i just want to understand :
What happens in Anet after Nightfall ?
We have a company who have made a good game, good mechanics, great univers, and, suddently, they give up, and made a theme park extension (GWEN).
Whats happens ? they loste their minds ? the founding fathers suddently go mad ? They all lost their balls at the same times ?
Or inflated by pride and greed, corrupted by the Great Evil Capitalism :p , they lost their mind and decide to give up GW1 and raise a new child : GW2
This is mistery for me !
What probably happened is that they had so many ideas and intentions which they couldn't realize in GW1. From that point, they tried to make a game that would embody those things.
They had a game that was great, but also frustrating at some points for them as devs:
* It was a nightmare to balance and quite hard to create new and unique skills
* They shoehorned themselves into adding 2 new classes with every release, which became quite hard
* Every release they needed to add more and more skills to the old professions + complete new ones
* The engine had it's limitations
* They wanted to add more races, but that would require tons of work since you could go back to other campaigns (armors, animations, cinematics would need to be modified)
* They talked about adding mounts, which wouldn't work.
* They had locked themselves in a 6 month release cadence
* They had the possibility now to do things they couldn't before, as they had a lot more money compared to when they started the company.
Combine all that together and it becomes clear why they changed things: the things we as players like are not always the things that are easy to implement. Some systems might be nightmarish!
I just think it's a combination of everything and a desire to do something new. When they announced that they were starting with GW2, they already had worked 7 years on GW2 (even though it only released in 2005, it had been in development for 5 years).
I still think they're enthousiastic for the game they've built and still like it, but also see it as something in the past. With season 3 they are really going back to the Guild Wars 1 lore, bringing the White Mantle back, Mursaat, the Forgotten and so on. It's obvious that they still like their first game, but we also need to realize that they haven't got the manpower to run 2 games. When they decided to go for GW2, they knew they had to end GW1. But they didn't do that at once - we got support (and even new content) until the last minute they could - the Live team was pulled a year before release I think, but they gave us 3 fantastic releases that actually are still challenging on hard mode on this day.
It was never the intention to release any new content after Eye of the North got released, but thanks to Lindsey Murdock and her team (she still works for ArenaNet) we got new content. Which continued when John Stumme took over (he unfortunately doesn't work for ArenaNet anymore). They gave us great content!
But... if you're working all day long on a game, which you're really proud of, and you don't really have that much time anymore to devote to the original... well, that's kinda what happened. The devs switched over to GW2, of which they're really proud (and it's a good game, just not a good successor for GW1) and on which they work daily. The motivation to work on GW1 is quite a bit smaller, and it simply doesn't have the players anymore it used to have (which is normal, as new content isn't being added). However, they are using the story of the first game, they're adding in small hints to GW1 everywhere now.
ArenaNet still loves this game, there simply isn't a doubt about that. But the future for them is GW2 and the past is GW1 - but they don't regret the past.
While they might not support the game 100% anymore, they still run it. Not many companies would do that. This MMO is 11 years old and it's still running - not many MMO's can say that, and there's not a single word about the game getting shut down.
I'm pretty certain a lot of devs still play the game nearly daily, but if devs would be more active here, would talk more to us, we kinda would expect that the game would get new content. We'd get excited and those things would probably never happen. That's why we have the radio-silence of ArenaNet - not because they're ashamed, but because they've moved on and they don't want to disappoint us.
That's what I think.
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