Guild Wars 2 Q&A - ArenaNet on Switch to Yearly Expansions, Secrets of the Obscure Learnings, and 2024 Updates
wccftech.com
We talked to Guild Wars 2 Game Director Josh Davis about the learnings from the Secrets of the Obscure expansion and what's coming to the MMO

Probably save to assume that they will keep selling half a season of Living World once a year for an almost full full box price, but I’ll wait until something is actually released. Maybe it’ll be more than 85% cannibalized and recycled mechanics and art assets.

  • lulztard@lemmy.wtfOPEnglish
    3·
    6 months ago

    Taken at face value it really doesn’t look good, to phrase it mildly, does it? Work/life balance has been the argument for change since 2012, fucking hell of they still don’t get it right. There hasn’t been a content drought since Season 3 under the old management, and if SotO is what NCNet manages to create with a dev pool as big as the one that created Season 4, then may God have mercy on their souls. All signs point toward End-of-Life milking mode, but I’ll wait on their next buy-to-play Living World snippet for my final verdict. Maybe they surprise us.

    • Necropola@lemmy.sdf.orgMEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago
      • Our current team size is roughly what it was during the development of Living World Season 4 and about 15% larger than it was at the release of End of Dragons in 2022.
      • From our experiences with Secrets of the Obscure alone, we’ve adjusted development schedules, review processes, dev resource allocations, documentation and communication practices, and more. All of these contribute, to some degree, to improving the quality of what we deliver.

      TL;DR: The code is already a proper mess, We are now inflating administrative overhead to further decrease efficiency. Our goal is for every new line of code to produce at least one new bug and involve at least 100 members of staff.

      • lulztard@lemmy.wtfOPEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        I swear to God the longer it goes on the more I’m convinced that the fight was about GW3 or something. The limits of their heavily modified GW1 code become more apparent the more you start recognizing the patterns, and every year it gets worse.

        • Necropola@lemmy.sdf.orgMEnglish
          2·
          6 months ago

          Yep, that’s what I’m saying all along. The GW2 code has become a nightmare to maintain and ArenaNet desperately wanted to start from scratch with a new game (not sure that it actually was GW3), but they weren’t allowed by NCSoft.