Guild Wars 2 Preview, Closed Beta This Year, No Evil Microtransactions

Eurogamer is offering some ample coverage for ArenaNet’s sequel to Guild Wars recently, like this three-page preview they’ve published today, which comes with an included Q&A with lead content designer Colin Johanson, from which we take our customary snippet:

Johanson deftly deflects any questions surrounding release with the air of a man who may have been asked this question once or twice already over the weekend. “We’re going to go with a closed beta before the end of this year for sure,” he says.

“Based on the outcome of that closed beta, that’ll determine our open beta schedule. Based on the outcome of the open beta, we’ll determine the release date. We really don’t know when open beta or release is going to be, because we want to be able to have the time to react to things.”

…

Eurogamer: What’s the most people you can have doing a dynamic event?

Colin Johanson: It depends. They differ. They can go higher [than 100], they can go much lower too. Technically there’s not a cap, but there’s a point where the event stops scaling to support those people. Any number of people can do an event, it’s just going to stop creating additional content to support the number of players that are there.

If you’re fighting a giant dragon, certainly 100 players or more can participate, and the boss would recognise that and scale to match.

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Eurogamer: Can you unlock skills by killing bosses?

Colin Johanson: Right now you don’t. That’s subject to change, but right now skills aren’t currently learned from killing bosses, no.

Aside from their preview, they also bring news that ArenaNet has vowed to never sell anything that could make a character more powerful via the micro-transaction cash shop:

“Correct, there is a cash shop that we run for the game,” Guild Wars 2 lead content designer Colin Johanson told us at the Eurogamer Expo 2011.

“One really important thing to note is, we don’t ever sell anything in there that makes your character more powerful. That’s really important to us.

“We like to do the – we like to call it the Is it Evil? test. Every micro-transaction that we do in the game, we have everyone in the company look at it and say Is it Evil? Is it really something we should be selling?