Guild Wars Holiday event includes 5 free hours of Eye of the North and Triple XP

Starting today at noon, and lasting for 10 days, Guild Wars players can try out Guild Wars: Eye of the North for free for five hours. Also, the level requirement to play Eye of the North has been lowered from 20 to 10 to make it easier for players to access the exciting content in Guild Wars first true expansion. To help players be competitive in the level-20 plus world of Eye of the North, players at levels 10-19 will be buffed up to in order to go toe-to-toe with the new content.

Additionally, to help celebrate the holidays, players in Eye of the North will receive:

- Triple experience from all primary storyline quests in Eye of the North.

- Double the chance to receive rare items from chests, and triple the drop rate of Lockpicks in Eye of the North.

- Double gold and experience rewards for vanquishing Eye of the North explorable areas while playing in Hard Mode.

In addition, all weekend long, three special items will be added that can drop from all creatures in Eye of the North: Sparklers, Hunter's Ale, and Honeycombs.

For more information on the event and to receive a "universal access code", go to http://guildwars.com/products/eyeofthenorth/trial/.

With almost four million copies sold across the original game and its two expansions, Guild Wars is doing just fine as a franchise.

With Eye of the North, the final expansion before next year's Guild Wars 2, NCSoft aims to both bridge the gap between the old and new games while giving the dedicated Guild Wars players something to sink their (sword's) teeth into over the next year.

Guild Wars 2 will feature multiple races for characters instead of just humans. All three are introduced in Eye of the North as hero companions. Consider the mish-mash of influences that form Guild Wars's backstory, it doesn't feel that strange to suddenly have friendy cat warriors, goblins, and elves appear in the world.

Most of the content in Eye of the North are inspired by traditional pen-and-paper dungeon crawls, which may be something new to Guild Wars, but won't likely entice too many other genre fans into the fold. A new "battle music engine"—I'm not quite sure if that should be capitalized or not—will change the ambient soundtrack depending on how well—or how poorly—you're doing in the fight.

The new "Hall of Monuments," once discovered, will let you memorialize your achievements from past Guild Wars games. When Guild Wars 2 arrives, each achievement will garner you unlockables in the sequel, although in the interest of fairness none of the new gear will be too overpowered.

Although you'll barely see them in game—and then only as loading screens—the concept art for Guild Wars: Eye of the North is really great stuff. Paintings mostly. They'll be on display at a special gallery at this year's PAX.
Joel Johnson

AUSTIN, Texas, July 3, 2007— NCsoft® today revealed its line up for the E3 Media & Business Summit July 11-13 in Santa Monica where the company will provide a preview of several of the most anticipated online games coming out in 2007 and 2008, including Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa™, Aion™, Guild Wars: Eye of the North™ and Dungeon Runners™.
NCsoft North America CEO Robert Garriott said, "NCsoft strives to deliver the highest quality online entertainment possible, and these products represent the next generation of online games. This E3 meeting will provide a window for the public to see the breadth of the variety of game genres and business models NCsoft provides, as well as show off how advanced and exciting our products are."
NCsoft products to be featured at E3 are:

RICHARD GARRIOTT'S TABULA RASA
Tabula Rasa has been in closed beta testing since May and is set for launch this fall. Tabula Rasa is poised to evolve the massively multiplayer online genre with a host of fresh features such as a character cloning system, dynamic battlefields with contested control points, deep storylines with ethical parables and fully integrated voice chat. Tabula Rasa also offers players an original alien language named Logos that unlocks special powers, and fast paced combat that combines real time action with role-playing game style character development. These kinds of features are the types of touches that players have come to expect over the years from a Richard Garriott game.

AION
From NCsoft's Seoul studios, Aion, is one of the most visually stunning MMOGs in development. Cutting-edge graphics redefine players' expectations of online role-playing and reveal a true fantasy world where divine beings wage a war that will determine the future of the world. This highly anticipated title is set for release in 2008.

GUILD WARS: EYE OF THE NORTH
Guild Wars: Eye of the North is the first true expansion to the Guild Wars® franchise, one of the most popular online role-playing game franchises on the market today. Guild Wars: Eye of the North delves into the dungeons and caverns of the lands of Tyria that players first explored in the original Guild Wars game. Guild Wars: Eye of the North continues Guild Wars' no subscription fee model 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: Eye of the North is set for release on August 31 at an anticipated price of $39.99.

DUNGEON RUNNERS
Dungeon Runners is a free to download and play online multiplayer role playing game set in a sword-and-shield world where players get piles of loot and treasure by defeating hordes of evil monsters enemies. It's a different game model that fits right in to NCsoft's diversified online game lineup. Dungeon Runners has recently opened up play to the general public and will have large chunks of new content implemented through the summer.

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.