Guild Wars for consoles?

Serelisk

I wasn't sure where to stick this, whether it was general gaming or MMO discussion, because it doesn't explicitely cover any of the current Guild Wars titles, but I guess this is a fair spot.

 

There's been a lot of talk about the possibility of a console version of Guild Wars 2, and while Arena Net has repeatedly said they've had a small team look into it, their current focus is on the PC version.

However, I'm predicting that, should Guild Wars 2 be a massive success, Arena Net will expand drastically with all the revenue and new resources because they're a very ambitious group of developers, as their track record has shown.

Since Arena Net has a very expansive lore for the land of Tyria, I couldn't imagine it would be too difficult to create an action RPG or even an RTS using that expansive lore and tapping into new gaming markets. The elusive "Guild Wars" that have been mentioned, alluded to, and even mimicked would make a great candidate for a prequal game setting and a great treat for lore hounds. If Arena Net had the resources, they could definitely do this.

We're already seeing Trion creating more games from the gains of Rift, and I wouldn't exactly call Rift a runaway success so much as just highly successful.

I don't know what role NCSoft would/could play in this, as they're a publisher known only for MMO's and I fail to assume I can understand their role in development decisions but I'm fancying the idea of an expanded Guild Wars universe through multiple game genres and gaming platforms. Sort of like a backwards Warcraft.

 

 

Ezhae

Problem is the way the console games work in general, and i don't mean the technical details. 

With games like Guild Wars it would really be troublesome to give justice to the world, and the game itself would pretty much end up as "yet another fantasy action rpg", a one shot deal that would give you a small slice of the world and wouldn't really be able to expand on anything. 

Thing with console gaming is that the games made specially for consoles tend to have much shorter longlivety compared to PC games. Consoles are where a game comes out in one week and is forgotten 2 weeks later, not many of those games are even further supported post release. Sure you can have content DLCs, but that usually happens along with releasing the game on PCs as well, as PC core audience is more likely to return to a game even months after (in part due to the fact that game renting/trading is a common thing among consoles).

 

So, would it really be profitable, for a company working on an MMO, to move resources towards a project that may not even warrant a return anytime soon and, in worst case scenario, might even drive potential future customer away from the brand? Even among MMO PC gamers first GuildWars was met with very mixed opinions and criticized a ton for it's instance based nature and complete lack of open-worldness. 

Logicially, they are way better to focusing purely on making GW2 as good as possible and leaving dabbling with consoles for a time where they can actually afford to throw money away. 

Diovidius

PC gamers are Anet's core audience, I'm not sure how many of GW1's fans also own consoles but I think it's below average. GW2's audience is probably somewhat more mainstream but still, they are mostly MMO players. I think Anet should focus on that so if they want to develope more games within the Guild Wars universe they should create them for the PC, or smartphones, tablets, browsers and what have you. Furthermore they could expand into non-digital games such as a TCG or a PnP RPG.

cheyane

Right now there are only two games that mix the PC and PS3 players together that is FFXI and DCUO. Or is it only FFXI am not so sure about DCUO.

 

I played FFXI on the PC and the players that played on their PS 2 that time had one major problem they were unable to carry on conversations unless they had a keyboard attached too. That made it difficult for them. You could immediately pick out the PS 2 palyers.

aesperus

Originally posted by cheyane

Right now there are only two games that mix the PC and PS3 players together that is FFXI and DCUO. Or is it only FFXI am not so sure about DCUO.

 

I played FFXI on the PC and the players that played on their PS 2 that time had one major problem they were unable to carry on conversations unless they had a keyboard attached too. That made it difficult for them. You could immediately pick out the PS 2 palyers.

It's both, you are correct. FFXIV was also supposed to do the same, until it released as a complete disaster.

 

That said, GW2 would actually play very well on a console, from what I've seen. The only real issue would be the social aspect of MMOs, which reguir a keyboard attachment / some type of mic - headset to play the game. Not a huge deal, but the market for these games seems a LOT more common on PC.

Wizardry

I thought FFXI was the only game,but if dcuo is also,hats off to them.

I feel it is very much doable,the problem is extra cost.GW2 is not designed at present to continually make more money,so they would have no where to draw from,other than the soon to be current cash flow of sales.

I guess we would have to see and know the size of the zones to know if it possible.I mean no way VG would work as a console game.Do i think it is a good thing to look into?Well only A-net knows this as they would weigh in their cost to port and pay for each consoles gaming libraries,licenses.

 I feel Square Enix is still ahead of these other MMORPG devs in that they actually designed their game engine to run multi platform.Other devs such as A-net would have to do it differently[unless this game engine supports mulit platform] with a few choices and would take a heck of a lot more work.Square's problem was not success of the game or porting,it was a couple other limitations they ran into on the consoles,be it memory and total bandwidth and ability to maintain playable frame rates.Most console games i have ever played that tried to incorporate high end graphics are usally shallow,narrow,smaller maps.Luckily GW2 is imo not a high end graphical game,so imo it is again doable,it will just cost them a fair bit of money.