Interview with NCNet's Game Director Josh Davis
Interview with NCNet's Game Director Josh Davis
We talked to Guild Wars 2 Game Director Josh Davis about the learnings from the Secrets of the Obscure expansion and what's coming to the MMO
Probably save to assume that they will keep selling half a season of Living World once a year for an almost full full box price, but I'll wait until something is actually released. Maybe it'll be more than 85% cannibalized and recycled mechanics and art assets.
I'm actually quite happy with the way SotO turned out and looking forward to next year.
Heh, fair enough.
I've completed my bullshit bingo card not even half through the interview ...
Taken at face value it really doesn't look good, to phrase it mildly, does it? Work/life balance has been the argument for change since 2012, fucking hell of they still don't get it right. There hasn't been a content drought since Season 3 under the old management, and if SotO is what NCNet manages to create with a dev pool as big as the one that created Season 4, then may God have mercy on their souls. All signs point toward End-of-Life milking mode, but I'll wait on their next buy-to-play Living World snippet for my final verdict. Maybe they surprise us.
- Our current team size is roughly what it was during the development of Living World Season 4 and about 15% larger than it was at the release of End of Dragons in 2022.
- From our experiences with Secrets of the Obscure alone, we’ve adjusted development schedules, review processes, dev resource allocations, documentation and communication practices, and more. All of these contribute, to some degree, to improving the quality of what we deliver.
TL;DR: The code is already a proper mess, We are now inflating administrative overhead to further decrease efficiency. Our goal is for every new line of code to produce at least one new bug and involve at least 100 members of staff.