Bring Out Your Dead

Here are a couple of shots of the fireworks and one of four guild members waiting for the end of the world by the fountain in Lion’s Arch District 1.

Violet Deepsky has produced another video of the ending moments of the April BWE. Thank you for taking the time and effort to put these together and for sharing them with the rest of us!

According to this article on Computer Games Magazine’s site, ArenaNet has announced that the final discs have been released to manufacturing, which means they will soon be in our eager hands.

They cut things somewhat closer than I thought they would, but all’s well that ends well. 🙂

A little over 5 days to go!

ArenaNet has posted the BWE special edition Fansite Friday, with descriptions of new features (lots of interface changes), a guild challenge, and tips on reporting problems in the game with /bug along with a list of some of the things they’re looking for in particular.

Less that 8 hours to go!

Gaile posted some news today that made me very happy:

Your guild names will be protected, as guilds will carry over into the release as they currently exist. I guess an exception could exist if no one in a guild obtained the preorder, and therefore there were no active members in the guild at the time the game goes live.

Otherwise, the most recent word is that you will find your characters in the game, with your guild alliance in place, come April 28th. (Or, for you lucky ones, April 27th.)

I was really hoping that we wouldn’t need to play the remake the guild game again.

Go ArenaNet! 🙂

4 days to the final BWE, 16 days to release!

There’s a new video out that features some gameplay, some Gwen on a rampage, and Gaile leading a run around Lion’s Arch at the end of the March BWE. The BOYD dancing monks appear for a few seconds starting at 4:24.

After following the link above, you’ll need to type in the passcode (that’s displayed in the graphic) and click the “Go Get It” button.

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.