• 18 multi-level dungeons
• 50 new skills across all 10 Guild Wars professions
• 10 new Heroes
• 40 new armor sets
• New items, weapons, and titles.

With Guild Wars 2 right around the corner, NCSoft and AreaNet have promised that players will be able to transfer the characters they've been working on smoothly from the previous incarnations to the new version with all their accomplishments in tact. I have to commend NCSoft and AreaNet for creating all this new content and continuing to keep it subscription free. After all, you paid for the game, why should you have to pay a monthly fee to actually play it? All of the Guild Wars games, including Eye of the North can be purchased at your local game store or downloaded from the NCSoft Website.

Guild Wars: Eye of the North
Prerelease Bonus Pack to Hit Shelves July 20th
Tuesday 17th July/...NCsoft® Europe and ArenaNet® announced today that the prerelease bonus pack for Guild Wars: Eye of the North™ is set to arrive on retailer's shelves on July 20th and will include a host of compelling features, including exclusive in-game items and access to the Guild Wars: Eye of the North Sneak Peek Weekend set for later this summer.

The Guild Wars: Eye of the North prerelease bonus pack will be available from retailers in North America and Europe as well as at the NCsoft store at PlayNC.com and via the Official Guild Wars online store.

Guild Wars: Eye of the North is the first ever expansion to the subscription-free Guild Wars franchise of fantasy online role playing games, which will be released to the public on August 31, 2007. This expansion will provide new content accessible to players who have any of the previously released Guild Wars campaigns (Guild Wars, Guild Wars: Factions™, or Guild Wars: Nightfall™).

Players who pre-order Guild Wars: Eye of the North will gain access to the Sneak Peek Weekend, August 24-26, 2007, where they will be able to log into the game for a first look at Eye of the North. Players will be able to explore the Far Shiverpeaks region of the world, home of the barbaric Norn. Everything players obtain during the Sneak Peek Weekend, including items, XP, Heroes, and loot, will be permanent and available when the expansion goes live.

The Guild Wars: Eye of the North prerelease bonus pack also comes with exclusive weapons, including the Glacial Blade, the Hourglass Staff, and the Darksteel Longbow. These new weapons are based on the winning designs from the Guild Wars Design-a-Weapon Contest held earlier this year. In addition, the prerelease bonus pack includes a Guild Wars Trilogy Trial DVD that provides access to all three of the Guild Wars campaigns for a special trial promotion lasting 10 hours or 14 days, whichever comes first*.

"We believe this feature-packed prerelease delivers real value to our players," said Mike O'Brien, co-founder of ArenaNet. "From past experience, we expect the Sneak Peek Weekend alone to be hugely popular, and players won't want to miss this chance to get a leg-up before the game goes live."

"Guild Wars has one of the most committed and loyal player bases I've ever seen, and Guild Wars: Eye of the North is our way of delivering prized content to veteran players and creating a link to the future of Guild Wars," said Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet.

Guild Wars: Eye of the North Readies For August 31 Release

NCsoft and ArenaNet set $39.99 price for first ever expansion of Guild Wars franchise

Bellevue, WA., July 2, 2007—NCsoft® and ArenaNet® announced that Guild Wars: Eye of the NorthTM, the first ever expansion to the subscription-free Guild Wars® franchise of fantasy online role-playing games, will be released to the public on August 31, 2007. The Guild Wars: Eye of the North expansion will be available for an expected price of $39.99 in North America and €34.99 in Europe, as well as through the NCsoft store at PlayNC.com and in the Guild Wars in-game store.

Guild Wars: Eye of the North will continue the no subscription fee model pioneered by ArenaNet, and will provide new content accessible to players who own both the expansion and any one of the three previously released Guild Wars campaigns (Guild Wars, FactionsTM, or NightfallTM).

The Guild Wars franchise has sold more than 3.5 million units since the release of the original Guild Wars campaign, in 2005, making it one of the most popular online role-playing games of all time.

Guild Wars: Eye of the North follows up on events told in the original Guild Wars campaign, and is set in previously unexplored areas of the continent of Tyria. The expansion contains a host of new features that will appeal directly to veteran Guild Wars players, including 18 large, multi-level dungeons, 150 new skills across all ten Guild Wars professions, ten new Heroes, 40 new armor sets, and more items, weapons, and titles. Additionally, through the innovative Hall of Monuments, Guild Wars: Eye of the North creates a path for players to carry the legacy of their characters into the upcoming Guild Wars 2. The Hall of Monuments will allow players to preserve their accomplishments and titles from Guild Wars, Factions, and Nightfall, which can then be claimed in Guild Wars 2.

"Guild Wars has one of the most committed and loyal player bases I've ever seen, and Guild Wars: Eye of the North is our way of delivering prized content to veteran players and creating a link to the future of Guild Wars," said Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet.

For more information on the Guild Wars franchise, go to: www.GuildWars.com. The award-winning Guild Wars campaigns can be purchased from retailers or downloaded from the PlayNC store at https://secure.plaync.com/cgi-bin/Store.pl.

The Arena Net guys are messing with me.

Jeff Strain, former Blizzard coder and co-founder of the dev team behind Guild Wars, is clearly enjoying having me on the hook while I'm on the horn.

He's talking up Guild Wars 2 when I break in with the most, I believe, relavent question: Are you going to charge a monthly subscription fee this time around?

"With Guild Wars 2 we will be introducing a persistent world," he says, as almost an excuse. "We will have playable races. Everything you expect in a subscription system..."

He pauses for dramatic effect.

"...and we decided not to charge a subscription fee."

Strain and the people on his side of the phone call break into laughter.

"Funny," I say, genuinely amused.

The phone call is about two things, first that Guild Wars, what NC Soft believes to be the second largest massively multiplayer online game around, is getting a final expansion and that the final expansion will prepare gamers for Guild Wars 2.

Eye of the North
Eye of the North, set to hit this holiday, will be Guild War's first expansion. In the past the games that came out to bolster Guild Wars were all stand-alone titles which while they could be played with the original title, didn't need to be.

This first expansion brings you back to Tyria, the setting and storyline of the original Guild Wars.
In it, Strain says, you will be finding out what happened to some of the storylines and characters that peopled that first game.

The game will feature 18 new multi-level dungeons, 150 new skills across all ten Guild Wars professions, 10 new heroes and 40 new armor sets.

Because the game will require you to own one of the three Guild Wars campaigns the price will be less than a full campaign, Strain said.

Eye of the North, which will take place mostly underground, will also introduce three new races, but they won't be playable, at least not yet.

The Asura are an underground dwelling race that begin to come to the surface. They are ver "goblinesque" and the builders of the Guild Wars world.

The Norn are Viking savages of the mountains and the Sylvari are a kind of forest dwelling race which you witness the birth of the Eye of the North expansion.

While the character races won't be playable in the expansion, they will be in Guild Wars 2 as will the Guild Wars' perpetual enemy, the Charr.

A lot, it seems, that happens in this final expansion is about preparing for the launch of the new Guild Wars.

I asked Strain why Arena Net decided to stop producing expansions and campaigns and instead develop an entirely new game with Guild Wars 2.

Strain said that after shipping the last campaign, Nightfall, this past October the team sat back and evaluated where they were in terms of game design .

When they looked at what they had accomplished with Guild Wars and its campaigns they were happy with what they saw. Then they looked at what their gamers were asking for and it wasn't one more campaign, one more continent to explore, new professions to learn.

"What people wanted, I think, was more content for the existing models," Strain said.

So the team started creating a wishlist of all of the things they'd love to see added to Guild Wars and when they were done they realized it was too much to stuff into the existing game.

Instead it was a master plan for how to build the "ultimate Guild Wars game," Strain said.

But the plan required something to transition current players from the original campaigns into the new experience and, in many ways, that's where Eye of the North comes in.

Most central to that idea is the Eye's Hall of Monuments.

In the hall you can store achievements that can then be transferred to a Guild Wars 2 account.

This hall will be located in a sort of base of operations you can establish in Eye of the North. The instanced base will allow you to store not only the Eye of the North achievements in the form of monuments but the achievements earned in all three campaigns.

Every monument earned will unlock something, from heroes and pets to weapons, clothes and miniatures, in Guild Wars 2.

When you create your character in Guild Wars 2 you can choose a character from Guild War to inherit these unlocks from.

Kind of a neat idea, I think. To bad these new character don't also inherit some other attributes or traits from your Guild Wars characters, that would be fantastic.

Strain said the team decided to include this form of inter-character inheritance to make sure that all of the time players spent playing Guild Wars wouldn't be wasted.

Guild Wars 2
Since the game is essentially starting with a clean slate, Arena Net decided to make some pretty substantive changes to the game.

First, and most importantly though, the game will remain subscription free.

This time around the game will have a persistence world, one still set in Tyria, but now hundreds of years after the events that took place in the original Guild Wars.

"The big new feature is a persistent world," Strain said. "I think Guild Wars has some very radical departures from typical role-playng. One of those was the instancing model.

As each of the campaigns was released we took greater and greater pains to do that.
On the other hand, there are things we missed out on, like the more organic type of community building where you wandering through the area and hook-up with other people."

"In Guild Wars 2 we wanted to have the best of both worlds. We are retaining the strengths of instanced areas, but we are also integrating a persistenced world. We are not making a World of Warcraft clone here, we are not trying to do what other MMOs have done."

Arena Net's new spin is sort of an amalgam of both instanced and massive environments, where instanced events can have domino effects on other parts of the world, or zone..

Here's one example of this Strain used:

You are wandering through the countryside and you see a dragon flying overhead. You and a group try to stave off the dragon. If you are successful the nearby town gives you a treasure.

But if you don't drive off the dragon, the bridge will be destroyed. This will lead to a team of carpenters gathering at the bridge to try to fix it and then you will have to protect them from bandits.

"The idea is that there will always be something going on in the world," Strain said.

He said that there will be hundreds of these types of events that happen in the world, some daily, some hourly, some will be triggered by specific player actions.

"That is what persistence allows us to do. That is the type of content and play experience that we can offer in Guild Wars 2 that we couldn't offer in Guild Wars."

Another major change will be in the way the game handles player versus player.

In Guild Wars 2, the same character you use in-game will be used for player-versus-player conflicts that will take place in the Mists, the place between the many worlds, aka servers, of this new Guild Wars. Despite having several worlds, the game uses a global database so you can instantly transfer between worlds, Strain said.

And these inter-world battles in the Mists, which Strain says almost play like a large real-time strategy game, can have a real impact on the worlds.

"By achieving victories in these battles there will be benefits to your world," Strain said. "Bonuses, advantages, maybe everyone gets increased energy regeneration or healing rate or enhanced loot drop rate."

Strain says the world-versus-world match-ups will be shuffled every couple of weeks to make sure things stay fair.

Every week or every two weeks we will shuffle who is matched up.

Arena Net, it seems, is trying to tackle many of the biggest drawbacks most current massively multiplayer online games face. Chief among them is level capping. Why, once you top out, should you stick around in a game?

Guild Wars 2 is trying to deal with that issue by using a system with a high level cap once that could be set to 100 or even boundless.

"So there is not a level 20 cap," Strain said. "Either it will be a high level like 100 or unbounded, we haven't decided."
Besides these significant changes to the game, Guild Wars 2 will also introduce plenty of smaller ones, like the ability for your characters to do things like jump, swim, even climb trees.

The combat though, Strain says, will remain purely RPG

"Our belief is that role players aren't playing a RPG because they want a twitch action," Strain said, "there is a difference between playing a game like an RPG and playing a game like God of War."

Guild Wars 2 is expected to hit public beta next year, but now release date has yet been set.