Guild Wars 2

This webisode from Extra Credits talks about how to approach Open World Design and some of the challenges and restrictions that go along with it. It’s just a brief overview but it may help understand some of what the Living Story team at Anet deals with.

It runs a lot with what I (as a tabletop GM who tried straight homebrew) have to go through when figuring out their world and what to do, how far to design things, and so forth. How much freedom do I let into the game, how much detail do I really have to work on, how do I design it so they can find adventure without needing to lay down railroad tracks and having a predetermined “fate” for them?

It also mirrors what I recall reading a lot about when it came to the earliest MMOs, which were mostly sandboxes. Some of the best stuff in UO came from players ganking . . . I mean, interacting with scrubs . . . I mean, other players.