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 links with folks just catching up from last week’s events at PAX.

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 Guild Wars Beyond material, keep this page bookmarked.
• Reminder: Guild Wars official support forum. Here is the FAQ page for the forums.

Part 3: Guild Wars 2 news

• Gamers: Eric Flannum interview.
• Talk Tyria: GW2 PAX day 1. “The first day of the Penny Arcade Expo is winding down, and what a day it has been! ArenaNet and Guild Wars 2 are a major presence at this convention – between the panels that seem to be constantly running in room 2B, the massively popular PvP matches at the Alienware booth, the Guild Wars 2 booth itself, and the advertisements and t-shirts everywhere, it seems like one can hardly turn around without being reminded that Seattle is Arenanet’s ‘hood.”
• Guild Wars Insider: Guild Wars 2 Community Manager Panel.
• Talk Tyria: PAX Day 2. “It’s been mentioned that some classes, like the guardian and the engineer, can take a bit more finesse and mastery to play to their fullest extent than other, possibly more straight-forward, classes. From my experience, and the experience of a few other fans I spoke with, that’s very much the case. I enjoyed the engineer, but I was never expecting it to be my favored class anyway, and I think it’d take a while longer playing the game to get really comfortable with the profession. That said, I did very much enjoy my time in the land of flamethrowers and equipment packs.”
• Hunter’s Insight: Comprehensive Skill Tip Videos. “To give credit where credit is due, the fine people at RevGaming appear to be the ones responsible for the videos, and if you go by their site you’ll see they already have set up an interesting web interface for creating your own Guild Wars 2 builds. That is to say they help you decide what skills you want on your skill bar.”
• Massively: Guild Wars 2 to allow more open guild membership. “For the average MMO player, this isn’t really news, but for Guild Wars fans, this is huge. As announced during PAX Prime this weekend, Guild Wars 2 will allow multiple guild affiliations on your game account. Each character on that account will still need to belong to the same guilds (as in Guild Wars 1), but with unlimited guilds per account, it allows you to join various groups of friends with the same characters.”
• Massively: Guild Wars 2 to provide private server functionality? “Apparently, ArenaNet’s Colin Johanson and Eric Flannum let slip that GW2 will allow players to ‘create and host their own servers or games with specific rule-sets as well.'”
• Flameseeker Chronicles: PAX 2011 Travel Diary. “Welcome to my own version of post-holiday letdown. Just like last year, PAX is over and I’m a little sad. I’m dead tired, my feet are killing me, and I’m dreading trying to organize and pack the chaos of my hotel room, but I wish it were last Friday morning again. I had meetings that took me all over the show floor during the three days of PAX, but of course my downtime was all about Guild Wars 2: standing in line for demo time, checking out what panels I could, and chatting with the development team. Today’s Flameseeker Chronicles is what I can now call my annual PAX travel diary, so hit the jump and I’ll catch you all up on PAX, ArenaNet style!”
• Kill Ten Rats: Unshackling Guilds. “As I’ve said before, with the mind crush of information coming out of PAX for Guild Wars 2 I have to focus on one feature with laser-like intensity for my sanity and ability to communicerfuffle*error*. Anyway, possibly one of the first features most players think about for Guild Wars 2 is the guilds themselves. We aren’t doing a guildless war, people!”
• Nerd Trek: PAX 2011 Guild Wars 2 panel.
• Lost Pages of Taborea: Customization in Guild Wars 2 and Runes of Magic. “It took me a little while, but you should know by now that I was going to do a Guild Wars 2 comparison. It’s a little later than I previously said I’d write it, but there’s no time like the present, right?”
• Inc Gamers: Interview with Boon Control about PvP. “For those who were following Gamescom 2011, you know that the guild Boon Control was chosen to play demonstration PvP matches against the developers. An interview has surfaced over at Team Legacy that deeply probes how they prepared for these matches, and their impression of what the state of GW2 PvP is. It’s deep and full of great insights!”
• Hunter’s Insight: Asura Guardian skill animations. “I think asura (incoming feature week soon I hope) are really coming around to being one of the most popular races in Guild Wars 2. Kind of unusual considering most small races don’t typically end up being popular. I’ve been generally hearing a buzz around them in the blogosphere however, and frankly, who wasn’t impressed by the asura emote video I posted a while back?”
• MMOrpg.com: Guild Wars 2: The End is Only the Beginning. “It seems that any more, “endgame” is the buzzword whispered by players as they peruse upcoming MMOs…or maybe it’s loudly crowed from the rooftops. In his weekly Guild Wars 2 column, MMORPG.com’s David North takes a look at the endgame and the amount of content that Guild Wars 2 will feature. “
• MMOrpg.com: Guild Wars 2 PAX 2011 – The Whole Package. “At PAX 2011, MMORPG.com Managing Editor Bill Murphy beat a hasty path to Arena.Net’s Guild Wars 2 booth for one of his first interviews. He sat down with Colin Johanson and Eric Flannum to chat about Guild Wars 2 and Bill found out a bunch of terrific information.”
• Bitmob: It’s the Little Things: Telling a personal story in Guild Wars 2. “One of my biggest problems with massively multiplayer online games is the inescapable fact that you’re just a face in a crowd. Sure, you can hit the level cap, adorn your character with all the epic gear, and unlock all the achievements…but you’re still doing what thousands, even millions of others have already done. That’s why I enjoyed my brief hands-on demo of Guild Wars 2 at PAX Prime. It made me feel like my character had a story worth telling…even if I was the only person who ever heard it.”
• Video: Behind the Scenes of German Voice Acting
• Necrobator: A Detailed Look at Lich Form. “It amazes me just how much a single elite can open up a whole new layer of depth in combat, but ArenaNet definitely proved just how powerful elites in Guild Wars 2 will be. Think of it this way – Lich Form offers necros the equivalent of a third weapon set to use in combat, albeit on a longer recharge than normal weapon swaps.”
• Inc Gamers: ArenaNet’s Tirzah Bauer talks Guild Wars 2 Environmental Art. “A new video has been added to G4 which profiles ArenaNet’s Tirzah Bauer. In this video Tirzah talks about her job working as an Environment artist at ArenaNet and what the job actually involves.”
• GuildMag: Guild Wars 2 PvP Walkthrough (with ingame sound) .
• Talk Tyria: Guild Wars 2 PAX Prime Report: Frenzy + Healing Signet. “Another PAX Prime has come and gone from our city of Seattle. Fortunately we managed to avoid the H1Nerd1 outbreak like we had a few years ago but as always, PAX can be a very draining experience. Just like Frenzy + Healing Signet: it’s awesome and hilarious, and probably will leave you wiped. There’s so much to see and so much excitement in the air! NCSoft has always had a large presence at PAX, typically having a large space with huge murals of the games on display along with tons of demo stations. While they did just announce their new MMO Wildstar, GW2 was really the star of the show; so much in fact that it had 3 different locations dedicated to it (Alienware and Logitech). Even with more floor space than probably any other single game aside from Halo, the Guild Wars 2 stations and booths were always completely packed for all three days, literally from opening to closing.”