Gaming Insight recently posted an interview with Lead Game Designer Eric Flannum, discussing Guild Wars 2′s upcoming release, Arenanet’s approach towards system design, and leveling. In the interview, Flannum addressed some of the problems that could arise on release from a developers’s side of the table. Flannum’s response to Gaming Insight’s query about the possibility of a high traffic release helps ease some pre-launch tension.
Having a lot more demand than you estimated is always a nice problem to have. In our case, I think we have a pretty decent handle on the demand that we’ll see for the game and are planning accordingly. Part of smart planning is, of course, having contingency plans in place in case of unexpected results. For example, while we have an estimate on the number of worlds we’ll need at launch, we also have the server capacity to bring more of them online or increase the maximum number of players per world, and we can do these things very quickly.
However, one of the most interesting answer in the interview was certainly the final one. When asked what Guild Wars 2′s strengths were, Flannum responded by saying,
There are a lot of ways I could answer this question, but I’m going to go with a bit of a non-traditional answer. I think the major strength of Guild Wars 2 is the team that created it and the amount of energy and passion that they’ve put into it. I play through the game and am constantly surprised by the things I discover. In my mind, it’s the details that take a game from good to great and Guild Wars 2 is full of those great extra touches. The passion, skill, and dedication of the team is what has made the game what it is, and those same qualities are what will keep the game moving forward.
Check out the full article for Eric Flannum’s answers to the other questions posed by the Gaming Insight team.
I think it's great, that there were questions asked, that the "newbies" can learn something too ^^
a friend of mine just started with getting a key at mmoga and now he's wondering, what hes going to play XD
Sigh, I'm going to be honest. That was a bad interview almost entirely because the questions were so basic. Every single question has been answered, some quite frequently. I'm not sure if the German site, Gaming Insight is a mainstream source of gaming information comparable to our IGN or something, but seriously those questions were pretty boring for all but the most ignorant about GW2. When a dev replies, "As you know by now....", the interviewer did not prepare well.
@Finit A lot of articles you're going to see in the next couple months are going to be aimed at people who haven't been following GW2 forever and are really just now getting interested now that there's a release date. Interviewers will ask questions with the assumption that their reader/listener knows almost nothing at all about GW2.