MMORPG Interviews Colin Johanson On Future Plans And More...

MMORPG sat down with Colin Johanson to discuss the current pressing concerns of players with a lack of content for all, how each live team is handling their area of expertise, and the future of the game.

First up is the plan of giving players more content on every level of play style.

''Depending on what type of gamer you are, GW2 provides a pretty extensive depth of content and features to explore across all the levels, including once you reach the max level. However, we’ve seen a lot of feedback that people want even more to do, and our goal is to give everyone exactly that. Depending on what part of the game you’re interested in, and hopefully you want to do a bit of everything, there is different aspects we’re working on to expand the range of things for a player to do.''

But where does this apply for PvE, WvW, and PvP?

From what Johanson says WvW is looking to expand the allowed population of players. PvE will be getting additional content that will add new features, new zones, and giving players more ways of being rewarded.

Lastly for PvP, players will see a continued support for the casual but ArenaNet is pushing for features that are missing for the hardcore players.

Tack on the addition of new dailies, new festivals, new rewards and just a greater emphasis on supporting the game.

This is all well and done but what about the live teams?

Appears the live security team has been steadily growing and improving their response time. Having permanently banned 4800 hackers and bots last week, Johanson is confident that the live security team will only get better.

For the live balance team, players can expect the hard task of balancing all the professions will continue moving forward and while some of us will point out those pesky professions that have a build that is near god like, Johanson felt that the game at launch was close to where they like it and stresses they will strive to ensure the meta game gets as close to balances as possible.

The living world team will be coming out with new content and events but Johanson was sly in keeping it quiet. So we will have to wait and see what comes out.

As to the mobile app, players will have to wait until things are finalized and to the nature of adding new items to the gem store, players will have to wait in anticipation.

When asked how the future looks and what Johanson wishes to see:

''If we can accomplish everything above while being transparent and honest with our player base we can grow the game to become even larger than it is today. We can be one of the rare games in the MMO genre that continues to see its core every-day player base grow as time goes on, and by the end of 2013 my hope would be we’ve seen that happen and we’re still continuing to grow.

The most exciting thing for me looking forward is that despite how proud of GW2 we were at launch, the promise of what GW2 can be in the future is something all of us at ArenaNet cannot wait to see realized. We have the tools to do something very special with this game as we go forward, and we want our players to be able to look back by the end of 2013 and realize the game has come further than anyone realized it ever could.''

With the Mad King quickly drawing his dark shadow closer, Johanson did stress that gamers should mark their calendar for October 28th mid day PST for a special event.

Leave a comment in the forums letting us know your thoughts on this interview and what you think is going to happen on the 28th? Are we going to get something similar to a zombie invasion like World of Warcraft or something more sinister?