龙年快乐！

I was won­der­ing whether I came out of closet–of being a fan­boy of Are­naNet.  Look­ing back to my last Guild Wars post, the answer is yes.  Oh and, in case you won­der, this post is about Guild Wars 2 release date! (True Story!)

We recently fin­ished our first closed beta test, and we’re now ready to hold pro­gres­sively larger events. In Feb­ru­ary we’ll invite select press to par­tic­i­pate in beta test­ing, and in March and April we’ll aggres­sively ramp up the size of our beta test events so that many of you will have a chance to par­tic­i­pate. And of course, this all leads to the release of Guild Wars 2 later this year.

Source: Are­naNet blog

Any­way, I’m pretty sure I won’t be part of the “select press” (read: var­i­ous MMO news/review sites), so I’ll bet my luck on March and April of 2012… to say “bet my luck” is accu­rate since this is not an announce­ment of an open beta.  It is cleared up in this thread on GW2 Guru forum by the devel­oper guy who wrote the post: the term “open beta” is pur­posely avoid as cur­rently Are­naNet are not arrang­ing a play ses­sion open for “any­body on the inter­webs”.  The spec­u­la­tion seems to be that there will be pre­view week­ends where the game opens up a selected area for a greater audi­ence to participate.

This of course does not mean there will be no open beta (in its con­tem­po­rary mean­ing) for GW2.  It is pos­si­ble the OB will come shortly before the game releases.

And for orig­i­nal Guild Wars, things have been fun.  A recent update to Ele­men­tal­ist pro­fes­sion skills finally con­vince me to start play­ing it once again.  The rea­son being my main char­ac­ter (albeit my only active char­ac­ter to play for the pur­pose of casu­ally fill­ing up Hall of Mon­u­ments), is indeed an Ele­men­tal­ist.  For a long time in GW’s metagame, Ele’s role in par­ties (in dif­fi­cult PvE areas) is not the DD/Spiker despite the orig­i­nal intent of the devel­op­ers and the gen­eral per­cep­tion of “mages” in RPG.  This update made some rem­edy to that; by buff­ing Ele elite skills, Are­naNet gave Ele­men­tal­ists more options in build­ing skill bars.  Although it did not made Ele the new “OP class”, the update reju­ve­nated the game’s metagame–something the Ele­men­tal­ist pro­fes­sion really needed.

My last hia­tus took place before some of other good changes in Guild Wars: team of 7 heroes, and Guild Wars Beyond’s Can­tha instal­la­tion: Winds of Change.  From point of view of a GW lore fan, I feel WoC’s story has not been very inter­est­ing com­pare to the ear­lier chap­ters (War in Kryta and Hearts of the North).  ANet seems to have shift their focus to GW2 to the point that WoC story has not con­cluded for months… some­thing I hope will change along the recent fre­quent skill updates.

Despite the def­i­nite areas of poten­tial improve­ment, Guild Wars being the source of its sequel’s hype is entirely jus­ti­fied.  The game is unique and a clas­sic in many aspects within the online/MMO/RPG indus­try.  I highly rec­om­mend full pur­chase ($30+$20 USD for the Tril­ogy and Eye of the North expan­sion) of this game for any­one who don’t hate role-playing games.