Info about future beyond April '09

I remember a friend of mine PMing me during the NF preview weekend awhile back. He said that a game called "GW2" was going to come out in the future, I said "Do you mean another expansion?" or something along the lines of that.

So for all we know it could of been in development BEFORE Nf was released...?

which they have to press evert 108 minutes or the island blows up....
or something bad....

Increasingly people have been treating MMO betas like release, and if a game has problems or bugs in that beta, even if release is 6-12 months away, it gets a bad rep fast. Also, the sooner you show anything at all, the sooner competitors (wow, war, etc.) will be able to start the process of copying the best bits of it, whether that is a new class design, a novel set of class skills, a cool graphics technique not seen before, a type of loot design, story concept, quest, battleground design, or anything else.

They've already stated they want players to be blown away by their first impression, so I think we aren't going to see anything until it's extremely polished and basically done, and they just need stress testing.

The real question is, how close is it really from release? Their statement in the ncsoft conference call "We'd like to have something out by that time" [holiday 2009] was stated in a very evasive and carefully worded tone of voice, and doesn't actually mean they are planning on that release date, it only means they plan for the game to be out BY then. NCSoft did also say in the call that they were looking at a bunch of release dates, whatever that means.

If it were a brand new MMO, it would take 3-5 years to start from scratch (according to Mark Jacobs, WAR took 3 years, although I'll admit that game sucks), but GW2 isn't brand new. I'll bet most of the architecture and design decisions such as the geo-distributed data centers, blades, database interface code, reliability/monitoring/watchdogs, server code deployment, client update download servers, authentication servers, probably aren't being scrapped.

They get to re-use all that stuff, and have their 2-3 years to put in totally re-redesigned classes, skills, mechanics, loot system, update the graphics engine, and world persistence (which in another interview I read they said was much easier than they thought it would be).

I would rather they release all tonics at once based on demand now so low end tonics drop more frequently and high end ones drop rarely

The discussion on the call did not commit to a launch date, and I would like to continue to reiterate that we've not announced a release date for GW2.

It would be nice to get on The GWWiki yeah lots of tonics.

Interesting enough, and I know that ArenaNet makes their own decisions about GW2, but NCSoft said they might not want a beta for Aion in the U.S., instead they want a few weekend preview events.

So GW2 is not going to appear in 2009?