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. Lots of information this week as a result of last week’s Press Day and Fan Day events.

I got a few comments from non-gaming folks that these posts can get too long to scroll past, so it’s now in the extended post below.

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.
• Further discussion on Engineer skills. “What’s different about an Engineer, and it’s something I have never seen in any MMO prior to Guild Wars 2, is the way in which they use their utility skills to completely change how the profession itself is played. For example, with a Rifle equipped, I have the five abilities mentioned above on my 1-5 keys. On my 7-9 keys, I have utility belts and satchels (like Batman’s) that, when used, will change all of my 1-5 abilities to something new, because they’re changing the weapon that’s equipped. The closest thing I can compare it to is changing druid forms in World of Warcraft, but as you’ll see, the two are not exactly similar.”

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 page for the forums.
• Rubi’s guide to the Dragon Festival from last year (just in case you haven’t experienced it before).

Part 3: Guild Wars 2 news

• More tweets from last week’s GW2 fan day:

The fans got further through the explorable dungeon than the press did yesterday. #GW2FanDay ~RB

You know who’s awesome? @bsoltan is awesome. Why? Because of this: http://bsoltan.imgur.com/ #gw2fanday

Now the fans are in for a special treat. Tour of audio booths & their voices will be the first sounds recorded at the studio! #GW2FanDay ~RB

We will record background crowd noises and our guests will get their voices in the game. =) #GW2FanDay ~RB

.@KTR_Ravious: Log out with one character in a party, and log back in with another character still staying in the party! Nice feature.

. @ramondomke was such a good screamer, our audio guy requested a solo recording with him. #GW2FanDay ~RB

Our guests now get to play through some of the Winds of Change content as a special sneak peek for this upcoming update. #GW #GW2FanDay ~RB

We have three short #GW2FanDay videos for you: http://cot.ag/mxOitZ http://cot.ag/l7NIpA http://cot.ag/mjY683 ~RB

While our #GW2FanDay guests take a little break, I uploaded a couple hundred pictures to our Flickr stream: http://cot.ag/kTxQe6 ~RB

RT @NeoNugget I want to squeeze it. twitpic.com/5giwlz

[Neo]Swag given at #GW2FanDay. Skill pins, GW1 art books, mouse pad, oodles of signed art, a shirt,postcards, ect. http://yfrog.com/kk97lwj

#Gw2fanday tin transmutation stones cost 300 karma and work on items up to level 20. Iron 600, 30

#GW2Fanday Crowning event of the day; being in the first group to EVER complete the dungeon in EXPLORABLE mode… without cheating.

The amazing five – the first team outside the dev team that defeated the dungeon on exploration mode. #gw2fanday http://twitpic.com/5gi9gk

• A narrative about the Guild Wars 2 Fan Day. “I’ve returned from Bellevue, WA where I attended the GW2 Fan Day at ArenaNet’s brand new studio. I know that there has been a lot of twitter feed about our activities but I find twitter to be so disjointed. I’d like to present a full narrative of the trip.”
• Kill Ten Rats: GW2 Fan Day Winds of Change. “What I am really enjoying about the design goals for Winds of Change is that the Live Team has put a lot of heart in to making a player’s impact on the world actually seen. For example, players can apparently rid the explorable areas of Afflicted (their spawns will be replaced by “something else”). They have also hidden quite a number of scenes in the explorable areas, which are used to respond to characters completing quests. For my made-up example, a player could stumble upon a scene of Cantha citizens discussing the Ministry of Purity’s response to that “something else.” I have been wanting this level of impact ever since ArenaNet discussed having a persistently destroyed bridge in the explorable areas.”
• Neo Nugget’s GWFanDay write up. “This write-up will basically be a basic overview of our my entire day at ArenaNet, with links to some of the more detailed write-ups from some of the other Fan Day attendees.”
• Talk Tyria: Welcome to the dungeons. “My experience of going through the Catacombs dungeon at ArenaNet’s recent Fan Day was perhaps the single most enlightening experience of the entire wonderful day . It had everything — the companionship, the fun, and the visible fulfillment of many promises and bold statements on behalf of the developers. It was, effectively, a microcosm of the event as a whole: in it, one could find all the elements which defined the success of the entire venture.”
• More about underwater combat, including a 20 minute developer demo video.
• Guild Wars 2 Dungeons update. “Each of our dungeons is divided into story and explorable versions. The story version of each dungeon comes first, and completing it unlocks the ability to run the explorable version. In turn, the explorable versions of the dungeons have several options (usually three), each of which creates a different set of challenges and goals in the game. So, when we say that there are currently eight dungeons, we really mean there are thirty-two dungeons, as each dungeon has a story version and three explorable versions.”
• Guild Wars 2: Changing the Game. “From what I played, (an early dungeon in story mode), the encounters seem well designed, requiring frequent shifting of skill sets. My group consisted almost entirely of Engineers and we were still able to plough through after a few embarrassing wipes. Enemies would sometimes trigger area of effect attacks and we’d have to roll out of the way. We had to get used to the idea of setting up a mixture of healing and offensive turrets. We had to revive each other in the field, simply by holding a key down near a corpse. Even though there wasn’t a true tank, we gradually sank into specific roles: the flamethrower Engineer, the rifle Engineer, the Engineer that drops health packs, the one that goes crazy with mines. Then if bosses did something like spawn hordes of trash mobs to distract us, we could all flip over to flamethrowers to burn them into oblivion before switching back to preferred weapons or kit skill sets. “
• Guild Wars (and Guild Wars 2) and Me. “You see, I reached a miserable point where I’d played Guild Wars so much — I completed almost every quest that existed in the game, up to and through the Guild Wars: Nightfall expansion — that I went a little nuts. I made a rather emotion-fueled blog post over at 1UP.com (where I was employed at the time), which I became somewhat infamous for in the Guild Wars community. I quit the game in a huff, and I never really mended my relationship with it; Guild Wars: Eye of the North (the game’s last proper expansion) failed to win me back, and that was that.”
• Guild Wars 2 Guru interviews Jonathan Sharp. “Q: Outside of burning buildings and siege weapons, how are environmental objects such as buildings, trees, gates, etc. used in dynamic events? They won’t always be in need of defense or repair or putting out, will they? A: Sometimes they can be destroyed so you’d have to repair those as well. Sometimes they can block the way and need to be blown up, sometimes you’ll need to repair a bridge to be able to use it again. In World vs. World we have a lot of areas where most of the props can be destroyed — they can be knocked down, they can be repaired by the players. You can set up seige weapons to attack and then set up defensive seige weapons to defend against those as well. In events we sometimes have that, but not as extensive as in World vs. World.”
• Flameseeker Chronicles: Why you need to play Guild Wars right now. “The Guild Wars 2 Catacombs dungeon is what changed my mind, honestly. If you haven’t yet, take a look at the intro cinematic. This is what players will see upon entering the Catacombs dungeon in Guild Wars 2. If you’ve not played Guild Wars 1, this is a good introduction to the backstory so you know what’s happening. You get some great voice acting, cool art, and a little heads-up on what you’re going to find when you head down there. It’s pretty impressive stuff. Now let’s look at it from the perspective of a Guild Wars 1 fan. We lived some of this history; we were there. We saw the destruction of Ascalon at the hands of the Charr. We watched Adelbern progress from determination to frustration to rage, to the point of disowning his son. When we heard about the Foefire later, it wasn’t really implausible because we’d seen the writing on the wall. We’d watched Adelbern become someone who would conceivably be willing to destroy the whole thing rather than abandon it to the Charr.”
• GuildMag: Watery Depths and Hints of Things to Come. “With the unveiling of underwater combat mechanics during Fan Day, it’s probably no coincidence that the last two races revealed have been two with whom we’ll be sharing the deeps. They cover two ends of the spectrum — the aggressive, omnicidal krait on one side, and the pacifistic quaggan on the other. Within a fortnight of the last reveal John Peters, has given our first tour of a quaggan village (courtesy of Gamespot), as part of their presentation of underwater combat and environments. Interestingly, while we’ve known from the quaggan article that a friendly relationship had been established between the Krytan crown and the quaggans, this tour has shown just how close this relationship is, with the quaggans occupying an underwater cave almost directly below the Ascalon Settlement. It appears that humans and quaggan may have come to an agreement to intersperse their territory, with each occupying places that are unsuitable for the other.”
• Kill Ten Rats: #GW2Fanday – The Dungeon Gel. “Guild Wars 2 dungeons were one of the big presentation points during the ArenaNet Community Open House (and the press event the day before). I was very excited about this because the dungeon content would have us working in teams, instead of our open world meanderings. In an MMO without healers, it would be interesting to see how this content was designed. ArenaNet told us at the start to choose whatever profession (class) we wanted without regard to our teammates’ choices. Could we really succeed without even talking to each other about our group makeup?”
• Designing Guild Wars 2, part 1. “Apparently, making an MMO is not easy. I can’t see why, thousands of players, constant updates, exhaustive levelling, loot and guild systems… sounds easy if you ask me. Despite that, we sat down once again with ArenaNet’s Eric Flannum, lead game designer on Guild Wars 2, to chat about how the MMO space has changed since the first Guild Wars, how the team generate new ideas and the difficulty in making each player feel unique and valued.”
• Designing Guild Wars 2, part 2. “I think MMOs have two primary stigmas attached to them that non-MMO gamers hear and drives them away. The first one is the ‘grind’, the idea that you’re going to have to do a repetitive task over and over again… we wanted to eliminate that. Our levelling curve, for example, increases gradually until you reach about level 30 when it completely flattens out and takes about an hour and a half to progress through each level thereafter. So, to get from 30 to 31 is about an hour and a half, to get from 68 to 69 is about an hour and a half. We think that any longer and things start to feel a little ‘grindy’. The second thing we wanted to eliminate was the sense that you have to invest in an MMO like it’s your job, that MMOs are this deadly serious business. A lot of players are just not interested in that level of commitment, they have a day job and they don’t want to feel like ‘I’m the designated healer in my party and if I don’t show then I’m letting everybody down’ when they get home.”
• Game Reactor: The Catacombs of Ascalon. “One of the things I really enjoyed was the fact that it wasn’t filled with enemies. Looking back at dungeons in games like World of Warcraft, they are usually filled to the brim with groups of enemies that needs to be pulled and killed. Anyone remember Sethekk Halls from The Burning Crusade, or Drak’Tharon Keep from Wrath of the Lich King, just to mention two out of the whole bunch? Group upon group of what is usually referred to as trash mobs that need to be burned through before getting to the bosses. And we all know that MMO players go into dungeons mostly to punch the loot pinatas.”
• Pushing boundaries: exploration in Guild Wars 2. “If I could pick one thing from Prophecies that I felt was the epitome of what made that first campaign so memorable for me, it was the openness of it all. Even for a game that had no persistence, there’s always been -so much- to explore and discover. In fact, as recently as earlier this year, as I began to make more headway into getting my Hall of Monuments filled, I was discovering outposts and missions in Tyria I had no idea even existed.”
• Horia Dociu talks about how GW2 cinematics are produced. “These cinematics play at the key moments of the story mode in each of the eight dungeons in Guild Wars 2, setting the mood and delivering valuable info. Stylistically, we’re pushing the concept of a visual storybook as a form of communicating to the player — we want the cinematics to feel like moving paintings. There were a lot of technical challenges we had to overcome to achieve the deceptively simple and elegant look of our painterly, storybook cinematics. Our cut-scenes are rendered in real time and are formatted to allow us to layer both 2D and 3D elements into the mix. In addition to using 3D models to display our main characters and your customized characters, we also apply 3D animation rigs to add motion to 2D elements — anything from flags fluttering in the wind to actual drawn characters. We also make good use of our game’s particle system to animate stylized painted smoke, clouds, or birds in a realistic fashion.”
• A visit to ArenaNet’s “Dynamic” studio. “On Fan Day, we were treated to a tour of ArenaNet’s brand new studio by Mike O’Brien himself. Mike (or Mo as seemed to be his nickname around the studio) is one of the 3 founders of ArenaNet. Even prior to the creation of ArenaNet, Mike was a heavy hitter in the game industry for his work at Blizzard Entertainment. Hopefully I remember enough of the details despite my fangasm haze to share a cohesive story of the new studio with you!”