Guild Wars 2 Early Development

Take the awesomeness that is "Guild Wars," improve every aspect of it even more, and be willing to rebuild it from the ground up. Swirl in a lot of passion and you get the core principle of developing "Guild Wars 2."

Play NC's dev corner features an in-depth look at the early development stages of the next GW installment care of ArenaNet's James Phinney. Among the many points of accomplishments, include:

- Creating an immense freedom of movement allowing players to explore their environment freely, while maintaining its status as a hack-proof game. Yes, that includes jumping and swimming!
- Giving more common opportunities to meet with other players.
- Giving players the option to choose from multiple playable races.
- Giving players deeper options for character advancement.
- Making everything about Guild Wars better - PvP, PvE, storage...you name it.

Improving graphics and gameplay to further maintain the beauty of GW is a must. With the hindrance of backward-compatibility with the original GW engine gone, we can definitely expect wonderful things. GW2 will maintain its gameplay easibility with streaming updates, instant map travel, character templates, account-wide storage, etc. allowing players to essentially continue to play the way they want. GW will continue it's no monthly fee decree. I'm sure we all enjoy actually owning a game after we've bought it, so that won't change.

The GW world has been built to accommodate the use of third-party applications for voice chat. No word yet if this will be maintained, or if GW2 will have a built-in chat with voice capability. In the end, either way works for me.

Good things are brewing beyond Tyria. I can't wait to play it.