The Irish Mob

Years with no word from the Guild Wars team since their last expansion has calmed the storm of fans, but recent comments from ArenaNet's Mike O'Brien have breathed life back into the community. O'Brien sat down with IGN to give us some new dishes about the game. Guild Wars 2 logo.

First, some overview:

Guild Wars 2 takes the instanced gameplay that allowed us to tell stories so effectively in the original and supplements it with a fully persistent world that provides easy opportunities to find existing friends and make new ones. It takes the flexible and customizable character progression from the original and adds new options, new playable races, and new personalized storylines. It takes the optional competitive aspect of the original and splits it in two, so that it's both more approachable for casual players and more of an e-sport for the hard core. It takes the unique skill deck system of the original and makes it more comprehensible, with a focus on quality of skills instead of quantity.

During the past two years of development we made huge advances to our game engine, adding a persistent world with free-form movement and exploration, day/night cycles, cutting edge support for dungeons and interior environments, numerous graphical advancements including support for more detailed environments and models, better lighting and shadows, new animation and effects systems, plus new audio and cinematics engines, a more flexible combat and skill-casting system, and so on. We also built an array of new content creation tools, enabling us to build a larger and grander world, bring it to life with a wide variety of events always taking place, create more unique and interesting adversaries, and tell stories more compellingly than we ever did before.

Some info on their new dynamic event system:

Imagine for a second that you're strolling through the local military garrison when you hear a scout start shouting about a centaur column that has been sighted approaching. The soldiers are quick to action, shutting the gates and ordering archers up onto the walls. You and some of your fellow players watch as the centaurs batter at the gates with axes while their archers clear defenders from the walls and shots from their catapults arc overhead. It's a tense moment until the gate falls, and as you rush into the gap to fend off the centaurs you are joined by other players and guards who are all intent on saving the garrison. If you succeed, the garrison will hold and may launch a counterattack on the trading post where the centaurs came from. If you fail, it's a desperate fight as soldiers pour from the nearby town and attempt to retake their fortress. Scenarios like this are exactly the sort of thing that allows our event system to shine and we think players will be really pleased with how it has turned out.

Why not add in a little class info to end:

The five playable races in the initial release of Guild Wars 2 are the asura, charr, humans, norn, and sylvari. Although they begin in different areas, and have slightly different storylines, all the races must come together in order to defeat the Elder Dragons, because no single race is powerful enough to do so alone...The humans are the most well known race to our players, but they're also the ones who have suffered the most changes....The charr are the conquerors of the human kingdom Ascalon, a land they claim is their homeland....Forced by the ice dragon to leave their homes in the far north, the norn have settled in the Shiverpeaks, building new homesteads and totem lodges on the high peaks and in snowy valleys....Once, the asura ruled the caverns and tunnels below Tyria, contemptuously calling the races above them "primitive" and "unintelligent." The rise of the Elder Dragon, Primordus, drove the asura to the surface--but they have not only survived there, they have prospered....The sylvari are the youngest of the races. Their Firstborn blossomed from the Pale Tree only 25 years ago, and since then, they have attempted to explore the world and understand the strange call within their souls that drives their Wyld Hunts.