Guild Wars 2 PvP. It seems that you either like it, or you think it’s missing a whole lot. But what does ArenaNet think – is it in a good spot, or is there’s more that can be done outside of balance? A new interview with the devs just a few days out from the launch of the game’s upcoming saga has provided a bit of insight on where PvP may be headed in the near future of Guild Wars 2.
While the interview with PCGamesN (which appears to be a longer version of the interview posted earlier this month) mostly takes a broad-strokes look at the overall future of Guild Wars 2, it does offer a few notes that are likely of interest to the PvP contingent. For one, game director Mike Zadorojny explains why 2v2 maps have been so slow to arrive, saying that the devs don’t want to “fragment” the playerbase – they way having multiple PvP activities in Guild Wars 1 did.
“With Conquest, the goal was to always have one thing that, if you wanted to be the best at PvP, this is what you went and did. As opposed to ‘well, now there’s actually two things that are going on,'” he reasons. With that said, the team is experimenting with off-season things to fill the time between Conquests.
Zadorojny also offered some word about the Swiss tournament format, which fans of Guild Wars 2 will recall has been listed as a feature that’s been Coming Soon™ for a long while. The good news is that it appears to be in development now: According to senior designer Ben Phongluangtham, Swiss tournaments will arrive for public testing as special tournaments and will become the default ruleset for all tournaments in Guild Wars 2 once testing is complete. While a timeline for when this format will arrive wasn’t given, Zadorojny did state that the Swiss format and world restructuring work is in progress; efforts have been marred by some backend issues, but both features will be released as soon as possible.
Reader will recall that the original interview excerpt included a mention that the company hadn’t ruled out other expansions. Apparently there was more to that bit in regard to expansion-tier features – including elites.
“Things that we wouldn’t rule out – but that we’re not talking about today – would be like another mount, another elite specialisation, those types of things. Those are all things that traditionally have waited until a boxed product is ready. But instead, now we’re saying, ‘look, here are the things that we’re doing. Here’s what we’re releasing right now. Here’s what’s next.’ Some of that was given in the roadmap from February. We’re getting pretty close to being done with all the things I said we were going to do, and now going into the territory of the things that I said were on the horizon.”
