The nice folks who published Guild Wars five years ago are now preparing Guild Wars 2 for release . . . sometime. No firm release date has yet been revealed. This week, however, has seen a lot of new information released about the upcoming game, including:

• Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto by Mike O’Brien, one of the company founders.
  “So if you love MMORPGs, you should check out Guild Wars 2. But if you hate traditional MMORPGs, then you should really check out Guild Wars 2. Because, like Guild Wars before it, GW2 doesn’t fall into the traps of traditional MMORPGs. It doesn’t suck your life away and force you onto a grinding treadmill; it doesn’t make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun; and of course, it doesn’t have a monthly fee.”
• The first confirmed profession in GW2, the Elementalist. One of the eight professions in the new game (there are ten in GW, so we’re definitely losing at least two of the current ones). Victor’s favourite GW character is his Elementalist. He’s looking forward to finding how the character class has been changed in the new game.
• Some quite substantial changes to the combat system from what we’re used to in GW: Combat, Part 1: Skills and Combat, Part 2: Weapons, Professions and Races. It sounds like the changes are going to make the combat experience a whole lot more interesting (possibly harder to master, but definitely more interesting).
• Five Years in Tyria by James Phinney, a brief tribute to GW on its fifth anniversary.

An interview with some of the developers for Guild Wars 2:

IncGamers recently sat down with Guild Wars 2’s lead designer, Eric Flannum, and fellow designers Curtis Johnson, Jon Peters and Ree Soesbee to talk about the upcoming MMO and answer some of our burning questions.

We talk about the game’s lore, the community, changes to game mechanics, PvP and more. Check it out below:

The most recent trailer showed us GW2’s five races. Does each race have unique abilities, and how important will they be when choosing a character?

Eric Flannum: Each of the five races has unique skills available to them. Our philosophy behind the design of these racial skills is that they are slightly weaker than equivalent skills determined by profession. While they may be less powerful, the racial skills capture the flavor of each race and provide additional options for the player. For example, a human playing a profession that normally doesn’t have a good way of dealing with conditions could take the “Prayer to Kormyr” racial skill, which removes a condition but is a fair bit weaker than comparable skills provided by a profession specializing in condition removal. By doing this, we hope to give the various races access to skills that make them feel unique without making them overpowered when played as a particular profession.

[. . .]

What have you learned from GW1 in terms of management of an online community and about how to structure a game in general?

Eric Flannum: After releasing three full games and an expansion, we’ve learned a lot about community management and game structure. For example, one of the things that seemed like a great idea to us when we first started making GW1 was the unified server for all players. On the surface this seems preferable since it allows people the greatest amount of flexibility when playing with their friends. In practice it means that player community is much harder to build. When playing in a world with hundreds of thousands of players you hardly ever encounter the same people on a regular basis (our heavy use of instancing also had a huge effect on this). Some players also use the large number of players as an excuse to act in a rude manner, knowing that they can’t really gain a negative reputation or ever have to be held accountable by the community for their actions. Of course, breaking things into different servers isn’t magically going to make these issues go away or solve all of our problems, but online games are ultimately all about player communities. Anything we can do to foster healthy and active player communities is a big win for us.

Given the problems I’ve had communicating with other players when they’re not in-game, I’m happy to hear this:

Curtis Johnson: When we made GW1 we knew that guilds and community were essential parts of the online role play experience, so we made it easy to start a guild very early in the game and for players to keep those relationships going by including all their characters in the same guilds. For Guild Wars 2 we’re keeping that same focus on early connections. We’re making it easy to keep all your characters in one guild, but for GW2 we decided that more friends means more fun, so it will be possible to have different characters in different guilds. We also wanted to give guilds more common purpose, so we’re including guild achievements, and placement in the world including guilds holding keeps in World vs World. We also want to make it easier to stay connected with your guild mates, so we’re introducing features like a guild calendar to make meeting and coordinating across time zones easier, and participating in guild chat from any web browser so you can stay in touch even when you can’t play.