Guild Wars game notes
I had the opportunity to interview Mike O’Brien and Pat Wyatt, founders and lead developers for ArenaNet, makers of Guild Wars. This led to two lengthy posts on the technology of Guild Wars (overview) and the database technology of Guild Wars. Those were really, as the titles suggest, tech-focused. This post, by way of contrast, is just to share interesting game-related tidbits with fellow Guild Wars players. I came away with three key notes:
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Don’t hold your breath for an auction house. (The reasons are spelled out near the end of the database post.)
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Cartographer titles really are calculated based on what fraction of the total possible pixels you’ve opened up, of course with a few grace percentage points so that you don’t need to really open EVERYTHING to get the 100% title. It’s that simple. (And it makes sense. They store the character’s map anyway; there’s little effort in also noting its size.)
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Persistence (non-instancing) isn’t as hard as they thought, and they didn’t think it would be all that hard anyway. So in Guild Wars 2 they will have “more sense of a world,” even as there are also plenty of instanced areas ala the current Guild Wars.
There also is tons of cool stuff in the tech posts, and I hope you have a chance to look at them!
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[…] That’s just some of what I heard. For more on the technology of Guild Wars, please see my companion post on the database technology of Guild Wars and Guild Wars game notes. This interview is also just one of several I plan with game and virtual world companies, so I hope to in the future address other kinds of issues, such as rules and AI. […]
That edit at the bottom is very much true about the slowness of the site and the moderators. I pointed it out in that thread and they deleted it promptly.
Too bad that they can’t delete this page.
I decided to delete the most critical part of the edit myself after getting assurances that the moderation glitches would be addressed. I understand how volunteer mods can get stressed and cut corners.
And I decided to delete the link altogether because I wasn’t willing to leave it up without commenting on the site’s slowness. But I WAS willing to delete the slowness comment (and hence the whole link), as a courtesy honoring their link(s) back to here.
That wasn’t a glitch I’m afraid. That was actual deletions. That sort of thing happens all the time there at Guru. AND you deleting that comment plays right into it all, like a government cover up for example. The comment might have been blunt and maybe a little inappropriate for what the article calls for but it was very accurate. They can’t blame anyone but themselves for it.
[…] Some technical facts about Guild Wars from these three articles: […]