ArenaNet: Guild Wars 1 "could last forever"
"Even without anybody really touching it."
There are still people playing famed eight-year-old MMO Guild Wars 1, and developer ArenaNet has no intention of abandoning them.
"Oh absolutely not," lead content designer Mike Zadorojny told me recently.
"The game itself was so efficient on the server side in terms of the resources, like, it runs on a fraction of the hardware that we need for running Guild Wars 2, so having that on the back-burner is nothing compared to GW2.
"There's still a community there that's really passionate and really thriving in there, so we want to support them as best we can."
The team supporting the old MMO, however, is minuscule, and the chances of new content are slim.
"We've been doing a lot of automation support so that the game itself could last forever, even without anybody really touching it," added Zadorojny.
"They're not necessarily making new content right now but there is a team that is monitoring if there are massive issues they're taken care of, and they're supporting them."
The Guild Wars series - Guild Wars 1 plus standalone add-ons and expansion - was at six million sales and counting in 2009. It was a huge success for ArenaNet and was the basis for the multi-gazillion dollar investment NCSoft made in Guild Wars 2, a much larger project.
Not bad for a five-man team that created Guild Wars 1 in founder Mike O'Brien's apartment.
