Bring Out Your Dead

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.

Helping to fill the void left by the closing of the February Beta Event, Light of Vega has put together a wonderful movie of in-game footage from the event set to music. Right click on the link to get the option to save it to disk. Note that the file is 90M, so it will take a while to download – it’s well worth the time and effort though.

ArenaNet has posted a 5-question Fansite Friday that deals with the changes they made this month as well as some of what we can expect between now and when the game is released.

From a forum post by Gaile:

“We do not intend to do a reset prior to the February Beta Weekend Event. Sure, anything is remotely possible, but at this point, we do not intend to reset (or wipe) any characters.”

And given that the ladder page also appears to still be intact at this point, I’d say that the guilds are safe for another month at least as well.

ArenaNet decided to give us a very nice Valentine’s Day present: a list of dates for the next three beta events, a movie of the new Ascalon area, and a Guild Wars release date!

February Beta: Feb 18-20th
March Beta: Mar 18-20th
April Beta: Apr 15-17th

Release for Pre-Orders: April 27th
Release for everyone: April 28th

ArenaNet has a Press Release and a movie download page.

Even if we can’t play this weekend, we can at least look in through the window. ArenaNet has posted a series of seven screenshots showcasing the new Ascalon. A few of the alpha testers have commented that it’s even more impressive in person.

Two more weeks before we get to see for ourselves…

A couple of hours ago ArenaNet announced that the February Beta Event is going to take place starting early in the morning (PST) on February 18th. The move is being made to accomodate the changes they’re making to the Ascalon area – showing it as it was before the Charr invasion, complete with a large set of quests that tie in to the later quests from last month’s beta.

Also, the skill lists that are pointed to in the right-hand side bar for each of the six professions have been updated to reflect the latest changes that have been made in the game. Of particular note is a number of enhancements to the Ranger skills.

There’s no official word at the moment about whether there’s going to be another character wipe for this event, although Gaile has stated that she’s going to be getting an answer to that question to the community soon. Given the scale of the changes they have planned, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to be starting over at level 1.

Thinking about different character builds? Wondering how attribute point distributions affect certain skills? Want to lay out a team of up to 8 characters? Troy Bronzan has put together a program that lets you do all that, and save and print the results as well. You can find the Guild Wars Team Builder on the download page of the Spirits of War guild site.