Utopia brainstorming that lead to GW2

[Ahlec.8423]

The story that we've been presented is that there were lots of ideas going around for what the designers wanted to see out of the fourth campaign, and that the more that everybody brainstormed, the less possible it was to implement the ideas without creating a new game. And so you went the route of creating a new game. I'm curious to know if anybody remembers some of the ideas that were the fundamental limitations ("ability to jump" and "ability to swim" are pretty easy to guess, but others perhaps not so much). I'd expect that there'd be both "oh that's an obvious one" and "really? something that 'small'" kind of ideas and I'm curious if there are any that you're able to share publicly (or even remember, since that was over a decade ago now). Additionally, of the brainstormed ideas that lead to the creation of Guild Wars 2, how many of those do you think were able to actually make it into the new game? The [Companion system](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Companion "Companion system") was an idea that was told to the community for a long while but ultimately didn't make it in--were there other ideas that stayed around for a long time from the Utopia discussions that ultimately wound up hitting the cutting floor?

[Joe Kimmes.1357]

A big topic at the time was 'what is the new feature that is as cool as Heroes that gets everyone excited for this expansion'. A great example proposal that did manifest in GW2 would be open-world zones. It seems simple at first, but when you start going over the details - can you change skills or parties in a zone, do the monsters respawn, how does loot work, how do quests handle it - it quickly becomes clear that to be fun and interesting it needs a new set of rules that become a fundamental overhaul to the game.

[Mike Zadorojny.7058]

The core feature that Utopia was being built around was giving players choices through the form of quests and having consequences for the collective choices made by the community. Imagine a story line that branched every couple of weeks/months based on the total number of completions of one set of quests vs another. Which group of people did you choose to provide assistence to? (Did you focus your efforts on the hospital or the orphanage?)

 

While we were building out the story and associated characters, we started playing with the in-game tech more and more. It got to the point where we started to ask questions about things fundamentally associated with Guild Wars as a whole. I think the big turning point came when we essentially created a prototype for something like Shaemoor, that was a persistent map that had 50+ people running (and jumping) around. Like Joe mentioned some of the foundational code work was built around instances being the core PvE content and as we started to try to break that mold the tech hurdles started becoming larger. I know the engine programmers were also trying to push the boundaries on the quality of assets we were creating, but I don't remember the specifics there. Ultimately it wasn't a single idea that pushed us over, but enough things popped up that we decided our efforts would be better spent moving our designs into a new game.