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. Another quiet week in news.

Part 1: Discussion of previous news

• If you listen to podcasts, you might want to subscribe to the Guildcast weekly podcast
• Reminder: the official Guild Wars 2 wiki is still growing, so it’s worth checking it out now and again for new information.

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.
• Guild Wars now has an official support forum. Here is the FAQ for the forums.

Part 3: Guild Wars 2 news

• Guild Wars 2 Expansion Formula. “While in ANet’s first guild wars, we had 3 expansions: Factions, Nightfall and GWEN. While in order to be competitive within the game to its highest level, a player must own all the expansions in order to gain access to vital skills; if a player only owned any single one of these games, he would still be able to play this expansion as a standalone game. However for Guild Wars 2, Eric Flannum, a lead designer of GW2, stated ‘”At this time we don’t plan to continue with the standalone expansion model. We felt that this model split our player base unnecessarily and also caused us to focus development effort on things that were redundant with the original release of the game such as tutorial areas and duplicates of already existing skills.””
• Flameseeker Chronicles: Let’s talk business “Some of what I had to say prompted some heavy discussion in the comments, including my opinion that GW2 will have less competition thanks to the business model. Now, 95% of the time I laugh and move on when someone tells me that my opinions are wrong; after all, they are my opinions. It’s not really a question of right or wrong. The other five percent of the time, someone will make an eloquent, well-thought-out opposing case that makes me sit back and reconsider what I’ve been thinking. I usually won’t be completely swayed to an opposing opinion, but sometimes it can open my eyes to the merits of a different viewpoint and leave me feeling that there are some good things to be said for it.”
• Part 2 of Gamerzines‘ interview with Eric Flannum. “We have two very distinct types of PvP in Guild Wars 2. First we have what we call “competitive” PvP which features small teams matched against each other. In this type of PvP players are all on an even footing, having access to the same skills and abilities as every other player. The only progressions featured in this type of PvP are purely cosmetic upgrades. Then we have World vs. World PvP (WvW), which features full player progression and levelling. In this type of PvP, players are transported to a large area of the world where they take part in a multi-week persistent match against two other worlds (what you might call servers in another game). This match features castle sieges, supply lines, and lots of objectives of varying size. “
• An Arenanet writer talks about what it’s like to be a writer at a gaming company. Other than the gaming part of it, it sounds pretty much like being a technical writer at any other kind of software company (which I’ve done for many years). In short, even though you’re working on a game, you’re still working. “Well, that’s a big question. It’s a job, first and foremost, and you have to approach it professionally. From the outside, it may look like we have TONS of fun and goof off all the time, but that’s an illusion. It is tons of fun, but it’s also tons of work, long hours and strange hours sometimes. Working for a game company requires a lot of dedication. You have to be available to work long hours, especially during crunch time. Crunch time happens in the final stages before the game is supposed to ship. It can last as long as a year prior to shipping, as everyone hunkers down and works like mad to implement all the great ideas we came up with in the first stages of design. It can be very stressful, which is why it’s so important to remain professional even though the people you work with are friends too. “
• The mostly harmless Quaggan. “Their dual nature came from a concern that, being so cute and cuddly, they would never survive in a deadly outer world. That was when we hit on the idea of their hulking out — “Do not make quaggan angry. You would not like quaggan when quaggan is angry.” This brought about the wide-jawed, fang-faced version of the quaggans and, with it, a new question: why wouldn’t the quaggans just be quaggan hulks all the time? In a case of art informing lore, we determined that quaggans were embarrassed by this violent behavior. That self-consciousness led to further developments of quaggan attitudes about the individual and community, and the foundations of their society were born. In large part because of those unique societal norms, quaggans are one of the few races in the game that have a distinct speaking style, but that distinction can be difficult. Simply replacing every personal pronoun with “quaggan” is a challenge to clarity. Thankfully, teeth and all, quaggans remain our most cuddly race, so the hard work is easy to endure.”
• Kill Ten Rats: The need for Ewoks. “They are the mostly harmless species of lovable, cuddle-able, wuvabl… I mean, my charr warrior will occasionally do a drive-by fistpound on these beluga muffins.”
• Official Guild Wars 2 media asset kit. “ArenaNet is pleased to provide the Guild Wars 2 Asset Kit, a collection of visual assets related to the upcoming Guild Wars 2. This material is intended to help you communicate information about Guild Wars 2 and to create compelling content related to the game. If you’re looking for official GW2 visuals for your blog, fan site, website, magazine, publication, or project, these graphics are here for your use.”