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. Third slow news week in a row. This time, the Arenanet folks have been prepping for the G*Star show in Korea, so we’ve got a few new bits from that, but nothing really major.

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.
• The Soapbox: Diagnosing and understanding Girlfriend Syndrome. “You see them more often than you probably want to admit. They’re remarkably easy to spot, most often lower-level characters dressed in the best possible equipment, limply following behind higher-level characters like some sort of ersatz satellite. When you talk to them, they give short answers before the higher-level characters answer everything. You see them trudging along, going through the motions, but not showing any signs of interest. You’ve witnesses someone suffering from Girlfriend Syndrome.”
• Guild Wars Review: Eye of the North Review. “Eye of the North was released four years ago and was the final expansion for Guild Wars. In our latest review, MMORPG.com’s Som Pourfarzaneh checks out Eye of the North and offers his thoughts on how it holds up after four years. Read on and then offer your thoughts in the comments.”

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.
• Gwen fan tribute video. Discussion of the video.
• Guild Wars 2 Live – The Lore of Guild Wars – Episode 1. “We spent 3 months on and off, mostly off, working on this short video. Guild Wars‘s story was never told this strongly, especially when Prophecies was first released. We hope this will help some people see the bigger picture in Guild Wars and for those who are new to the world, more appreciation for where Guild Wars 2 is coming from.”

Part 3: Guild Wars 2 news

• Guild Wars 2 Interviews: Exclusive: Jon Peters Interview. “On Friday, Jon Peters updated the Guild Wars 2 blog with a slew of new changes to the game’s pet system, the engineer’s tool-belt, and gave us some revealing info on the cross-profession combos. We caught up with Jon to ask him a few questions about each.”
• Flameseeker Chronicles: C-C-C-Combo maker. “Sing hallelujah, for the Guild Wars 2 news drought is over! (The information gates may now slam shut for another excruciating period of time, but I’m choosing not to think about that.) Jon Peters brought us all sorts of exciting information on pets, Engineer changes, and cross-profession combos last week on the ArenaNet blog. Now that we’ve had some time to absorb the news and talk it over, I wanted to take some time to look at it more closely, particularly the cross-profession combos. Follow along after the jump and let’s get started!”
• The Feral Engineer – Tool Time with the Engineer’s Tool Belt. “In the last two days, Arena.Net released some outstanding news about updates to the Engineer profession. These changes focus solely around the Tool Belt as well as a new skill that has not been seen (but no name, just a description). Now, normally I would be writing about Audio Engineering this week, but with this news being so recent and The Engineer is the inspiration for the Blog in the first place, I figured I would put it off a week to focus on this wonderful update on the Engineer.”
• Guild Wars 2 @ G*Star. “If you haven’t been keeping up with the news lately, ArenaNet is planning on “unveiling” Guild Wars 2 to the Asian market at G*Star this weekend.”
• Regina Buenaobra posts some clarifications on the GW2 G*Star demo. “Hey everyone, I’m seeing a bit of confusion about the G-Star demo. Given that this demo is being presented in Asia and that we are further along in development, we have been able to add in options that make the game look more visually appealing and we have also tweaked it so that the people attending G-Star will find it approachable.”
• Eric Flannum on the Guild Wars 2 G-Star Demo. “This is a big week for us here at ArenaNet—we’re showing off a brand new demo build of Guild Wars 2 at G-Star, Korea’s premier game show. Since we’re constantly adding to and refining the game, this latest demo build contains some improvements over what we’ve shown publicly in the past. Since most of our Western fans are unlikely able to attend G-Star—and may even have trouble finding Western media sources covering G-Star—we thought we would give you a blog post about the demo and some of the new and improved features that it shows off.”
• Chuck Jackman on Updated Cinematic Conversations. “Hello, my name is Chuck Jackman. I direct the motion capture and animation of the cinematic conversations in Guild Wars 2, and I am here to give you a little insight into the process. What exactly is a cinematic conversation? I’m glad you asked. If you’ve played the Guild Wars 2 demo, you’ve seen the brief cutscenes that take place between the story NPCs and your player character. These are cinematic conversations.”