Guild Wars 2

If you attended the 2009 edition of the Penny Arcade Expo earlier this month you might have gotten lucky enough to get a free copy of The Art of Guild Wars 2, a hardcover book with lots of concept artwork for the upcoming fantasy MMO game. Now NCsoft and the game's developer ArenaNet are selling the book to everybody else.

The 128 page book is now on sale at the official Guild Wars 2 web site (which takes you to the Penny Arcade Store site) for $30. There's also tons of lore info about the game's locations, characters, creatures and more in the book and will likely be the biggest source of info about the long awaited game for some time until ArenaNet reveals more info in 2010.

NCsoft has had a busy month with its official coming out party for Guild Wars 2 at Gamescom. However they are also bringing ArenaNet's MMO sequel to Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle next weekend . . .well, sort of. While the game won't be playable there, members of the ArenaNet team will be around to answer questions about the game. They will also be giving away The Art of Guild Wars 2, a 128 page hardcover book with lots of concept art from the sequel.

NCsoft will also have playable builds of their next major game release Aion at PAX 2009. And City of Heroes players will get the chance to check out the upcoming powers customization update that will be included in the next free update for the super hero MMO.

After years of silence, ArenaNet and NCsoft surprised GamesCom 2009 attendees by premiering a trailer for Guild Wars 2 and announcing the launch of the official website. The game takes place 250 years after the events of the original Guild Wars, and players will have an opportunity to select characters from different races introduced in the original game like the Charr, Norn and Asura. Heroes will need all power they can gather, whether it be magic, technology or plain steel to take on a powerful dragon named Zhaitan. No details on a possible release schedule have been announced yet.

Download HD Guild Wars 2 Trailer (347 MB)

As teased earlier this week, NCsoft and developer ArenaNet have now launched a new web site for Guild Wars 2, the long awaited MMO sequel to their hit fantasy game. The site includes a new trailer for the game and a new FAQ is now available to check out.

While there is little new info on the FAQ it does reveal that players will be able to play a variety of non-human characters in addition to humans. There will also be a sidekick system that's similar to another NCsoft game City of Heroes. More info about the lore and races of Guild Wars 2 will be revealed later this year and gameplay info will begin to be revealed early in 2010. Naturally there is still no official release date.

When we first launched Big Download about 10 months or so ago, we knew we could be covering all sorts of titles, from large publishers and developers to small one man indie games. However we also knew there would be games that we, and we hope our readers, would spend more time in covering and playing over the next several months. These games came to be known to us as the BigAss 25.

This list has remained something that's only been known to the Big Download team . . . until now. Today in a special two part article we reveal what games are included in our BigAss 25 list is for the current time period. Our aim is to revise this list every few months, taking some out and putting new ones back in, so that it remains a fresh and relevant look at where the PC game industry is headed.

While we will still cover the entire PC game industry, this list of games represents what we think will be of special interest to us and our readers. You may notice that this list contains games that have already been released. Why? Because those titles continue to generate interest, especially if they have had or will have new downloadable content and expansions that will keep their games fresh in our heads.

Today we are revealing the first 13 games on the BigAss 25 list in alphabetical order. Stay tuned tomorrow as we reveal the other 12 games on our current list.

Click on the image above to continue reading Big Download's BigAss 25 - Part 1

Late last week, NCsoft's own financial results targeted the long awaited Guild Wars 2 as coming out sometime in 2010 or even 2011. Now the official Guild Wars web site has a statement from ArenaNet's Mike O'Brien who tried to do some damage control about those dates in the publisher's report (which oddly he calls "published rumors" even though the info comes from their own publisher). He states, "ArenaNet has never given a release date for Guild Wars 2 other than 'when it's done.' NCsoft's investor materials are a reflection of that philosophy."

Even so, a number of gamers thought that there would be some light at the end of the tunnel by now and O'Brien seems to know that as well. He states,"I know some fans had hoped for a smaller gap between the launch of Guild Wars: Eye of the North (released in August 2007 - editor) and the start of beta testing for Guild Wars 2, but we communicated last summer that it would be some time before we could commit to any beta or launch dates. Guild Wars 2 is a large and ambitious game, and we're going to take the time to do it right." While he doesn't flat out say it, it seems pretty clear that the game won't be out this year.

NCsoft released their financial numbers for their last quarter a couple of days ago but buried in their financial web site was a document that showed the planned release dates for a number of their upcoming games. The PDF document (encased in a ZIP file) showed the image of a table that has some bad news for people awaiting the release of Guild Wars 2.

The long awaited sequel to ArenaNet's multiplayer action-RPG game series is now listed in the table as being released sometime in the 2010-2011 time period. If the the table in the document is truly accurate (and it does come straight from the game's publisher) that could mean that even the game's beta test might not happen in 2009.

[Via Voodoo Extreme]

So far our multi-part look at the forthcoming PC games of 2009 have looked at action games, FPS titles and strategy-RTS games. Now two more popular genres of games, the RPG and the MMO, get the once over for our preview feature and there are some major games due for release in both categories in 2009. Once again we have snagged some exclusive screenshots from a couple of these game titles including one for Sony Online's super hero MMO DC Universe Online.

Stay tuned for Wednesday's final installment of our 2009 PC games preview feature as we go over a number of other titles we are looking forward to playing next year.

Click on the image above to continue reading 2009 (And Beyond) PC Game Preview: RPG-MMO Titles

We have seen many games get adapted and expanded into prose novel form over the years. We have seen a number of novels based on all of Blizzard's games over the years and other novels based on Halo, Command and Conquer and Doom, among others have been released.

Our sister site Massively, reporting from the Penny Arcade Expo, has revealed that ArenaNet's Guild Wars series of games will be getting their own series of novels. The three book series will be published by Pocket Books and are intended to fill in the story gap between the end of the original Guild Wars series of games and the upcoming full sequel Guild Wars 2, scheduled to launch sometime in 2009. No author or release dates for the novels were revealed.

If you were looking forward to perhaps beta testing ArenaNet's upcoming action RPG MMO Guild Wars 2 this year, you are out of luck. According to a revised version of FAQ on the game's web site the beta test won't be happening this year.

Here's the official word: "Although we publically alpha- and beta-tested the original Guild Wars while it was still in early development, with Guild Wars 2 we will commence beta testing closer to the game's release. With that in mind, we will not start beta testing in 2008 as we had originally planned. Guild Wars 2 is a very large and ambitious game, and Guild Wars players rightfully have very high expectations of its quality. We want players to be absolutely blown away by the game the first time they experience it."