I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community.

Part 1: Discussion of previous news

• This week’s anniversary sale item at the Guild Wars in-game store is the Extreme Makeover Pack.
• If you listen to podcasts, you might want to subscribe to the Guildcast weekly podcast — https://guildcast.wordpress.com/

Part 2: Guild Wars news

• Reminder: If you’d like to keep track of the upcoming Winds of Change and other Guild Wars Beyond material, keep this page bookmarked — http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_Beyond.
• Ascalon Royal Family Masquerade Ball 2011 on May 21st. “The Ascalon Royal Family Masquerade Ball is a long forgotten formal event, engraved into history years before the searing. The Kingdom of Ascalon was once prosperous, led by King Adelbern and the Royal Family. During such times the ball was the yearly celebration to celebrate the wealth and beauty that was Ascalon.”

Part 3: Guild Wars 2 news

• Inc. Gamers Guild Wars 2 Interview, Part 1. “One big difference is crafting in the original Guild Wars was you salvage stuff and you brought it to an NPC and he crafted it for you. In Guild Wars 2 we have a number of different ways to get materials. One is from drops, another from salvaging and also from gather nodes in the world. For crafting your character chooses crafting professions and you are going to be doing the crafting and you find a crafting table where you take your raw material. You then craft the items. What this does for us, it creates a more social experience, it’s a little more traditional but it gives the chance for players to interact a lot more with each other.”
• Inc. Gamers Guild Wars 2 Interview, Part 2. [On PvP dynamics:] “Absolutely, a small group can defeat a larger group when fighting each other. We have a few players that are quite good at the game right now, generally now my reaction when I see them is to turn and run, even with an ally or two with me. There’s definitely a lot of is skill involved in the game. We introduced some new players to our PvP environment recently and when they first started playing, not their very first game, a couple of games in when they had a grasp of the basics, we had a player who was beating people, he would kill like nine players in a row. Eventually as time progressed a lot of the players who were getting beaten by him are now as good as him, maybe even better. There’s definitely that sort of skill and learning how to play the game. Everyone thought the profession he was playing was completely broken and then he switched to another one and they were saying that one was now broken.”
• PC Gamer’s Guild Wars 2 Preview. “If nothing else, Guild Wars 2 will be a beautiful fantasy MMORPG. Better than that, having played it, I can say that I think it’s a step forward for MMO games. Guild Wars 2 is advancing the very fundamentals of the genre. It is bravely ditching the fetch, carry, kill and collect style of questing that has kept us entertained/sedated for years. It is pinning its second-by-second interactions on a combat style that is fast, frantic and unpredictable. Oh: and there’s no subscription fee to pay. Once you’ve bought Guild Wars 2, you’ll be able to play it forever. Ruh roh. Guild Wars 2 is taking huge risks. With those risks come potentially huge pratfalls.”
• Guild Wars 2 developers on alert of security breaches. “The pair stated it’s still too early to talk about its specific security measures, however they “understand having operated GW and seeing all the account theft that has happened. Obviously we’re hoping to shoot for accounts never being stolen, but there’s only so much you can do. At the moment though we’re not quite ready to talk about exactly what we’re doing.””
• Flameseeker Chronicles: Lion’s Arch unveiled. “Every square inch of Lion’s Arch speaks to that, and I love it. Look at the buildings created from broken ships, the bridges and walkways constructed out of salvaged wood (wood planks, I assume), and even the windows framed with parts of much smaller vessels. The stone towers appear to be built from the same stone you can see in the structures in present-day Lion’s Arch, and the idea that those responsible for the rebuilding effort salvaged them from the ruins of the old buildings fits with the feel of the city overall. The Lion’s Arch we see in the video might be relatively new, but it’s got a strong sense of history and familiarity.”
• Gamebreaker.tv Episode 47. Discussion of Guild Wars 2 (including the Lion’s Arch video) begins at the 37:40 mark.
• Interview with Martin Kerstein at Hunter’s Insight. “Okay lets start off with the obvious. Martin said at a meet and greet in Germany that a new profession will be revealed this month. It was reported in this thread at Guild Wars 2 Guru, commencing about 14 pages of a thread I wish I had never read. In any case it has been confirmed in an interview and on those forums. Will it be the mesmer, or the 8th unknown profession? Who can say. I suspect it will be whichever is done, though from a marketing perspective I’m sure the 8th unknown profession would have to be the last.”
• A not very serious entry in the Guild Wars 2 Ambassador video contest.
• GameReactor.tv Guild Wars 2 preview video. “Petter Mårtensson, our resident MMO expert, has not tried Guild Wars 2. Instead it was the complete MMO n00b Bengt Lemne who took a plane to Seattle to try a bit of Arenanet’s new game and meet the developers.”
• Further confirmation that there will be a Guild Wars 2 beta in 2011. “The Guild Wars 2 beta will begin in the second half of 2011, NCsoft has announced. During a conference call, chief financial officer Jaeho Lee also heavily hinted at a 2012 release for the game. “Starting from year 2012, we believe substantial growth will be driven by new blockbuster titles like [Blade & Soul] and Guild Wars 2,” announced Lee to investors.”
• An interview with Martin Kerstein at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. “Well, what we try to do with Guild Wars 2 anyway is to break a lot of the existing conventions, like by getting rid of quests and basically totally focusing on dynamic events. So you just run through the world and happen on stuff, and that stuff has an impact on the world. It’s not just there’s this one guy standing with an exclamation mark and you go there, he says ‘hey, those evil bandits over there have been threatening me for the last 15 years, like I told the other thousand people before you…’ Then you go there and they’re not actually doing anything. So you kill them then come back, so the guy says ‘thanks, everything is fine now’ but you turn around and the bandits are back… Our dynamic events will actually have an impact on the world, so if you defend a village it’s safe. It’s more like a living, breathing world.”
• Introducing the 7th profession: The Engineer. “Masters of mechanical mayhem, engineers tinker with explosives, gadgets, elixirs, and all manner of deployable devices. They can take control of an area by placing turrets, support their allies with alchemic weaponry, or lay waste to foes with a wide array of mines, bombs, and grenades. Like elementalists, engineers use a single weapon set at a time, but they complement this weapon set by equipping special utility and healing kits. These kits provide the engineer with special weapons and backpacks loaded with a full set of skills to replace their current weapon skills.”
• Rubi Bayer reviews the new information on the Engineer class. “Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 fans, did you love the Commando class? Were you disappointed that it was all an elaborate joke? Did you love the idea of detonating bombs, flinging grenades, and setting mines in Guild Wars 2? Well, this is going to be a good day for you, because ArenaNet has announced the seventh profession: the Engineer. While it’s not the Commando class per se, the Engineer is described as “a master of mechanical mayhem” and looks to be the class that will fulfill all of your most explosive gameplay wishes.”
• Wartower.de interview with Eric Flannum and Jon Peters. “Engineer technology really developed with the Charr first and foremost. And its one of the specialties developed by the Charr Iron Legion. When we talk about the Engineer he is very much a Combat-Engineer and good in inventing things that are useful in a combat situation. The Iron Legion is the start of all of this, and the Engineer profession has spread to the other races from there. The People of Tyria have seen it in combat over the past few years and have seen the effectiveness of an engineer. And so you are going to see Engineers of all races although it is a little bit more common to see a Charr Engineer than anybody else. So it all started with the Charr and their technological development.”
• Kotaku.com looks at the new Engineer. “In some fantasy role-playing games, engineering bombs, guns, and useful gadgets is nothing more than a novel crafting skill. In Guild Wars 2, it’s a way of life. Let’s meet the game’s newly-revealed Engineer. While other classes rely on their magic or physical prowess to survive the harsh environs of Tyria some 250 years after the events of the original Guild Wars, the Engineer relies on his or her mechanical know-how to fill the many roles asked of a character in Guild Wars 2. How does a mechanical genius survive on the battlefield? I suppose the bombs help.”
• Strategy Informer’s interview with Eric Flannum & Jon Peters. “Our engineers are very much combat engineers so they have a lot of ways to do damage. Like all of our professions, and I think this is especially true of the engineer, we try to make different play styles available to them and allow players to switch between each of them rather quickly. In one moment an engineer might be utilising the health kit, dispensing med-packs and healing team mates and then the next switching to the mine kit where you can throw out mines to secure and area before detonating them. In another minute you could switch to your rifle and dual pistols and be able to do more damage dealing. If monsters are right up in your face you can switch to the bomb kits which, unlike grenades which have to been throw out, can place a variety bombs at your feet. This can turn the engineer, if you want to think of it in a traditional MMO sense, into a point blank area of effect character. “
• Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s fans’ Q&A with Martin Kerstein. “Q: What’s the endgame looking like, what kind of raids and dungeons are we looking at? Martin Kerstein: Eric said it and I reiterated it over the weekend, but our end game begins at level 1. What other MMOs do is basically get you to level 80 or 90 or whatever the max is, and then you have to abandon the game that you have played, because what’s the traditional endgame is a completely separate game. So you play the whole time, level your character up to a certain point, and then a new game begins. So we don’t want to force people to play something that they might not even enjoy because it’s not what they were doing before. So if you like our dynamic events, they will be there all the time, and they will still be there when you reach max level, with really challenging stuff. If you like the dungeons, great! We have challenging dungeons at the end. If you like PvP, we have world vs world PvP where you can even level the whole way up to 80 without even touching PvE. So we want to provide people endgame content that is actually catering to the style they like to play, and that’s why we say our endgame begins at level 1.”
• GuildMag: Technological Advancement in the Engineer. “The Engineer was both the best- and worst-kept secret of the Guild Wars 2 profession lineup. It was the best because, unlike the other professions, we didn’t know what it was going to be until a leak a few hours before the official release, as ArenaNet had been canny about giving practically no hints that could confirm it — even if some are of the ‘obvious in hindsight’ nature (for instance, I think we can say we now know Kranxx’s profession in Ghosts of Ascalon). However, it was also the worst because despite this, pretty much all of the engineer’s features had been predicted before release. While there was still some reasonable doubt (and, it has to be said, a lot of unreasonable doubt) that it was actually in, wading through the profession speculation threads will reveal turrets, a variety of explosives, advanced weapon kits (although apparently we’ve missed out on the charrzooka), medical concoctions and exotic ammunition loads for firearms. All in all, it seems a success for the community’s speculation engine.”