Massively OP- “had been prototyping a possible Guild Wars 3”

[Cobra.6509]

200+ Anet's employee worked since february (when they so "refocused" on GW2) to :1 prologue2 LW episodes ( still to be deliver)and....idk ...... build templates....I didnt count here last episodes of lw4 wich was in february working progress.So nice productivity for 10 months of work, tbh I would like to work at Anet. Must be a forever holiday there.

[Burnfall.9573]

@Ashantara.8731 said:My opinion exactly, and surely that of the majority of loyal players. GW2 has so much more to offer, potential that has not been tapped yet. Plus, there is no point in creating a successor as long as the core problems have not been resolved

+10++

[starlinvf.1358]

@Ashantara.8731 said:

@"FrigginPaco.4178" said:However, it's been 7 years since launch and I'm tired of saying to myself every single year "Oh man! Look at all this shiny ~potential~ this game has!" instead of actually achieving that potential. When will it finally go beyond just being "that one game that's supposed to be different," to

actually

being as great as I and others envision it to be?

:+1: I agree. That's what I meant when I said they need to solve all the issues GW2 has before anyone dares talking about a sequel, because - as stated in the article - those issues, which are caused by how the game is being handled by the devs, will only transfer into any new product.

I would state its the other around. Legacy code and Regression are the 2 biggest, continuous issues any long long running piece of software has to face. Why do you do think WinXP was such a breath of fresh air after 4 generations of OS on their 9X architecture? The reason it doesn't happen often is the time (and money) it takes to build up from scratch, or at least barebones. Starting over lets you cut loose all the mistakes and all the limitations of the previous engine, and get to make all new mistakes, and slam face first into new limitations.

Projects started prior to 2010 were mostly built out of DX9/DX11 mind set... and the last few stuck with it came out around 2014. Moving forward, it became obvious that top to bottom multi-threading was the future. The bug push to move servers into Cloud computing only helped double down on this further. So a lot of games after that time period were designed to support it.... but too few of them actually implement it properly.

As much as I rag on the Devs for a lot of things...... engine development usually comes down to around a dozen or so Engineers, while its the job of the Designers to set the right requirements. If those 2 groups are properly managed, and communicate well, every other Dev team is a separate issue. FrostBite makes a perfect example of all of this; good and bad. Early version of the engine were incredibly sturdy, and benefited from being incredibly focused on FPS games. But over time EA kept piling on new requirements that the engine was never designed to consider, because they wanted a propitiatory engine for all their games, and Frostbite was already there. The tipping point was switching to it for Mass Effect Andromeda, and had next to no architecture to support massive branching narratives, large open world maps, nor the procedural systems that were going to drive them. But all these new requirements are having an impact on FPS games, the one thing its usually good at, because it has a lot of irrelevant code to support unused bespoke systems in the mix.

If they do ever get the funding and approval to do a complete rebuild of Frostbite, you can bet the Engineers are going to go even more modular so it can swap out entire code base elements as needed. That way they don't have to kludge support into an existing frame work, and the instability that comes with it. More importantly- if a module breaks, it only breaks modules that depend on it, and not everything around it.

Another thing to not overlook is "Sticky note Attrition". Its a phenomena in software development where a developer doesn't have time and/or the will power to design their code properly, and properly document it. The result is That Developer being the only one that fully understands that section of code, and if lost for any reason, that level of understanding is lost forever. Others can try to reverse engineer it, but its always a gamble at best. So that comment about "bad management will cause the old problems into the new engine" is essentially false. Bad management might lead to a similar issue.... but its patently a new issue that does not have, nor could have been the result of the previous issue. Taken in the context of what I said above, its entirely possible that the issue can be avoided in the new engine (by knowing what situation to avoid). But trying to fix the old engine is more or less impossible when its code base reaches Black Box status among the remaining developers.

The Engine team is currently trying to piece meal overhaul every section of the engine. But the legacy content, which was made to run on legacy code, and doesn't work right on new code, thats been making the entire exercise an uphill battle, with extra gravity, covered in itching powder, while being followed by a kid asking inane questions every few seconds. When they hit the wall, thats it....

But most of that can be avoided by starting over with a new engine, and building a new game on top of it. The Entropy can never be stopped... but those steps and restarts is how we avoid them becoming overbearing. But until then, we're sitting at the performance cap of DX9 architecture; and there aren't many directions left to go.

[Teratus.2859]

@Ashantara.8731 said:My opinion exactly, and surely that of the majority of loyal players. GW2 has so much more to offer, potential that has not been tapped yet. Plus, there is no point in creating a successor as long as the core problems have not been resolved.

Completely agree.

As far as I am concerned the only justifyable reason to create a Gw3 will be After! the Elder Dragon Story of Gw2 is finished and tied up and also when the developers want to create a lot of content etc that just isn't capable of being made in Gw2 due to the games limitations.

That's what happened with Gw1 and that's what should happen with Gw2.If Gw2 is killed off for a sequel game before this story is wrapped up and before they've pushed the game as hard as they can then those of us who have invested so much money into Gw2 are going to be far more stingy about doing so with the sequel.. because we invested under the mindset that we are supporting Gw2 all the way through.. not 50-60-70% of the way through and then jumping to a new game where we're expected to start all over again..

[Fenella.2634]

I think it's highly unlikely that any potential GW3 is going to be an improved version of GW2.That project would be doomed from the beginning. They just have one money-making game right now. Why on earth should they create their own worst competitor now?

No, I expect that IF a GW3 is ever going to happen, it will be either a mobile game, or a genre different than MMORPG for PC. Either way, it'll be something that can run alongside GW2 without competing too much for players.Now, seeing that they in fact did work on a mobile project - who knows, maybe that was that "prototype GW3" indeed.

[Zoid.2568]

The pvp in gw2 sucks. They should create a Guild Wars game like Overwatch or Dota 2.

[witcher.3197]

@wrathmagik.3518 said:

@Acheron.4731 said:In its current state I just don't see GW2 going very far any longer.It may continue to 'run' but I just don't see it growing/improving. New mechanic, sure. New mini-event, no problem. New map extension, ofc. But improve as a game overall? Unlikely.AT BEST, even IF an expansion announced...it would take too long to push that out, some people would come back for the elite specs but then I think the game has ran its course. One more good expansion could have propelled it forward a few more years BUT, as-is, nah, ppl are just gonna keep trickling out as they are now.I understand why some people are still optimistic about GW2, it really is/was a good game but its no different than your favorite tv show. By season 6 or season 7 it just kinda becomes predictable, you want to still love it, you want to keep watching, but eventually you just stop tuning in.

Yah this game is is so dead that the over the 50 Labrynth groups in the LFG i can't get into any of them because all the maps are full.

During events GW1 towns can have 15+ districts (layers/servers/overflows whatever you wanna call it) and that game was discontinued like a decade ago. Few full instances at events doesn't mean the game is blooming.

[Astralporing.1957]

@Ayrilana.1396 said:Except they lack sources.

Lacking sources and not telling us what the sources are are not the same things.

Quality of Kotaku writings can be argued about (they can be really sensationalist at times, and they are known to push agendas), but their sources are usually high quality.

@Xar.6279 said:Some GW2 remake would help. They could rewrite it (to make game code easier to modify) and also think about everything again. What worked in this game and what not. And do it all properly this time.It would be some kind of GW 2.5 so players wouldn't lose their progress. And they could do PvP, PvE and WvW properly this time. And support every game mode enough, without delays. And maybe try to go with reworked PvP into esports again.

FF14 did something like that and it worked.There's a reason why noone believed then they would be able to pull it off. And why after they did, it was universally considered to be nothing short of a miracle.

[Acheron.4731]

@KryTiKaL.3125 said:

@zealex.9410 said:

@Ashantara.8731 said:

@"FrigginPaco.4178" said:However, it's been 7 years since launch and I'm tired of saying to myself every single year "Oh man! Look at all this shiny ~potential~ this game has!" instead of actually achieving that potential. When will it finally go beyond just being "that one game that's supposed to be different," to

actually

being as great as I and others envision it to be?

:+1: I agree. That's what I meant when I said they need to solve all the issues GW2 has before anyone dares talking about a sequel, because - as stated in the article - those issues, which are caused by how the game is being handled by the devs, will only transfer into any new product.

No necessarily, the devs might know they want to redo certain systems of the game but not doing so for various reasons, like the game having 7 years of kitten build on top of said systems, resources needed vs resources ncsoft will provide for a 7 yo game etc.

Telling them they should fix all the peoblems of gw2 before moving on to 3 is asking them to stick with the game for another 7 or so years which may come at the expense of the company.

Plus one of the big problems of gw2 is its engine, it would simply make more sense to solve that with a new game rather than trying to fix it here.

I don't like this method of thinking. The fact that its a 7 year old game or that it would be too much work, over too long of a time, would hurt the game I find is false.

Look at Warframe as an example. It is of similar age to GW2, having been in early beta stages in 2012, "releasing" in 2013 and in 2019 it doesn't even remotely look or feel like the game it was back then. The amount of iterative changes they have made to the game over the years, along with reworking systems and adding new content has caused it to evolve to a state that makes it something other games of its type are compared to. They've overhauled movement, combat, upgrade systems, added more upgrade systems, more progression methods, reworked several warframes (with more reworks to come), overhauled their daily Alert system into an entirely new system altogether, improved their new player experience (with more of that to come), and will soon be adding

space flight

to the game.

I don't want to hear the excuse made for the ANet devs or

by

the ANet devs that its just "too much". This is their job. This is part of their passion in video games.

Show it

because right now...barely anyone is seeing it.

Wow, that is what I would have liked to see for GW2People that actually cared to keep developing the game in a meaningful way outside of gemstore purchases.If ANET had half that motivation/management style the game would be great.

[b k.1648]

I got into the 9th paragraph before spotting a grammatical error. Massively OP being what it is, I'm somewhat surprised it took that long.

[zealex.9410]

@Acheron.4731 said:

@KryTiKaL.3125 said:

@zealex.9410 said:

@Ashantara.8731 said:

@"FrigginPaco.4178" said:However, it's been 7 years since launch and I'm tired of saying to myself every single year "Oh man! Look at all this shiny ~potential~ this game has!" instead of actually achieving that potential. When will it finally go beyond just being "that one game that's supposed to be different," to

actually

being as great as I and others envision it to be?

:+1: I agree. That's what I meant when I said they need to solve all the issues GW2 has before anyone dares talking about a sequel, because - as stated in the article - those issues, which are caused by how the game is being handled by the devs, will only transfer into any new product.

No necessarily, the devs might know they want to redo certain systems of the game but not doing so for various reasons, like the game having 7 years of kitten build on top of said systems, resources needed vs resources ncsoft will provide for a 7 yo game etc.

Telling them they should fix all the peoblems of gw2 before moving on to 3 is asking them to stick with the game for another 7 or so years which may come at the expense of the company.

Plus one of the big problems of gw2 is its engine, it would simply make more sense to solve that with a new game rather than trying to fix it here.

I don't like this method of thinking. The fact that its a 7 year old game or that it would be too much work, over too long of a time, would hurt the game I find is false.

Look at Warframe as an example. It is of similar age to GW2, having been in early beta stages in 2012, "releasing" in 2013 and in 2019 it doesn't even remotely look or feel like the game it was back then. The amount of iterative changes they have made to the game over the years, along with reworking systems and adding new content has caused it to evolve to a state that makes it something other games of its type are compared to. They've overhauled movement, combat, upgrade systems, added more upgrade systems, more progression methods, reworked several warframes (with more reworks to come), overhauled their daily Alert system into an entirely new system altogether, improved their new player experience (with more of that to come), and will soon be adding

space flight

to the game.

I don't want to hear the excuse made for the ANet devs or

by

the ANet devs that its just "too much". This is their job. This is part of their passion in video games.

Show it

because right now...barely anyone is seeing it.

Wow, that is what I would have liked to see for GW2People that actually cared to keep developing the game in a meaningful way outside of gemstore purchases.If ANET had half that motivation/management style the game would be great.

Yeah when it comes to features and communication de has been solid, sadly content delivery is garbo.

[dodgerrule.8739]

@Operator.2590 said:

@zealex.9410 said:I agree with the piece, the game still has stuff to give and i wouldnt want anet to move on and make a new game unless they are in the best shape to make it.

That being said i dont think the systemic issues of gw2 can be solved in gw2, the game is just too big to take everythomg into acount when it comes to large systemic changes. A blank slate would be their best option.

On this note, essentially like a reboot / Guild Wars 2.5, like how Final Fantasy XIV had to do. Get a new engine for an optomization and graphics overhaul. I wouldn’t even mind if I had to re-buy the game for that. The fact Guild Wars 2 still runs on a modified Guild Wars 1 engine holds it back in quite a few areas.

Holds it back on every pc that plays this game

[Thundabolt.8541]

Oh boy another Half Life 3 thread. Look, Gabe already said he was done. Let's just take what we've got and enjoy it.

Oh right, we're talking about Guild Wars .

No. There won't be a Guild Wars 3. Just in case you didn't pick up on that.

[Juillin.5361]

It's hardly surprising. MMOs take a LONG time to develop. If they started working on GW3 now, I'd expect it to be about 5 years before we see anything from it. GW2 was announced in 2007 and released in 2012, after all. I would be more concerned if there WASN'T any movement on GW3 at this point. Like it or not, the game is starting to show its age and can only continue to lose players over time; it's what MMOs do.

I understand the fear of your current game getting ruined by a premature/underdeveloped sequel (see: Everquest,) but we're rapidly approaching the 10-year mark. That's a more than decent run for any game. With such a long development time, starting on a sequel at this point would not be "creating their own competitor"; it would just be planning for their future as GW2 starts to flag. Don't get me wrong, I would love to see a massive investment in bringing the game up to modern standards (DirectX, etc...) but I just don't see that happening. We can only hope that GW3 would be bigger and better enough to get its own 10-year-run.

[Diak Atoli.2085]

@Zoid.2568 said:The pvp in gw2 sucks. They should create a Guild Wars game like Overwatch or Dota 2.

Oh, by the Six! Please, no!

[SloRules.3560]

@starlinvf.1358 said:

@Ashantara.8731 said:

@"FrigginPaco.4178" said:However, it's been 7 years since launch and I'm tired of saying to myself every single year "Oh man! Look at all this shiny ~potential~ this game has!" instead of actually achieving that potential. When will it finally go beyond just being "that one game that's supposed to be different," to

actually

being as great as I and others envision it to be?

:+1: I agree. That's what I meant when I said they need to solve all the issues GW2 has before anyone dares talking about a sequel, because - as stated in the article - those issues, which are caused by how the game is being handled by the devs, will only transfer into any new product.

I would state its the other around. Legacy code and Regression are the 2 biggest, continuous issues any long long running piece of software has to face. Why do you do think WinXP was such a breath of fresh air after 4 generations of OS on their 9X architecture? The reason it doesn't happen often is the time (and money) it takes to build up from scratch, or at least barebones. Starting over lets you cut loose all the mistakes and all the limitations of the previous engine, and get to make all new mistakes, and slam face first into new limitations.

Projects started prior to 2010 were mostly built out of DX9/DX11 mind set... and the last few stuck with it came out around 2014. Moving forward, it became obvious that top to bottom multi-threading was the future. The bug push to move servers into Cloud computing only helped double down on this further. So a lot of games after that time period were designed to support it.... but too few of them actually implement it properly.

As much as I rag on the Devs for a lot of things...... engine development usually comes down to around a dozen or so Engineers, while its the job of the Designers to set the right requirements. If those 2 groups are properly managed, and communicate well, every other Dev team is a separate issue. FrostBite makes a perfect example of all of this; good and bad. Early version of the engine were incredibly sturdy, and benefited from being incredibly focused on FPS games. But over time EA kept piling on new requirements that the engine was never designed to consider, because they wanted a propitiatory engine for all their games, and Frostbite was already there. The tipping point was switching to it for Mass Effect Andromeda, and had next to no architecture to support massive branching narratives, large open world maps, nor the procedural systems that were going to drive them. But all these new requirements are having an impact on FPS games, the one thing its usually good at, because it has a lot of irrelevant code to support unused bespoke systems in the mix.

If they do ever get the funding and approval to do a complete rebuild of Frostbite, you can bet the Engineers are going to go even more modular so it can swap out entire code base elements as needed. That way they don't have to kludge support into an existing frame work, and the instability that comes with it. More importantly- if a module breaks, it only breaks modules that depend on it, and not everything around it.

Another thing to not overlook is "Sticky note Attrition". Its a phenomena in software development where a developer doesn't have time and/or the will power to design their code properly, and properly document it. The result is That Developer being the only one that fully understands that section of code, and if lost for any reason, that level of understanding is lost forever. Others can try to reverse engineer it, but its always a gamble at best. So that comment about "bad management will cause the old problems into the new engine" is essentially false. Bad management might lead to a similar issue.... but its patently a new issue that does not have, nor could have been the result of the previous issue. Taken in the context of what I said above, its entirely possible that the issue can be avoided in the new engine (by knowing what situation to avoid). But trying to fix the old engine is more or less

impossible

when its code base reaches Black Box status among the remaining developers.

The Engine team is currently trying to piece meal overhaul every section of the engine. But the legacy content, which was made to run on legacy code, and doesn't work right on new code, thats been making the entire exercise an uphill battle, with extra gravity, covered in itching powder, while being followed by a kid asking inane questions every few seconds. When they hit the wall, thats it....

But most of that can be avoided by starting over with a new engine, and building a new game on top of it. The Entropy can never be stopped... but those steps and restarts is how we avoid them becoming overbearing. But until then, we're sitting at the performance cap of DX9 architecture; and there aren't many directions left to go.

Finally someone with knowledge and willpower to write this.As a developer i took over a project that was on halt for some time, while it initially started in 2011 or 2012 something and just clearly stated that we need to start over. Granted it's smaller than full fledged game, but requirements now are just soooo much different than back then. Not to mention that no one knows that code anymore.

ANet has repeatedly stated that they have spaghetti code(maybe not in those exact words). Problems with adjusting UI for instance. 1.5+ year work on alliances or swiss? Those under reasonable code would never take that long, even if worked on by a single person.

As for GW3, i don't think there is a way to reverse deterioration of GW2, which makes me a supporter of new mmo by ANet. Afterall there's people constantly looking for new mmo, just that no AAA mmos release anymore. Last ones that released are still the biggest ones today (in the west) WoW, FF14, ESO, GW2, BDO

[ugrakarma.9416]

just remembering Microsoft is good at maintain compability with legacy stuff and API, i doubt that migrate to a newer DX engine is all that uphill battle... inst like Android/Google that just scrapp/delete old API stuff overnight and let applications developers by themselfs.