Guild Wars 2 by ArenaNet and NCSoft

Guild Wars 2 promises to be a completely different game from the original Guild Wars offering.

ArenaNet has managed to eliminate all the usual sources of griefing and that's a pretty good achievement. ArenaNet has implemented a Diminishing Returns system to moderate their already meager rewards; I believe the intent is to encourage more players to use the Gem Shop to buy Gold. Many players were doing short dungeon runs in order to avoid some of the harder content, and farm the dungeon reward tokens. ArenaNet felt that this was an exploit and changed the system so that tokens would only be rewarded upon completion of a dungeon path. While many players complained that the dungeon content was too hard, other's said that it was too easy and should not be PUG'able. Many players were greatly disappointed with the PVE campaign ending because the final battle with Zaitan was too easy, although the content leading up to it was still pretty difficult. Many of the problems and bugs that plagued the game's launch have been fixed. The Black Lion Trading post works passingly well after being taken down often for optimization, it's not 100% perfect but it mostly works. Economic conditions have driven most sell orders down, and buy orders up so that there is not much margin for flipping items. In order to flip items successfully you have to beat the 15% sales tax imposed on all Black Lion transactions. The prices of Legendary pre-cursor weapons has skyrocketed, these items can only be obtained randomly by doing Mystic Forge combines, some players have dropped large sums of gold into the Mystic Forge without success. It's also required that you gamble on the Mystic Forge to obtain Mystic Clovers, another ingredient in the Legendary Weapon recipe which may require large amounts of Karma to fulfill. While the crafting of a Legendary Weapon is supposed to be a long-term endeavor, and the main portion of the end-game PvE content, a number of players have already managed to obtain them. After one player managed to reach level 80 in less than 35 hours, by training tradeskills, the Chef tradeskill was nerfed.  Before the cooking nerf a player could master the Chef trade by investing around 1 gold and 3000 karma in materials. After the cooking nerf, many of the materials that could be bought with karma where changed to be mob drops only, which means that you'd have to buy them from other players off the TP. This has increased the cost of training the Chef Trade considerably.

GW2 has a persistent game world and the community will be divided up across several different servers; this is completely different from GW which had instanced combat zones, you could only meet other players within cities, and the world appears as a single server world. One clear advantage that GW had over other games is that the mobs in their combat areas would not respawn, the zones could be completely cleared which was called vanquishing if done in Hard Mode. In GW2 there will be large scale PvP battlegrounds, where servers compete against one another. They call this World versus World versus World because there will be 3 servers connected to each battleground. The battleground will be divided into 4 zones, 3 of the zones will be the entry areas for each server, and there will be one common battlezone connecting the other 3 areas. These PvP battlegrounds will include some NPCs, fortifications to fight over and sources of "supply". Supply is a commodity that will be used to construct siege engines and repair battlements of a fortress. Among the siege engines available are the catapult and trebuchet, it will require a blueprint which may be purchased for gold, plus an amount of "supply" to construct these. I have seen several other games that featured large scale battles between players and they generally don't work very well, bringing many players into a single area usually creates a lot of lag problems. It remains to be seen if ArenaNet has managed to overcome these sorts of issues with their game engine and servers.

Instead of having a series of static quests, GW2 will feature Event areas. When the players approach an Event area they may engage in a quest-like activity which may succeed or fail, depending on the outcome a new event may become available in the same area. From previewing game videos it can be seen that there will be many large scale mobs and boss battles featuring extra large mobs, ArenaNet has made an effort to place end-game style epic content throughout the game at all levels of experience. The 8 professions may be advanced up to 80 levels, but they will supposedly reach a plateau of power much earlier.

The 8 Professions are:

• Mesmer
• Engineer
• Thief
• Guardian
• Necromancer
• Ranger
• Warrior
• Elementalist

It's notable that there is no dedicated healing class and it has been suggested that all classes can engage in a tanking or support role.

Among the different weapon types available in the game, guns will now be included and primarily used by the Engineer class and also the Thief.

Your equipped skill set will change depending on the type of weapon you are wielding, and may be switched by changing weapons. In addition to the 5 skills which depend on your equipped weapon there will be a self-healing skill for all classes and several selectable elite skills. The elementalist has an additional level of complexity in their skill set because they can chose between 4 different elements; fire, water, earth and air magic. When a player is defeated in battle they will not die immediately, instead they enter a downed state and can be revived from this condition by any player.  Some of the player skills will create a ground-targeted area of effect, such as a wall of fire for example. When normal attacks pass through one of these areas they can pick up an extra effect; for example, arrows fired though a wall of fire will become flaming arrows.

As of March 2012 ArenaNet has run a number of closed beta events, during a 48-hour signup period for beta-testers in March they reached 1-million applicants.

On April 10th copies of the game became available for pre-purchase, and of course pre-purchasing the game includes a number of perks.

There are two digital download versions available, including the standard version and a deluxe version including some additional in-game items.

Certain retailers are carrying a pre-purchase package for the standard or collectors edition retail boxes.

Pre-purchasing the game on April 10th will entitle the player to participate in all beta-events up to the game's release date, and get a 3-day headstart.

Optionally some stores may be offering pre-orders of the game which will not charge the full retail price to reserve a copy; players that pre-order this way will get a 1 day headstart.

I'm definitely planning to play this game and I will likely pre-purchase the collectors edition on April 10th. The purchase of the client software is all that is required to play this game, ArenaNet is not charging a subscription fee.

Here is an update on April 10th - The game was made available for pre-purchase from GameStop in the USA. As announced by ArenaNet; Best Buy was also supposed to be carrying the Collector's Edition, however they did not have it in stock on April 10th! ANet has tweeted that Best Buy will be getting some CE's to sell soon without giving a definite date for this. Amazon.com is taking pre-orders on the game which will include a 1-day headstart. I have successfully purchased my copy of the Collector's Edition from GameStop today and registered it with ArenaNet, I am expecting to be included in a beta event before the end of this month. The release date for this game is tentatively stated by GameStop as June 26th; however it may be further delayed depending on how well the betas go.

Here is an update on July 13th - The game will be released officially on August 28th, 2012! August 25th for 3-day headstarters.

The final beta weekend event is scheduled for July 20-22nd.

Link to the offical GW2 Wiki here.

For the most complete list of craftable recipes check the GW2 Wiki link above.

I would like to include links to some additional fansites which provide valuable info about the game.

GW2Codex has a nice map and you can post your builds and rate other player's builds.

GW2Guru features a game forum and database.

The following links are pages on this site.

Inside scoop from the beta-test Weekend event - Norn Elementalist.

GW2 Crafting and Tradeskills.

GW2 Trading Post and Gem Shop.

GW2 Guild Interface.

Class Skill lists have been copied from another source on the web, but I intend to fill out a little more detail.

GW2 Ranger.

GW2 Elementalist.

GW2 Warrior.

GW2 Guardian.

GW2 Mesmer.

GW2 Necromancer.

GW2 Engineer.

GW2 Thief.