Guild Wars 2

Hey everyone,
So i’ve been really enjoying the game when it launched way back, and had thought that we would at least have news of expansion packs in 2013. Instead, we don’t have any news at all, but just peppered with some minor content patches here and there.

I mean i like the Super Adventure Box update, it really rocks, but the entire Flame and Frost questline i just don’t get it. As far as i know, its just a small little quest that basically gets me following a couple of dudes and go kill stuffs lol.

So anyway i went to googling, and found 2 intriguing articles:

1) Guild Wars 2 Expansion Coming in 2nd Half of 2013?
Originally posted on Feb 7 2013 by Gamebreaker.TV.
http://www.gamebreaker.tv/mmorpg/guild-wars-2-expansion-confirmed/

Summary: This article gives a very optimistic view that the head honcho of Arenanet/NCSoft KDB Daewoo Securities, is very impressed with GW2 sales and stated that an expansion pack will be coming at 2nd half of 2013 in US and Europe.

Now on the other end of the spectrum, i find this very depressing article:

2) Guild Wars 2 May Be The End Of The Franchise
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/122516-Guild-Wars-2-May-Be-The-End-Of-The-Franchise
Originally posted on Mar 6 2013 by The Escapist

Summary: Now this is a very much more depressing article that says ArenaNet has no plans to expand the game, and a sequel seems increasingly unlikely. The writer translated Colin Johanson’s quote below as “NO Expansions for GW2 in development”

“Expansions are definitely something that we’ll potentially look at in the future,” Johanson states. “We don’t have a timetable on it. We’re open to it, but I think our major focus as a studio is making the living world concept as strong as possibly can for the players that we’ve got.”
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Do ya’ll think GW2 actually has a future and are expansion packs coming?
Although i haven’t played GW1, i remembered seeing TONS of expansion
pack for it, a sure sign that that game was crazy profitable.
What do ya’ll think will happen IF we actually come to the 2nd half of 2013 and there are STILL no expansion packs even announced?

I’m not trying to add Doom and Gloom or predict anything, just a lil concerned that GW2 may have auto-magically suddenly become not profitable anymore and will probably gonna shut down soon without warning. TBH i really enjoy this game very much.

Waddya’ll think?

Yes they are going to add in more expansion they are just not working on one right now. If any thing they are making sure the game is good with out just simply adding more expansion to it in hopes that the expansion makes every thing better in Anets view. A lot like making sure you do not burn a stack instead of burning the stack and putting a lot of ketchup on it to try to make it taste better and that the person eating it forgets that its just a burnt stack.

Any way this game seems to be making a good bit of money so GW2 going to be here for a long time even if there are errors made it is worth retooling the game to fix these problems.

The escapist one basically says they are not working on an expansion, they just plan to update the game. Basically an expansion without buying anything, which sounds good to me. There probably will eventually be an expansion but I would doubt it will be any time soon.

And of course they aren’t planning GW3, this game is not even a year old.

The game is doing fine financially (you can view quarterly reports on the NCSoft website if you are interested) and will continue to grow once the localization for China is finished.

The article writer for Escapist Magazine should be fired, he writes like a 12 year old who heard some rumors and immediately panics without checking all released information along with other stated facts.

For example, they are strenghtening the core of the game first before they expand as there was alot of negative feedback on the core of the game. This has been stated several times and the writer would know this if he did a proper investigation on the subject.

They are clearly improving the core of the game, along with the localization in China. Once both are finished we will see an expansion announcement I think.

purpleskies.3274:

The escapist one basically says they are not working on an expansion, they just plan to update the game. Basically an expansion without buying anything, which sounds good to me. There probably will eventually be an expansion but I would doubt it will be any time soon.

And of course they aren’t planning GW3, this game is not even a year old.

If they make GW3 i am hoping for CHARRS IN SPACES!!!!

The escapist hates mmo’s, unless they have bronies in them. Read that article a while back. The site has gone downhill, imo, quite a bit the last few years. Yahtzee is the only redeeming feature, and sometimes Jim.

I’d just ignore the escapist’s article, considering it’s a mixture of misreading information, false assumptions and general misunderstanding.
I’m currently browsing the rest of his articles because I’m not quite sure if he just had a bad day or if he’s actually dense.

/e: I tend to believe the latter is true.

That escapist ‘article’ is poorly written. Anyway, its the way guild wars 2 is set up that enables them to change available and add new content on the fly without much hassle. Combined with the emphasis on gems to generate income and the available manpower at Arenanet it makes perfect sense to just focus on improving the game and explore implementing living story aspects (its the first time they do it, so your experience of it actually is the same as mine).

tl;dr: If they had unlimited resources they would be working on an expansion, this is not a call of duty type of game that has 2 teams rehashing the same game year after year.

Interesting views guys, so i take it that most of the playerbase understands that Anet is probably taking a more cautious stance in developing Expansion Packs due to the amount of work and money involved.

Yea i myself support the optimistic version because after all, KDB Daewoo Securities even wrote down that they were impressed with GW2 sales. I guess we’ll have to see how the future holds for GW2.

Yea, i guess its wise to be cautious and calculate carefully in this economic climate.
Though i do hope we get more content annoucements soon, can’t wait to finish up this flame and frost thing and get that annoying msg box out of my screen lol!

If they aren’t working on an expansion by now, then I doubt we will see an expansion for quite some time. Development on such large additions to games takes years.

Ignore the escapist article. I don’t know why he took those quotes as doom and gloom.

I don’t ignore either, two totally different views.. good or bad it shows the lack of communication for the future we as players get, especially here in this forum..

The OP has a good point though, why are there conflicting views and would it be so hard for Anet to at least give its customers a fair idea of Expansions coming or not, sure they maybe still on the drawing board or not even started, but one saying “No expansions are planned” and the other saying “Yes expansions are planned” is pretty confusing and sends mixed signals to their fans/customers in my opinion..

Anet has said they’re not working on expansions at this time. Therefore, what can Anet actually say. They haven’t actually decided there won’t be a full-fledged expansion, so they can’t say there won’t be, and they haven’t ruled it out so they can’t say their will be. I’d call that communication.

The Flame and Frost story, I’m guessing here, is a test case. It started off slow, they want to see what they can/cant’ do with it, and then they’re going to move it forward. I have a feeling the living story thing is going to kick up a notch the next time they have it. I think this is setting the stage for something bigger.

Most MMOs don’t have monthly content updates anyway. When you add up everything that’s come out in monthly content updates so far, it’s actually quite a lot of stuff. I expect more stuff in the future, particularly as the major infrastructure gets filled like the LFG tool, custom arenas, observer mode and the like.

There are two ways to get content. Wait a year or a year and a half, pay some money and get all your content at once, or get some content every month that you don’t pay for. When you look back over the course of a year and a half, how much content did you really end up getting?

And you’re not paying for that content, so that’s a bonus.

For the record, I believe there is an expansion planned but they’re not going to work on it until the game is in the shape it should have been in at launch (which it’s getting to around now). Now with the culling fixed, guesting in, an LFG tool coming, you’ll start to see more moves toward more ambitious content.

And let’s not forget, something like the Fractals usually only comes in a major update, like paid expansion. We got it free. No telling what else we’ll get for free over the next year.

I do expect there to be expansions in the future but the first released this year? No, i think that’s too soon. Presumably the expansions would include some new areas or other content that would take quite a while to develop. Even if they had a team working on an expansion now id be sceptical for a summer ’14 release let alone Q3/Q4 2013.

I disagree. There wont be any expansions as far as we can see. I dont even think they have one planned as part of the core design document of the game, and they admitted not even working on either. The most development we have seen since launch has come in the form of temporary events, often tied some how to the gem store. I am not sure they are doing as well as they let on, nor do I think any of their original ambitions will see the light of day. Dont forget they wanted GW2 to be seen as having a professional gaming element to it in spvp, but that wont happen.

There is no strong objective indication that the game is going to get better and they seem desperate for time sinks in the form of laurels and fractals.

The game sold incredibly well, exceeding expectations and continues to make money through gem store sales. So of course they won’t even consider an expansion, they’re all going to retire, shut down the servers, and abandon their customers. Because that’s what successful companies do after they produce a hit, right?

I mean, after George Lucas was finished with the one Star Wars movie, he said “I’m glad people liked it, but really, I don’t want to revisit these characters or anything, I’m moving on.”

And what band ever releases a second album? They just make a few bucks and go back to school so the band members can get their CPA licenses.

tolunart.2095:

I mean, after George Lucas was finished with the one Star Wars movie, he said “I’m glad people liked it, but really, I don’t want to revisit these characters or anything, I’m moving on.”

He really should have though.

When Arenanet works on an expansion for GW2 I doubt it will take long to develop. They make games that are easy to build upon, just look at GW1, if we were playing the launch of GW1 now, we would already have gotten Factions, it took 6 months to come out I believe.

They have said expansions are going to be a thing, so it’s just a matter of when, and it wont be years down the track I don’t reckon.

And yet all the updates they’ve given us has been rather poor. Look at the Southsun debacle (its still useless content that no one visits). The “Living Story” content is very shallow. Even fractals, which had the biggest impact on actual game play, was only 9 very short maps. The Battleground update that was supposed to be, “Game changing!” (ANets words) ended up being nothing more than a meaningless set of levels and ultimately pointless siege specialization. Nothing actually changed. Don’t even get me started on the patch that was supposed to be all about improving tPvP. The leader boards are also a completely joke. If you look at all the content that has been added to the game from release up until now, very, very little has actually been added to the game. By now, most MMOs would have had an expansion that would have given us tons and tons of new content, skill updates, new skills, new weapons, and balance fixes. So far, all of ANets balance fixes has been ignoring the obvious OP kitten, taking a sledgehammer to classes who’s abilities are already under performing, and giving miniscule, meaningless boosts, to skills that seriously need improving.

I’m not sure whats going on at ANet right now. Their actions and whats going on with the game are contradictory to what they’re saying.

I would prefer to have an expansion coming later this year than more of the same “content updates” we’ve been getting. We’re almost 8 months past release, and the content we’ve seen added is nowhere what Factions added to GW1, and that was released exactly one year after Prophecies. We’ve had no permanent content added aside from Southsun, which is a completely worthless map (although beautifully crafted) with a couple dynamic events in it, and FotM for people that enjoy dungeon grinding. Halloween, Wintersday, and SAB are nice, but they are temporary and still very little actual playable content.

Absolutely everything that has been added can be fully experienced in just a couple hours. The only technical exceptoin is FotM, and that’s only because the difficulty increases. The content is still the same, we’re just given reasons to want to repeat it over and over. The same applies to guild missions.

The entire Flame and Frost living story doesn’t have any life to it at all. The majority of it is nothing but busy work of collecting pointless items or interacting with objects/NPCs. I really have no desire to go back to Hoelbrak every day to see if some NPC has a new sentence worth of barely relevant story to tell me. The playable content is just some “kill the horde” events and 2 short instances. I completed those instances the day they were added, and have had nothing else to do with this “living story”, because there is nothing else to do.

I know they said F&F was some sort of test run for living content, but Anet has already proven they can do better living stories with GW1. The War in Kryta spanned months, had multiple long missions that were actually challenging content, had a viral marketing campaign behind it with lots of lore, and played off of lore and characters that were around since release. I can’t even believe F&F was made by the same company/people that gave us WiK. WiK even gave us better/more interesting “busy work” like boss bounties that gave meaningful/useful rewards, compared to F&F’s “rewards” being stuffed behind the horrible RNG of overpriced gemstore chests/keys.

That being said, I enjoyed (still do enjoy) the content the game was released with, and would like to see more of that. I don’t want a time-sink dungeon and daily laurel to grind out for months to gear up characters. If it has to be grind like this, at least make it for optional/cosmetic items, not the only way to get must-have better stats. Looking back at GW1, the daily Zaishen Quests were a much better idea than the current daily/laurels, in both playable content and rewards.

Anet spent 8 years learning how to build upon an amazing game, and they did a great job with it. Now it just feels like every one of those lessons has been forgotten. Look back on those lessons instead of doing these knee-jerk reactions that are pulling the game in several directions at once, and will do nothing but continue to fragment the playerbase.

tolunart.2095:

The game sold incredibly well, exceeding expectations and continues to make money through gem store sales. So of course they won’t even consider an expansion, they’re all going to retire, shut down the servers, and abandon their customers. Because that’s what successful companies do after they produce a hit, right?

I mean, after George Lucas was finished with the one Star Wars movie, he said “I’m glad people liked it, but really, I don’t want to revisit these characters or anything, I’m moving on.”

And what band ever releases a second album? They just make a few bucks and go back to school so the band members can get their CPA licenses.

Off topic: Google one hit wonders.

Khal Drogo.9631:

Off topic: Google one hit wonders.

Guild Wars (plus several expansions) and Guild Wars 2 are a series, not a one-hit wonder.

Firstly I wouldn’t say GW1 had tons of expansions. There were 4 releases in total – 3 campaigns which could be played separately or together (Prophecies, Factions and Nightfall) and one expansion which needed to be added to an existing account (Eye of the North). For non-players it was probably slightly confused by the fact that there were multiple releases of each, like special editions and packs with 2-4 releases. So there were a lot of different boxes, but only 4 releases.

Secondly I don’t have a source to hand but from what I’ve seen from Anet both those statements are true. They said they won’t release an expansion in the games first year, which makes the second half of 2013 the earliest it could happen. They’ve also said they’re not working on one right now.

What those “journalists” did is take one statement and twist the interpretation to it’s absolute extreme. So “We won’t release one before the second half of 2013” becomes “We will release one in the second half of 2013” and “We’re not working on one now” becomes “We will never work on one ever.”

Personally I think the logical approach is to assume both are true and look for the middle ground: They won’t release one before September 2013 and they’re not working on one right now. It’s unlikely they’d be able to make the entire thing in 5 months so it will probably be 2014 at the earliest.

Personally I think it’s obvious they were planning expansions from the start. For one thing there’s a lot of things in game where the amount of lore and backstory they’ve created and released seems disproportionate to the amount of in-game content. The Koda and the Tengu for example – why would they go to all the effort of creating detailed cultures and long histories for a few random NPCs scattered around the game? We know from other races like the centaurs that’s it’s not something they do for all the races so I suspect it’s because they’re planning to add their homelands in future expansions and wanted to get the lore straight so they don’t contradict themselves (and to get us interested).

So unless you really believe this game is a flop that no one plays any more and is on the verge of being shut down any day now (and I doubt anyone here does believe that, otherwise who the hell do you think all these people you’re talking to are?) it seems reasonable to assume we will see expansions one day.

Just not soon.

For the amount of blood and sweat invested in this project so far, I think they would be crazy not continuing it. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and you can’t expect to achieve WoW status overnight. They have sold very very well for an MMO post-wow, they must still be working on the game.

Of course they’re working on the game. There is a vision there, though some people can’t see it. They have said many times they want to create a living/breathing world. To some small degree they have accomplished it, but they want to take it further. They want these events they’re doing to change the world, so that it evolves as time goes on. So it’s not always the same game. They want to add more dynamic events into the world and stagger them. This is all stuff they’ve said before.

And that’s all content.

People have it in their head that the only way to provide content for games is paid expansion. And in the past that may well have been true.

But Anet has a different vision. Whether they can pull it off or not is a matter that only time will tell.

MistaMike.7356:

For the amount of blood and sweat invested in this project so far, I think they would be crazy not continuing it. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and you can’t expect to achieve WoW status overnight. They have sold very very well for an MMO post-wow, they must still be working on the game.

Given modern management, Rome would never have been built in the first place…

Personally I feel like a lot of this confusion is caused by Anet themselves. I spend more time playing the game than I do following their news releases but, even in the bits I do read here and there I’ve seen blatantly contradictory information. Not including when I see statements on things that are going in game, then see completely opposite developments.

I don’t think the game is going away anytime soon, nor do I think we’ll see any crazy new content updates any time soon. What sparks my interest the most about all this is thinking about their organizational structure and the effects it is having on their communication and work both internally and externally.

Outside of anecdotal evidence mostly found on this forum and what I have randomly come across myself I’m beginning to believe that they may have an overly decentralized structure. Or, that, after the release of the game they began a process of restructuring that has led to a more decentralized structure. I’m not arguing that these structures don’t work – they are all the rave in academia and business these days – but, that in this particular case it could be the reason we are getting so many seemingly contradictory statements/developments.

Or it could be a million other things. It’s hard to know since none of us are on the ‘inside’ anyway.

Dante.1508:

I don’t ignore either, two totally different views.. good or bad it shows the lack of communication for the future we as players get, especially here in this forum..

There’s no lack of communication, it’s all in the dev tracker or in streams and other interviews, just check the well known community sites. They won’t repeat themselves over and over again and they cannot make statements about things they don’t know yet. The state of the game is just what they said: no expansion is currently being worked on, they’re extending the living world concept. Which means there’s enough revenue via sales and gems to work on free extra content, which is good.

SoulSaga.2390:

I disagree. There wont be any expansions as far as we can see. I dont even think they have one planned as part of the core design document of the game, and they admitted not even working on either. The most development we have seen since launch has come in the form of temporary events, often tied some how to the gem store. I am not sure they are doing as well as they let on, nor do I think any of their original ambitions will see the light of day. Dont forget they wanted GW2 to be seen as having a professional gaming element to it in spvp, but that wont happen.

There is no strong objective indication that the game is going to get better and they seem desperate for time sinks in the form of laurels and fractals.

Very well said. This is my opinion as well.