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Aren't some of the GuildWars developers for blizz employees?

GWI: Do you have an idea of how many people are in a WvWvW?

Jonathan: We’re estimating right now that we’ll be able to get about 500 people into each map.

Matt: Since there about 4 WvWvW maps, that’s about 2,000 players in total. So we have a pretty large capacity but we still haven’t done a whole lot of optimization passes either so we’re hoping we can get that number a little higher. We’re just estimating 500 as our cap right now.

GWI: Dynamic events play a huge part in gameplay and storyline, and it has been mentioned that nearly 1500 have been designed or planned for GW2. From a lore and continuity standpoint, how in the world do you keep all of this in line?

Ree: We have a wiki!

Jeff and I got started on the plot for Guild Wars 2 several months before anyone touched it. They were all still finishing up Eye of the North. They were working on live team stuff and making the basic programming of GW2 while we were making the lore, deciding who the dragons were, what they were doing, and what was going on with the world and how it was changed. We were writing all that stuff down and putting it on the wiki. There was a wiki page for Logan Thackeray 2-3 years before anything was written for him in the game, because we needed to know who he was and why he did the things he did.

I do a lot of the writing for personal story quests, while Jeff does a lot of dungeons and overarching story of Destiny’s Edge. We have a full team of writers who do a lot of the event chains, and they do those based on what we’ve written. If we’ve said this is the story of what happened in this area, or this is the story what happened to this race, they can look up on the wiki to see most of the information that they need.

As Jeff and I play the game we check each area. A lot of what we’re doing in dynamic events isn’t so much writing them, we’re checking to make sure it’s all consistent. If we said: Jotun don’t ever make pets out of fish, then there must be no Jotun with a pet of a fish in the game.

This does mean we get some really strange questions sometimes out of the blue. I’d be working on Asura stuff all day and somebody would walk up to my desk and ask something completely different about some random area of the Shiverpeaks. I’ll stare at them for 3 to 4 minutes with a blank look on my face like “you’re in another world and I need you to back up and tell me more”, because it’s JUST so big and JUST so much.

It’s a good thing that there is Jeff and I because we act as each others rationality sensors. Jeff may say, “I told this guy it’s okay that a Jotun does this, is that okay with what you’re doing?” Jeff’s also good with asking the basic questions like “Do we have an animation for that? Can we actually make it work in the game? Is it going to look and act alright?”. It’s not just the lore, we have to work into the game and what it’s capable of doing.

We wanted to make WvW fun and easy to get into, so there’s no level grinding required—you can just hop into the battle using your normal PvE character, regardless of what level you are.

When fighting in the Mists, you’ll be using your regular PvE character and the gear you’ve acquired in your adventures through Tyria. In the Mists, players all fight at the same level. Any character below level 80 will be adjusted so they are roughly equivalent in power to what they would be at level 80. This makes combat among characters of any level not only possible, but actually fun!

Even better, you continue to gain experience and new items while playing in the Mists. Players you kill will drop loot for you just like slain monsters in PvE. The player that was killed doesn’t lose any of their own equipment—that would suck—so you’ll never need to worry about losing your favorite rare weapon if you are defeated in WvW. Even better, any gear that is dropped for you will be level appropriate. You can improve your character’s weapons and armor as you fight!

Character level adjustments have a limit, however. The level-adjustment system won’t let a level 1 character go head-to-head against a level 80 character with much chance of victory—a level 80 character is still going to have more bonuses on their gear and access to a full complement of utility and elite skills that players just don’t have at lower levels. This is not to say that the high-level character will one-shot the level 1 player, but they will have a clear advantage.

So what’s a low-level character to do? Anybody can man a siege weapon, help repair walls, or go hunt down enemy dolyaks, so even new characters can still be useful in the Mists—as long as they pick their fights wisely. Fights are rarely one-on-one affairs, so if you’re just starting out, you’d be wise to find some teammates to fight alongside you as there definitely is strength in numbers.

Can they? I don't doubt it.
Can anyone using their client? No fucking way.

It's a ridiculous and sensationalist claim.

Large groups of players can only protect so many areas at one time, and since your world’s score is based on how many objectives you hold, running around in one huge group doesn’t help your world nearly as much as it would to break into a couple of smaller groups so you can cover more area.

I have a feeling these battlefields are larger than what we're used to in WoW...

I'd like to know how large these maps are... relative to WoW zones. Do you know Zaryi?

I have a feeling these battlefields are larger than what we're used to in WoW...


If you have 1500 players in a single screen then, yes, it would be much hard for any computer to render that much... but if you have groups of 70v70, or more or less, at several points around a large map then I could see how this would be possible. They don't say what 'smaller' is so my numbers are just speculation.

I'd like to know how large these maps are... relative to WoW zones. Do you know Zaryi?