Senior Open World Designer

We are looking for a savvy game designer interested in shaping the world for our players. Do you love combining interesting characters, encounters, and gameplay into one for players? Are you a problem solver who loves to look for creative ways to create new experiences? Do you consider yourself the type of person who can’t wait to learn more about tools and discover all the things they can do? Do you love to collaborate and come up with solutions as part of a team? Are you experienced at working across multiple disciplines to craft video game experiences? Do you have experience owning content on a live game from design to ship? Are you focused on creating experiences that groups of players can engage in and enjoy? If any of this sounds like you, we would love to hear from you!

Why Join the ArenaNet Design Team?
The Design team at ArenaNet are responsible for creating the content and systems that players interact with in the game. We collaborate closely across multiple disciplines to bring our knowledge to bear on a wide array of problem sets and are a critical part of taking ideas and turning them into interactions for players. It is our job to build the stories, events, quests, creatures, and worlds that the players experience. We also believe that a healthy team is the first step to making fun, engaging games. And a healthy team is one of mutual respect, psychological safety, and diversity. We believe that new perspectives and voices help us to improve our game and find the best ideas.

As a Senior Open World Designer, you will utilize your love of games, well-crafted stories, and exciting open world gameplay along with your innovation and creative problem-solving skills to define and craft experiences that affect our players over the lifetime of their relationship with the products that we (and you) develop. You will collaborate across disciplines with other developers who bring their creativity and expertise to work every day. You will own major sections of open world content and be responsible for delivering them at a high-quality level.

TYPICAL TRAITS:

• You have experience with MMO or open world quest, mission, or encounter design
• Experience telling stories through gameplay
• You’ll also need to be up to date non-linear narrative best practices
• Success in this role will rely heavily on your ability to translate designs from ideas to final implementation in the game
• Experience working with a writing team to deliver high quality characters, narratives, and quests
• You’ll be experienced at giving and receiving constructive design feedback
• It will be essential to the success in this role for you to be able to communicate clearly with a variety of different disciplines, to drive consensus, and to always be a voice for the player experience
• Familiarity with designing multi-player content

NICE TO HAVES:

• Experience with implementing content in a live game
• Familiarity with Guild Wars 2, especially the ongoing lore and story
• Experience with scripting or programming languages such as lua or python
• Familiarity with user experience best practices
• Experience leading a team or major content area