Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The RPS-chat-room is broke by the cry: “Guild Wars 2 has splendid terrain!”. As we all know terrain is the single most important factor in PC Gaming. As such, I continue to be excited by Guild Wars. The first half of the video is slightly animated versions of the always beautiful Guild Wars concept art, so when the actual game footage arrives… well, it’s both a surprise and a joy. Clearly, I’ve taken a grab from the concept art section to avoid ruining the segue for you. The footage itself follows…
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It’s an anniversary. Four years today the original Guild Wars: Prophecy came out. Seeing this day approaching, we grabbed the chance to have a quick e-mail exchange with designer Eric Flannum about all that time and even let him include “®” symbols in his answers, as the birthday boy can do such things. We also resist trying to make Eric talk about Sacrifice, the other splendid game he was involved with, because this is Guild War’s special day and it’s hardly the time or the place. Questions and answers are found below in an instanced area below.
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Possibly winning some sort of award for longest time between a game’s release and it getting the demo treatment, Guild Wars now has a free trial wotsit. While you need to sign up for NCsoft’s mildly irritating PlayNC master account thinger, you don’t need to give out credit card details. So if you’ve yet to sample Arenanet’s well-received subscriptionless, PvP-heavy fantasy MMO, now’s your chance. Don’t let the fact that only one member of RPS thinks Guild Wars isn’t oddly characterless and overly mechanical stop you. (Pauses for angry protestations). It’s fine! Just not my cup of elf-tea, y’know?

Meantime, has Guild Wars 2 been delayed as a result of publisher NCsoft’s ‘restructuring’? No-one seems entirely sure.

This is a little more tentative than many games we’re talking about in this series. Arenanet have talked about starting to Beta-test thing in late 2008. While that probably won’t be a public, someone will hopefully be playing this before the end of the year. So why, with it that far off, is it worth talking about?

I guess it’s because that, after Guild Wars 2, there’s a chance of everything changing and that nags at me.
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Until you read this anyway.

(That was cheap – Subconscious Ed)

Shuddup. Anyway – Guild Wars: Eye of the North went live this weekend. I’m playing through for a review at the moment, and I had to – due to an Hilarious Internal Communication Error – actually go and buy a copy. This made me pay a little more attention to a Special Offer thing that Guild Wars has been waving in my direction every time I’ve booted it up recently. It’s a free mission pack, set around four sections of the Guild Wars Mythos (We get a Gwen: The College Years mission, basically). You get it when you spend more than Seventeen quid (or twenty-six dollars for our not-getting-abused-due-to-exchange-rate colonial friends) either in the Guild Wars in-game store or the PlayNC store. In other words, buy the expansion pack direct from them and you get extra content the chump in the street doesn’t have. Laugh at the chump in the street! Laugh at him with his sweaty features and charmless, extra-contentless demeanor.

Well, laugh at his sweaty features and charmless extra-contentless demeanor in a few months, as you can’t have it yet. The pack will become available in November to anyone who spends the amount of money before October 31st. In other words, when you can actually have it, it’s too late to actually buy it, and you’re relying on trust that they’re actually going to bother finishing it and not just slack off down the pub. Which is an interesting way to go about things, certainly. More details here.