Guild Wars 2 News Timeline

This has been flatly denied by Regina.

Even if you don't take her word for it, there's still the fact that Aion is fully released in Korea since November last year. So the only cause for the lag is localization effort - writers' and voice-actors' work.

To be fair, she didn't. She did not in any way say that ArenaNet has never helped out NCKorea.

I read an interview with a Lineage II (another NCSoft title) assistant producer today, which specifically covered the difficulty and delay caused by localizing from Korea to US/Europe.

More specifically:

So yes, were ArenaNet helping NCKorea with getting Aion ready for the US and European markets they could still have a significant amount of work to do, despite the Korean version being live.

That's beside the point though. If they finished with Aion a month ago, three months ago or yesterday it could still be a reasonable explanation for the massive delay for Guild Wars 2.

My personal theory on the delay is that they weighed starting the beta in 2008 and getting early and constant feedback (like happened with GW1 which started beta'ing years before it released), and keeping the existing players happy, vs these two downsides:

a) Possible negative publicity given the game will be far from perfect 2-3 years before release, as people's expectations are so high these days, even for betas. GW1 looked like shit early in beta.

b) Letting competitors see any interesting new features, game mechanics, and graphical techniques. For example, all the senior WoW designers have been moved off WoW now and are working on their new MMO. And of course, there are many more MMOs in development than Blizzard's next creation. The later all the beans are spilled about GW2, the more inconvenient it is for other developers to go back to the drawing board to steal the best ideas from it.

It's a tradeoff. Being tight-lipped does piss off the type of people that post on the forums all the time, but maybe they are planning for the huge market of people who didn't even get into GW in the first place.

I don't get this "stealing" thing. I just can't believe that's really an issue. Look at WAR. No one has touched PQs. The ToK, which can be called an iteration of LOTRO's deeds, still remains it's own beast. Or let's go back further to CoH's sidekick or now to their Architect. Still their own deal.

MMOs are big nasty beasts of code and design. You can't just mid-development "steal" a core-design feature like GW2's events or emergent skills. The whole game has to be built up with them.

I think it is much more about making a splash on this turbulent internet than competitor's stealing things.

Maybe they borrowed the localizing folks and a few others, but according to the NCSoft investor materials there are something like 160 people working at ArenaNet. It seems unlikely more than a handful would be helping out Aion's localization. That leaves everyone else to work on GW2.

The art thing is an easy theory to test. The Aion credits list the art team for the game, and as far as I remember they were all Korean names.


Examples include lua scriptable UI, achievements, making the MMO heavily quest based, queueing for a BG from anywhere. EQ2 has sidekicking, as will GW2.

Bad or mediocre ideas don't get stolen. CoH's architect didn't work out well, and is exploit city. Public quests as implemented in WAR didn't work out that great either except for initially. ToK was different but hardly worth copying, it's really for RPers. How much time do you really think the average WAR player spends reading it? Bear in mind that people don't even read quest text, they just click accept.

Gigashadow, Michael Jackson composed the music for sonic 3. But do we see him in the credits anywhere?

ArenaNET doesn't share employees with NCSoft/Aion. They are two different companies.

no you can listen to them, I dj three times a week on my station and you may have seen som adverts for it round here

check the community section, the next show is Thursday 30th

Can they then please stop advertising Aion?

My ears, they are burning.

Seriously, though, GW2 is on track according to our internal production schedules. What has changed WRT to the info we posted in public is the timing of the beta. Since the release of GW1, betas have changed in how they're perceived by the public and the company feels strongly about releasing a more polished product for beta.

From the GW2 FAQ:

Why? Who's it harming?

Yeah, that point I can definitely appreciate.

MMO news sites and blogs will be doing write-ups of their experience within the first few days, and they no longer have much sympathy for the word 'beta'. A few bad "reviews" can taint the launch of an MMO, which is obviously the last thing you want given the plethora of other potential problems. It's much more of a marketing exercise than it once was. Basically now treated as a free preview of the game to try and get people into it.

Then again, isn't this all the more reason to start putting together closed NDA covered beta testing groups, with dedicated individuals from the community?

This filthy bloggers and their "reviews."

I see what you did there

Seems like the CMs now attack in pairs

Let's try not to discourage them.

Strength in numbers, you know

while your here, CMs how about some info for us.

Will there be GW2 news at PAX? y/n

I understand the reason for the secrecy, but I feel like Anet has taken it a bit too far. Thus I voted 1, although truthfully I'm tied between 1 and 2.

We are always there, watching in the shadows.... *drumroll*

All we can say at this moment in time is that ArenaNet will have a presence at PAX.