Guild Wars 2: ArenaNet Details Their ‘Game Design Manifesto’

ArenaNet recently posted a pretty in-depth article on how they’re approaching game design with Guild Wars 2, the company’s highly anticipated MMO.

One of the key points of Arena’s game design “manifesto”, the post explained, is to put the “RPG” back into “MMORPG”. “When you play an RPG, you want to experience a compelling and memorable storyline,” the post reads. “You want your choices to matter. You want your actions to leave their mark on the world. Let’s start demanding those things of MMOs too.”

With Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet is looking to expand on the storytelling found in the original Guild Wars without falling back on the all-too-familiar MMO trope of having the narrative unfold entirely through quest text.

“Some games mostly tell story through quest text,” ArenaNet explained. “But we’ve all clicked so many exclamation points and accepted so many quests in our lives that we’re pretty immune to quest text at this point. GW2 tells story by allowing the player to befriend and adventure with key characters, by presenting him with moral dilemmas that will impact the lives of the people around him, and by having him live through world-changing events and all the key moments of the storyline.”

If you’d like to hear more on ArenaNet’s design philosophy with Guild Wars 2, you can head over to this link to read the full thing. Alternatively, you can check out the video below, which runs through the developer’s design philosophy with some new and old footage thrown in for good measure.