Hosted by Guild Wars O-Gaming

The fun of being part of a Guild is not limited to the social interaction between the members; it is also the development of inter-Guild politics. Will Guild Wars offer any sort of political ladder or status? I am referring to demonstrations of power such as guild owned castles or towns.

With a name like Guild Wars, you can be sure that we'll have a lot of features for guilds. These features are only just starting to be incorporated into the alpha, and we'll be testing them out over the next period of time to see how they function. Many of us on the ArenaNet staff have a background that includes guild participation. In addition, quite a number of our alpha testers have experience with various guilds. The testers' feedback will be essential to helping us bring the best and most-desired features to the game.

Some of the features that we know will be popular will be those that involve giving “credit where credit is due.” Guild owned castles or towns? It's entirely possible. It's fun to be good – it's even more fun to have everyone else know how good you are. So you can count on a full range of recognition systems in Guild Wars. We will have both a guild and an individual player ranking system, such as a ladder. Information on who is the best of the best will be accessible inside the game itself and outside the game, as well. And remember, with the manner of tournament play available in Guild Wars, your guild won't just be the best guild on such-and-such a server. With great skill, your guild will be the best in the entire world.

The Necromancer recently received three summoning skills, can we expect to see other professions obtain similar abilities?

One of our goals with Guild Wars is to make sure that each profession is unique. For instance, the only profession who is able to serve as a focused healer is the Monk, and his range of buffing and healing spells is very deep and varied. And while characters of another profession may be able to enhance their attacks with some sort of elemental enhancement, such as the ranger's Ignite Arrow, the profession with the real handle on elemental skills is naturally the elementalist, who will have an incredible array of choices in all of the elements: air, water, fire, and earth.

With that in mind, the only profession who will have a summoning skill will be the necromancer. Interestingly, none of the characters in Guild Wars will be able to create creatures “out of thin air” so to speak. The necromancer doesn't actually summon a minion, but in fact animates a corpse to do his bidding. The ranger doesn't summon a pet, but rather uses her nature skills to charm a creature who already lives in the world as a form of ambient life, such as the lynx that you may have seen during our E3 for Everyone Demo Event. So in the case of both necromancer and ranger certain things that need to happen in order to have a minion or pet. The necromancer needs to get into combat, which produces corpses for reanimation. The ranger needs to search for and tame an animal who exists in the wild.

Of all the features implemented within the world of Guild Wars, which do you believe is the most innovative?

That's a really hard question to answer, and I know that try as I might, I'm not going to be able to pick just one feature or one facet of Guild Wars as the answer. I mean, start with the Guild Wars art – it's simply stupendous. Then consider the game design that offers players the chance to be truly competitive, which rewards skill over “the leveling grind,” which removes endless traveling and other un-fun things like standing in line to wait for monster spawns. If I think back to the feedback from the E3 for Everyone Demo, another thing that sticks out in my mind is how smoothly the game functioned and how few bugs or problems there were, particularly for a game still in alpha state. I think everyone would agree that inviting 200,000 to play our alpha was pretty innovative!

Another feature that makes everyone sit up and take notice is our intelligent streaming technology. On the final day of the E3 for Everyone event, we seamlessly streamed content to each player as he or she joined the game. Suddenly, Prince Rurik was in town telling us all of the Stone Summit Invasion, begging us to accept just one more quest. That extra quest was a great way to show the innovative nature of streaming technology.

Ultimately the real innovation lies in being able to take all those features – the art, the game design, the gameplay, the technical performance, and the streaming technology – and offer it without a monthly fee. That is a real innovation!