ArenaNet are planning to increase the frequency of their Guild Wars 2 updates. It's an ambitious scheme, if only because their current content schedule is already pretty frequent: with new, and often unusual, patches releasing every three weeks. For instance, there was that time they built an 8-bit world . Or yesterday's thing with the steampunk pirates . Going forward, that three week cycle is set to ramp up to every fortnight.
"We're doing three weeks currently, but now we're pushing to two weeks," lead content designer Mike Zadorojny told Gamerzines . "It's a marathon not a sprint and we've been getting better with each of our releases, in terms of how we budget, how we plan it out, how we manage personnel etc. Now we have four full 'Living World' teams that are building these content updates, so that we can stagger releases and make sure that [developers] can decompress and get the quality time necessary to build a good design document before going back in and trying to implement it all over again.”
ArenaNet clearly have good reason to push regular updates. As the always level-headed and reasonable critics of the game will politely point out, Guild Wars 2 doesn't have much in the way of a traditional MMO end-game. Ultimately, though, as long as it can draw people back regularly enough to run through the additions (many of which are split across multiple weeks), it doesn't really need one.
"If we can push this," Zadorojny continued, "if we can add content every two weeks that is engaging to the players, then really it's almost like a TV show at that point. It's kind of stay tuned until next week for the thrilling conclusion of... That's where our goal is, and it's really fascinating when you have an entire studio dedicated to pulling off."
Thanks, PCGamesN .
