A Letter to Our Fans [from Mike O'Brien]

Oh well, it is what it is.

Pretty much nothing left to post about or do in game, so happy gaming to the rest of you.

There's good advice in this thread btw. Yes, the situation is lame, but go do something else. Don't brood over it. You're actually letting them win your attention if you sit around pissed off. Do something cool with your life. If you already are do something cooler. Games aren't everything, in fact, they're not even close to being a big thing.

"Continued interest" has limits, Mike.

Why would they even want to start on building "marketing momentum" more than a year before release?

I really haven't read this thread too thoroughly yet, so I apologize if someone has already pointed this out... but what people seem to be forgetting is that before EotN came out, there was this idea of releasing a new campaign every month. They couldn't just say "Sorry, we're canceling Utopia and anything we might have done after that" without explaining why. If they had just stopped work on Utopia and released their last, simple expansion pack with no announcement of what comes next, there would be a collective wtf from the fanbase. Guild Wars players would probably feel more abandoned than they might already feel in this current situation. At least we know why they canceled Utopia and any later campaigns. We know it's so they could instead do GW2. Yes, ideally they wouldn't want to tell us about GW2 until they had more to show, but then we'd be complaining a lot more about them seeming to be doing nothing on nothing.

This way, at the very least, we know they're doing nothing on guild wars 2

Well if it comes out in 2011, poor anet going to eather be total RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOed over because of the changed in the world, or there will be to many games that took less time to make that are even better. Oh and there fanbase will also be gone.

That's because no one expected Diablo 3. ANet announced Guild Wars 2 in 2007, it's 2009 and they have released nothing. Blizzard announced Diablo 3 in 2008, and on the same day provided information, screenshots, a cinematic and gameplay video. If Diablo 3 was announced in 2002 and there was no information until 2008, I can assure you that there would be a lot of complaining. However, that is not the case.

Ok, more more time....

GW2 and Eye of the North announced -------- 2007 Q1 (Working on GWEN)
Eye of the North released ------- 2007 Q3 (Swtich gears to work on GW2)



Diablo 3 --- Blizzard started working on it in 2005 (dont know the Quarter)
Diablo 3 --- Blizzard announced its in 2008 Q4 (BTW: last info was it will be done when its done)

The only difference is that, Blizzard didn't announce at the beginning of the project like Anet didn't.

Now here's a question for you guys, if Anet didn't tell us about GW2 and had just released GWEN and then nothing else, what would you be doing now, how piss off would you be?

Anet took risk by tell us about GW2, and hoping we would understand a game takes time to make, IMHO, they would have taken a bigger risk by not saying anything.

I suspect that Anet announced GW2 very early to give them an excuse for not releasing new game content (that is new chapters, questing, etc) as promised in their original model for their GW MMO model......what was it every 6 months for a new chapter...lol

I am looking forward to GW2, but it will be an extreme disappointment if we have no major new content for GW1 between EoTN and GW2 (say over 3 years).....and....no updates on GW2 progress to boot.

Basically a 3 year GW vacuum...and as many have indicated....it isnt the end of the world, there will be other games to play, other things to do....and I am sure every now and then I will pop back into the game to do something or other....but nothing hides the fact that Anets current reasoning and lack of information is disappointing, especially to the long term players and those who have supported the game since day dot.

...and honestly what damage would a few screen shots do, or some sort of update....

...anyway my 2c.....

Cheers

Just thought I would fix this for you.


In the interest of full disclosure, I think it is fair to mention that Blizzard did release a good amount of information when they announced D3. That being said, I think the GW2 announcement was a bit premature. As far as I am concerned though, I can wait.

I agree, I would rather see them spend time and make it a more awsome game then we could ever imagine, because who wants to play an MMO that is riddled with bugs, missing content, and whos player base disapears in weeks not years.

I also see their standpoint on releasing more information/screenshots, etc, the game is 2 or 3 years off and they don't want people to see unfinished work and make judgement on it, they don't want their ideas picked out from under them, and there is no reason for it other then to please a relatively small base of people who are dyingto see it.

I understand their reluctancy to add any new content to the origional guild wars, they have no reason to really; afterall we pay no sub fees so they don't have a huge amount of incentive to keep us around.

On the other hand I think they have, if for nothing else, a moral standard and a promise to uphold. I remember playing Gw vanilla, no new content and when Sorrows Furnace came out they said they planed to do stuff like this every 8 months if I recall. So we saw SF, new campaigns, and some other decent things such as the change of Tombs. After EotN was announced they said no more new content to guildwars(besides the usuall skill updates/and other misc things) so we played EotN, grinded titles, but now it has been 2 years since GW2 announcement, they gave us an expansion set on transitioning us from GW1 to GW2, and they tell us 2 more years before we might even see a screenshot.

Thats fine but please please give us new GW1 content, ill pay for it, it dosen't need to be a huge expansion just another Sorrows Furnace type thing, keep us involved and looking forward to something. Who knows Guild Wars 2 might have gone the path of Windows Longhorn I.E. Not good enough, start over, so we waited and got Vista. So they might not have anything to show us, it might just be some early wireframe terrains and some ideas on a napkin. Who knows, but games such as Operation Flashpoint 2 gave us early screen shots and then we didnt hear a word from them for years. I know for a fact a huge fan base totally forgot about them because of this. I do wish Anet would give us just one screenshot/concept art/real info every once in a while, nothing crazy, just something to say hey heres a tease at what we have. Or at least give us a timeframe, first they say 2010/2011 now they say well lets set the record straight it moght not be 2010/2011, to me this looks and sounds like they are having major issues with the game and cant figure ou for themselves a release date, because then they could say "Hey no promisses here but we are aiming for Q4 2010 but if it takes longer, it takes longer."

Oh well ill go back to what ive been doing: living real life, playing other games,and every 3 or 4 months pop on guildwars.com and see whats going on.

Oh and here is a bit of my GW2 concept art, if you don't get any from anet...make your own!
http://www.caedes.net/Zephir.cgi?lib=Caedes::Showimage&name=GunnerMan-1230750878.jpg&width=1280&height=800&ts=1234914529 &r=1

From start to finish it takes around 5 years to put together a game on the scale of Guild Wars, and from what I have personally heard, Guild Wars 2 is looking to have 10 times the depth that Guild Wars did at launch. ArenaNet set the bar very high and were basically given the go ahead by NCSoft to aim high with a new product rather than merely a sequel. They are reworking the game engine underlying the game, which I expect will be optimized for multi-core processors given the types of machines they purchased at the start of GW2 development. They have been on a constant hiring campaign for the past two years, and have nearly doubled the size of the headquarters during that same time period. This is much more that merely a large expansion to Guild Wars - it's a whole new game.

As I said nearly 2 years ago now, Guild Wars was a proof of concept test for a new business model for MMO-type games. It has proven very successful while running pretty much on a shoe string. A lot more resources are being brought to bear for Guild Wars 2, and it should be accompanied by a very large launch - unlike Guild Wars saw.

So while ArenaNet is concerned about the current community, they fully expect a whole lot of new players will be coming along and trying out the game (after all a lot of the current community might be expected to have grown out of the genre anyway). In additon though, Guild Wars has very strong brand recognition worldwide. Old players will doubtlessly at least consider checking it out, and a new generation of Guild Wars players will probably be around to kick start it.

Given the big launches that Age of Conan and Warhammer Online had last year, I expect Guild Wars 2 to be huge. But ArenaNet also has to make sure not to make the same mistakes those games made - trying to compete head to head with WoW and not having polished end game content at release. If you want to blame the delay on anything, blame AoC and WAR for crashing and burning. ArenaNet is investing some 30+ Million Dollars in the development of Guild Wars 2, if delaying it a year is going to help ensure success instead of failure, it just makes good economic sense.

I think the problem is that your post explains the reasons for GW 2's "delay" a lot better than Mike's "letter to the fans" did.

So Anet have basically said "stuff" the existing 5 million activated accounts for GW1.....we are making a new and better game, expect new players to come along for the ride (where from though..mmmm)...so live with the fact GW1 is dead until GW2.

Just as I thought.

Starcraft: Ghost leaps immediately to mind.

i dont think anet will ever realize how stupid they are with this whole GW2 ordeal.

were seriously pissed. and they relly dont get it

Nice, succinct summation Billiard

I also appreciate the punctuation and paragraphs

If you want to see what ArenaNet's philosophy for Guild Wars 2 is, take a look at the speech Jeff Strain gave at the 2007 Game Developers Conference. I think he correctly foreshadowed what would happen to Age of Conan and Warhammer Online. Also from that speech you can see why ArenaNet has had so much direct and indirect interaction with the community concerning the development and updating of the game. These are things that many other developers are just now trying to do themselves, and for some it fails when the company doesn't carefully weight what the players want with their own design ideas. The thing is, ArenaNet has had people communicating with the community for so long that this quiet concerning Guild Wars 2 seems to be unsettling.

Don't you know that asking for more content and saying "does Anet expect us to be interested in GW1 until 2011?" equals the ultimate way of admitting you will be staying for until GW2 release?

By asking for more content and requesting more content/expansions to buy for GW1 you are already revealing yourself to Anet that you are the ultimate GW1 fan boy.


I lol'ed at you guys.

I don't care about the release date as long as they plan to put in the same Asian themed Assassin into GW2 with improved controllability/moves.

...and people *cough*Arkantos*cough* are STILL throwing around the same tired, "Why did they announce it so early if it was going to take them so long???"

They. Had. No. Other. Choice.

I have not seen a single person come up with a reasonable suggestion for what ANet should have done, at the point that they decided they wanted to move from GW1 to GW2, and yet I have seen this same argument thrown around endlessly in every GW2 thread on these boards. It's simply absurd, and it needs to end.

Furthermore, I feel obliged to remind you that we did get a significant quantity of GW2 info when they announced it. Not an entire website or anything, but we did get an entire issue of PCGamer dedicated to GW:EN and GW2. The pages of concept art may or may not be incorporated into the new game (some quite obviously will be, like the new Charr concepts, and the Sylvari), but we also got pages of backstory, a bunch of new lore, and descriptions of basic game mechanics they're planning on including. I've been anxious for any new info for a long while as well, but to say that they announced GW2 without giving us anything to go on is just not true, any way you look at it.

I'm very well aware of that. They had 2 options: announce GW2, or keep quiet and not tell the community why they weren't making any more campaigns. However, I don't understand why you're telling me this, seeing as I said they had to explain why we weren't releasing any more campaigns (read: announce GW2) on the first page. If you're talking about my last post, I was simply comparing the differences between what ANet is doing with GW2 and what Blizzard is doing with D3, not asking why they announced it so early.