expansions.
We knew from the jump that we wanted to fix this for expansion 5, and recognizing this at the beginning of the SotO dev cycle gave us a year to figure out how to resolve the problem before we started preproduction on the next expansion. Expansion 5 maps will see a rollout similar to maps like Bjora Marches or Drizzlewood Coast, additions that were well received at the time and still see a lot of play to this day.
One of the stated goals of this expansion cycle was to allow for a better work/life balance of the development team. How did that fare during the SotO cycle, and are there ways you’re looking to improve upon that goal even further?
Davis: We’ve seen a lot of improvement, especially compared to the dev cycles surrounding Living World, Icebrood Saga, or even End of Dragons. That said, there’s always room for improvement. Work culture isn’t something you ‘fix’ and move on from. It takes constant focus and attention, and it’s very easy to fall back to bad habits. And it’s not just about reasonable workloads and a 40-hour work week, it’s about building an environment that allows employees to thrive professionally and personally, that challenges them, and gives them space to grow their knowledge and skills.
Ultimately, our goal is to create a sustainable work environment that keeps our developers passionate and energized. By doing so, we not only improve the well-being of our team but also ensure that we can continue to deliver the high-quality content that our players expect and love. It’s a very symbiotic relationship.
