Guild Wars 2 Preview

GameSpy has conjured up a two-page preview of Guild Wars 2, based on what they learned about the sequel during a phone call with ArenaNet co-founders Jeff Strain and Mike O’Brian.

One of the major new additions to Guild Wars 2 is persistent world areas. The original game was entirely instanced which, according to the ArenaNet team, did wonders for their ability to tell a story (there’s a major event in the middle of the original game that completely alters the world forever). “What you lose in an entirely instanced game is a lot of social opportunities,” Mike O’Brian said. “There’s a lot to be said for running into the same people over and over again. If you run with a pick-up group and you never meet them again, it can make a completely instanced game a very lonely experience.” While Guild Wars 2 will contain a lot of instanced mission content, it will also sport a lot of shared landscape and will also be divided up into different servers filled with smaller groups of people in the manner of traditional MMOs.

Strain is quick to emphasize that that doesn’t mean that players will be ghettoized into their own unique shards. “We’re doing this to create more of a neighborhood feeling,” Strain said. “But we also want people to be able to switch worlds easily and also interact with players from other worlds.” In order to do this, the team is introducing a big addition to the game’s lauded PvP systems called “World PvP.”