Guild Wars was one of the many products born from the MMORPG boom of the early-to-mid 2000s. Released alongside iconic MMOs like World of Warcraft, EVE Online, and Star Wars Galaxies, ArenaNet's flagship video game not only survived but thrived in no small part due to its lack of a subscription fee, server maintenance downtime, and solid server infrastructure. Over 13 years after it took a back burner to Guild Wars 2, and 20 years after the game was originally released, Guild Wars is still getting updates. This includes the 20th Anniversary Masterpiece Edition, the ability to collect old pre-order bonuses in-game, and even a brand-new weapon upgrade suffix.
In an interview with The Best War Games, Guild Wars game director and ArenaNet "problem solver" Stephen Clarke-Willson spoke about this new Guild Wars update, as well as his history with ArenaNet. The senior developer has worked on both Guild Wars and its sequel for most of ArenaNet's lifespan and now acts as the shepherd of the original game. Clarke-Willson shared highlights of his experiences with Guild Wars over the years, alongside insights into what he believes has made ArenaNet's games timeless, enduring classics over two decades that have been inundated with countless MMORPGs. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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Stephen Clarke-Willson – The Guild Wars 'Problem Solver'
Q: You have worn many hats at ArenaNet over the last two decades: programmer, team lead, technical director, vice president, and game director, just to name a few. Can you tell me a bit of your history with Guild Wars and the company in general?
A: I had worked at some other game companies before, and at a previous place, I had worked with Jeremy Soule. Jeremy introduced me to ArenaNet. He wanted to do this direct song thing, and I was like “Great!” Because I don’t know anything about this stuff. I made his website and I did the music integration, and as part of doing the music integration with Guild Wars 1 so he could do music packs, I had to go into the office. Luckily, they were about a half hour away, so I’d go in there in the evening to do the music integration and then work on his website during the daytime from home. That’s how I got introduced to ArenaNet.
All of the music layout in the original Guild Wars was done by me, which sort of sums up how my entire career’s been – “We have a problem over here, and no one else is doing it. Why don’t you look?” And I’m like, “Okay, I don’t know anything about it. I guess I better learn!”
They talked to me about joining the company, and I was like, “Well, we’ll see how this goes.”Doing a website and the music integration was very different from the server programming that we do at ArenaNet, and at the time, I was like, “I don’t know anything about it.” But they were like, “Well, we need server programmers. Maybe you want to be one?” So I gave it a try. I mean, Pat Wyatt is brilliant. I’ll learn the way you do it. You guys have your 24/7 uptime goals, builds you run all day long. I want to learn how you guys do it.
It took a year to get going. I made stuff in the meantime because they had patterns to follow, but it really took three years before it clicked in my head how all the systems work because it's so big and complicated. It is millions of lines of code, and it is full of tricky stuff to make it do what it does. You can tell people, “We think it’s a great idea to run multiple builds,” and they go, “Great, we should go do that.” Then they go try to do it, and they can’t because there’s a lot of underlying technology that our founders brought to the game – especially Pat – for running multiple builds simultaneously, having them auto-update and retire themselves, and patch the minimum files.
I mean, the game used to work over a modem. When I first played it, it was over a 56k modem. It shipped on one CD-ROM. It was super compact and didn’t have a monthly fee, so they had to be super clever about everything. I just loved the cleverness of all of it, and as I was there, I loved learning more and more about all the tricky things they do and then seeing if I could enhance them in some places.
When it was time for Guild Wars 2—which works differently but has some amount of common technology, not that much, but part of the patching system was the same—it wasn’t going to scale up, so we changed some things for Guild Wars 2. That’s basically the reason I’m still at ArenaNet after all of this time: something to do all the time, changing, growing, not an overwhelming scale. The company size is such that you can generally meet and get to know everybody.
I don’t want to be ageist about myself, but I turned 65, and I was like, “What do I do?” I want to work forever, but I don’t know if I want to work as hard.” Even though this is my full-time job, personally for me, being able to focus on one product rather than jumping around between all of these different technologies and groups within the company is almost like retiring!
The more I get into it, the more time I put into it, and the less it is like retiring, but emotionally, being able to focus on just one product that is smaller than our other large product feels good. Again, it was a place where nobody was really looking at this right now, so I thought I’d jump in.
Q: Can you talk a bit more about the process of preserving Guild Wars 1 as ArenaNet transitioned its focus on Guild Wars 2?
A: Even after Eye of the North, there was a team of about 10 people working on it, producing content. Eventually, Guild Wars 2 just grew to consume everybody in the studio. It is a very big game; right now, if you patch Guild Wars 1, it’s about four gigs if you fully patch it. I don’t know what the sequel is at right now – 65, 70? It’s a big number for Guild Wars 2. Eventually, it consumed everyone, so we spent some time making sure it worked. But it is so well-engineered that you could literally do nothing. People will find ways to abuse it, people will run their bots or whatever, but it was so well-engineered that it would just run.
There were several file servers in Japan hosted by NCSoft, and they had been running for years. When one of them broke, we were like, “Who do we tell? We don’t know any of those people there!” Since it was set up, no one had talked to them once. It was incredible. We had to figure that out and how we were going to scope things so that it’s mostly so everyone is relocated to North America and Europe, so it’s easier for us to maintain. It wasn’t until much later, when we were at Amazon, that we were able to put a server instance back into Asia, which the people in Australia really like!
But everyone piled onto GW2. We had the additional content, but we had bought really great hardware in our data center, and things tended to run. There was a certain amount of maintenance to make sure backups were done, but it eventually ran itself for a couple of years.
Q: Why do you think it was important to make sure Guild Wars 1 remained playable even after the launch of Guild Wars 2?
A: There are a lot of reasons, but the biggest one is that it was the promise we made. No monthly fee, buy once, play anytime you want, play with your friends whenever you want. Because it’s so well-engineered that we could keep it going affordably and prove our promise to people that we want to support our games. Unless we’re wiped out totally, we’re going to do everything we can to support our games. Gaming is a service; it’s a buzzword, but to actually deliver and commit over 20 years now? That’s an achievement, and it’s something we want people to appreciate that we do for them because we love our players.
For me, as a server programmer, I didn’t think you could get further away from players. We look at graphs, we look at numbers, and we look at throughput. It was only when that Frankfurt data center blew up. I had just recently moved everyone from Asia to North America. So I said, “Well, I’ll just move everyone from Europe to North America, and we’ll keep going while they fix all that.” So, I did that. This was in our old data center. So I thought, “Well, I wonder how well this is working?” SI got on my VPN and went into Frankfurt – you can just push a button, and you’re in a different city. I thought this was the worst case it would be because I had to VPN there, play the game, and then it comes back. It was working great…but I thought “I don’t really know if it’s working great, so how can I talk to players and see what’s going on?”
Reddit was the only thing left. We had a deal for Guild Wars 2 where ArenaNet staff would not start threads there, but we could respond to anything we wanted. So I went to the Guild Wars 1 admins and was like, “We have this rule, but is that a rule here? Because I want to ask people what the latency is like.” And they said, “Oh please, just jump in.” So I did and asked them what the latency was like. People were telling me it was terrible! So, I had a problem. It was great for me, and it worked on my machine, but they were definitely having problems. They were getting three-second pings, and I was like, how is that even physically possible? Is it because I moved the servers? I don’t know, but I have a problem to solve.
Once it was all in America, we moved it to Amazon, which I had wanted to do for a while. A giant team moved Guild Wars 2 to Amazon. It’s basically the first Widows-based game that was all in at Amazon. I wanted to move Guild Wars 1 because I knew how it worked, I didn’t want to distract the team from Guild Wars 2, and I wanted to learn how to do it and about Amazon. So, I moved it into Amazon and thought I could move it back to Europe because Amazon has data centers all over the place. So I do that, thinking it would fix everything? Nope, still terrible. But it had been terrible forever, since before it was launched!
The thing is, the bug had to do with the number of people playing on a server in certain maps. It’s pretty subtle. As concurrency went down over the years, the odds of you running into this went up. That might not be intuitive, but that’s basically what happened. So, for whatever reason, it worked while I was trying it, but it was an odds thing. A statistical anomaly in how people interacted with the game determined whether you got hit by this thing. I had no idea what was going on, but then I remembered we’d fixed a similar bug in Guild Wars 2 that took me two years of staring at graphs to go “Oh, I think I know what’s wrong here,” and that bug had been inherited from Guild Wars 1. I went back and fixed it one way, then Bill Friest fixed it a different and better way! That fixed the three-second issues with the giant lag spikes people were seeing, and I wouldn’t have done that unless I had gone onto Reddit and started talking to people.
I went from this person who’s as far away from players as possible to interacting with them. I was like, “This is pretty cool! These people love this game, and they will help me.” There have been issues over the years, like one with a floating point error when we changed the compiler. People are sending me movies showing me what’s going wrong! It’s all happening in extremely hard levels that, even by cheating, I can’t get through. So they’re sending me videos showing me the problem, and I’m looking at code trying to figure stuff out. They’re just so passionate about the game that it started to wear off on me! It went from “we have this thing that we’re committed to keeping running” to “I think we should help this thing along a little more!
A New Definitive Edition of Guild Wars 1
Q: Can you talk about Guild Wars: The 20th Anniversary Masterpiece Collection, as well as some of the changes you have made to the game for it?
A: Joe Kimmes is the one making the gameplay changes, and he’s been around forever: maybe just a few months more or less than me but a long time. He knows the Guild Wars 1 code really well, and he was part of the team that maintained it after Eye of the North. For the 15th anniversary, he knew there were some assets lying around that he could repurpose into a new weapon set, and that was so hugely well-received.
I was like, “Can I borrow some of Joe’s time?” He’s on Guild Wars 2 now, so I borrowed about a month of his time, and we looked around for opportunities where we didn’t need an artist, where we could do it as much as possible in code, and bring in these things that were, for some people, virtually impossible to get. Like, there’s a pre-order item from Japan from 20 years ago. Who’s going to get that?! Like somebody did, and we want to respect that. These are all different, they’re not tradeable, and they’re a different rarity, so if you got that item, that’s still valuable!
Joe actually came up with the weapon suffix idea, so there’s going to be a drop that changes weapons you have with the new suffix. We have the minis coming back, we have a bunch of weapons that we’re giving out as pre-orders, and there’s this suffix that changes everything, new hard mode missions – that’s how you get the mini-pets. Just by really looking for opportunities to look for things that will be really fun for people by making use of things that have lain dormant for a while.
It wasn’t my idea to have the new SKU. We had the Game of the Year Edition from like a million years ago, which is still on Steam, but we wanted to come up with a new edition of the game. We added in the Bonus Mission Pack so it would be different, but we needed to come up with a name. Ultimate version came up, but “Ultimate” means “Last,” and I don’t want to close any doors. So, we looked through the thesaurus and came up with the Masterpiece Edition. I was like, “I don't know, is that too ostentatious?” The feedback was, “If you’re still alive after 20 years in gaming, it’s not too ostentatious!”
That’s the edition we’re bringing out, and we’re bringing it out super discounted, more than we’ve discounted anything in a sale. We’re going to discount the MTX items more than we ever have because we just want people to be able to have a good time. If you ask me, is the game worth $40? Absolutely, people get hundreds of hours of play. But if you’re a player, what risks do you want to take when you buy a product? In this economy!?
We want to give people the opportunity to jump in, and overall, we want to make it more accessible. It’s got super-deep gameplay, and pre-Searing is very accessible. I think all the tutorials are reasonably accessible, but can we make them more accessible so that it’s less of a scary thing to jump into? I think that’s a long-term goal I have.
The Timeless DNA of Guild Wars and ArenaNet
Q: The world of Guild Wars 2 builds on a lot of the things you helped make a reality in Guild Wars 1. What callbacks to the original game stand out for you in Guild Wars 2?
A: A lot of our artists went and played Guild Wars 1 to get inspired for the general layout. I think there’s a site that does Tyria before and after? But, obviously, the 3D is so much richer in Guild Wars 2. T hey just add tons of detail, but one of my favorite things in Guild Wars 2 is Lion’s Arch where you can swim out into the bay and find the old sunken Lion’s Arch. I think that is so cool. That gives me chills. It’s a throwback in a way where they could still have the high detail of a new Lion’s Arch, but still have the throwback to the original Lion’s Arch. I just think that’s so cool.
Q: Websites that attempt to track MMO populations consistently place Guild Wars 2’s recent average daily player count at around 70,000, and even Guild Wars 1 has approximately 5,600 players every day, even 20 years later. Do these estimates match up with your own numbers?
A: This is hard to talk about because there’s concurrency. When I was a server programmer, that’s all I cared about. We had concurrency graphs that we would add together and get our total concurrency, which is actually not the way anyone else in the world does it. Europe is in a different time zone, so they would peak at a different time than North America; Asia would peak at a different time so that didn’t all add up to the biggest number you could get. But that was just our measure, and that was what we did.
Now, I look at daily actives and weekly actives and monthly actives in addition to that because that’s where the rubber meets the road in terms of business success. All I can say about your numbers is that it depends on the timeframe! If you look at the instantaneous high concurrency, that’s one number. If you look monthly, that’s a much bigger number.
Q: What do you think is the ‘secret ingredient’ that makes Guild Wars games so timeless?
It’s a bunch of things, but essentially, our server architecture means people can play together no matter where they are in the world. What I used to do on Guild Wars 2 release day, we release around 9 AM, so I would transfer my character to Europe and run around tagged up because they love it. We’re in different time zones, so they don’t see us much. And then, I would forget that I did that, so on the weekend, when I was going to play with my guild, I would be like, “I see your dot, I see we’re in the guild together, I’m in the map, where are you? Oh, I forgot I’m in Europe!” The latency is so friendly and clean that I would literally forget that I was playing a third of the way around the world!
That incredible flexibility. You say no downtime, but deeper than that is the fact that I can play anytime. If my friends are in a different time zone, we can make it work. My guildies are mostly in Puerto Rico, four hours different from us sometimes. We had worlds, but they were virtual worlds. We just make it easy for people to play together, and I think that’s really significant. You’re not just on this one server. You have tremendous flexibility about when you play, where you play, and who you play with. Your friends list is worldwide. I think that’s pretty cool.
Q: Any final thoughts on the Guild Wars for its 20th anniversary, the Masterpiece Collection, or your ongoing legacy with ArenaNet?
A: I’m coming up on 20 years, but we’ve had people for 21 years. Several people have been there longer than me. But if someone asks me, “How do you work at a company so long?” I could say it’s a lot of variety, the size of the company, and the way I interact with people. But step one is to work at a company that lasts that long! In the gaming industry, there aren’t that many, and I don’t think any company I worked for before is still in existence. I just think it is incredible luck and good fortune that they are in my neighborhood where I live and founded by a bunch of smart guys who are really committed to the player experience. That DNA is still in the company, and I think that’s still visible to players.
[END]
- Released
- April 28, 2005
- ESRB
- T // Use of Alcohol, Violence
- Developer(s)
- ArenaNet
- Publisher(s)
- NCSoft, Level Up! Games
- Engine
- Havok
WHERE TO PLAY
- Genre(s)
- RPG
