Guild Wars 2 Interview
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GG: ArenaNet and Guild Wars seem to have become the biggest competition for Blizzard's World Of WarCraft. Why did you leave Blizzard in the first place, where you had big responsibilities?
Mike O'Brien: There are a couple of reasons. At that time, in 2000, I was heading up the WarCraft 3 team, Jeff was heading up the World of WarCraft team and Patrick Wyatt [the third founder, --ed.] was heading up the Battlenet group. The three of us have known each other for a long time and really wanted to be able to work together on one great project. So that was one of our motivations. But we also had two visions. We had been working on the Battlenet, and at that time it was being just used to provide online connectivity for retail games. We had a vision of making a gaming infrastructure for games that would be specifically designed for the Internet. What could you do if you could assume that everybody had to connect to the Internet in order to play the game? How much more compelling and dynamic would that game be! You wouldn't have a CD full of static content that could never be changed again, but would stream just the files player would need as they go from from place to place.
GG: And the second vision?
Mike O'Brien: The second vision was about breaking with tradition. Jeff and I wanted to be a lot more innovative than we could be at Blizzard. Jeff was working on a role playing game and tried to get strategy elements and competition into it. When players spend hundreds of hours to build up their character, what do they want do do? They want to compete against their friends! But a game like Diablo was not remotely set up to allow for competition. And I was looking at the strategy side and wanted to get more role playing in. If a strategy game feels dead, if it feels like you're just moving pieces across a board, than it's boring. You need to feel like you're fighting over something that you care about! It needs to feel like a world, which you can connect to, which you are defending. So we wanted to create a game that would cross the boundaries between those two genres. But we had no idea how to achieve that at that time.
GG: Why would that be difficult?
Mike O'Brien: A role playing is about your strength depends on how long you play it. That's the complete opposite to a strategy game, where your strength depends on how well you play the game.
