Bring Out Your Dead

ArenaNet is running a special BWE for some people who were locked out of the March BWE – here’s what Gaile had to say about it on one of the forums:

I wanted to explain about the Scandinavian Weekend. What happened, quite honestly, was that we messed up. The keys created for Scandinavian distribution were not activated, and those good folks in Denmark, Finland, Normay or Sweden who preordered through the official Scandinavian distributors/retailers were “locked out” of the last BWE. So in order to make it up to them, we’re giving access to the game to those who have preordered from those countries through the designated retailers.

We hope that you’ll understand our greatest goal would have been to have everyone participating in the March 18th BWE. But failing that, we’re determined to set things right and this is how we’re undertaking it.
The good news for the rest of us is that the weekend isn’t covered by an NDA, so we’ll be getting screen shots and information that we otherwise wouldn’t.

The biggest thing so far (besides the interface changes) is the addition of a number of new character customizations – new faces, new hair, new hair colors, and new skin colors. Check out the necromancer with blue hair. 🙂 The necromancer’s base color has been changed from red to green, and the elementalist has been changed from purple to red.

For those of you that aren’t firing up the Guild Wars client every day – the latest client build features a completely redone set of graphics for all the windows and dialog boxes, and adds a new button for the options window. After the client is loaded, there’s also an addition 40M of files that get streamed in the background if you leave it running for a while. From reports from Korean players, all the in-game windows have changed to match, and there’s a new set of matching mission loading screens as well.

You can find a new in-game movie from ArenaNet on their movie download page. It’s the one listed under March 2005 Gameplay Movie.

The March beta weekend ended with a bang, which happened to coincide with the filming of an in-game video. The result is funny as hell – right click and download from a mirror that someone was kind enough to put up to help with bandwidth usage, or if that doesn’t work, get it from the original location.

If you’ve ever wondered just how much benefit that better armor or weapon is going to give you, or if you’re trying to figure out where to put that last attribute point, then you’ll want to check out A Treatise on Combat Mathematics. A couple of people have done similar articles, but this one not only gives the formulas but also shows what they mean with tables and well done explanatory text.

Jeux Online had an interview with Jeff Strain in Paris, which has been translated to English and posted on their site. The translation is a little rough in places, but there’s quite a bit of information about ArenaNet’s design goals for the game and some screen shots (widescreen!) – including one near the end that shows a desert landscape that we haven’t seen in the beta events.

The District Nudists guild did an extensive Q&A with two of the developers in-game during the February BWE, and have posted the interview on their site. From the general tone, it sounds like the ArenaNet crew is not going to be getting a lot of sleep over the next few months.

12 days until the next BWE, 52 days until the preorder release.

Some people caught Jeff (the head of ArenaNet) in Paris showing off Guild Wars and wrote up a report in Q&A format. Some nice information about the number of missions planned for the release game, the number of explorable areas, NPCs, and more about how the Hall of Heroes/World at War is going to work in the game.