Today brings another Dev Blog from Ben Miller, a Game Designer for Arenanet. In this blog Ben goes over almost every aspect of designing a game. He talks about MMO combat, UIs a sense of character development and much much more and provides a really great insight in the mind of a game designer.

Some developers might wish there was a secret recipe book for designing an online world—some big ol’ Betty Crocker-style book with chapters like “Combat System” and “Interactive Story Telling,” containing recipes for “Melee Weapons” and “Compelling Main Characters.” And they’d wish all you had to do was add in the particulars specified and work on each bit for the required amount of time.

The truth is that designing an online world is a lot like the real world. It’s messy business. It’s organic. It’s chaotic. The mental space in which you are creating is different from moment to moment with assumptions and extrapolations piling into a confusing tangle that only your gut has time to sort out. It’s like a turbulent ocean storm of ideas, processes, people, and collaboration.

Source: The Golden Rules of Guild Wars 2

Over the last 10-15 years players have seen little evolution in MMORPGs.  Classes, combat, and quest systems generally are extremely similar even across the usual sub-genres; fantasy, sci-fi, and horror.  Due to  most releases up to this point reusing the same foundations with slightly different graphics the  experience playing them is nearly identical across the board.  This is partially why every game is called a “WoW clone”  even though World of Warcraft was an Everquest clone which was a DIKU mud clone and so on.  Guild Wars 2 seems to be trying to break the mold in many ways, most notably the dynamic event system at the heart of their game.

The MMORPG genre is growing faster now than ever before. From Everquest to World of Warcraft, Warcraft to Age of Conan, and in 2011 we saw two major titles released in Rift and Star Wars: The Old Republic. With the clock beginning to tick in 2012, there are multiple AAA titles scheduled to be released, but nothing grabs our attention more than Guild Wars 2. With the massive success of it’s predecessor, our expectations are sky high.

Last year we got our hands on the game at PAX Prime, and all we can say is that our expectations aren’t high enough!