QuoteAccording to O'Brien, while the initial closed beta testing for the title has finished, a new press-only preview will begin in February, to be expanded to the public in March and April at an 'aggressive' pace.
O'Brien also confirmed that the game is still on track for a 2012 release, promising that Guild Wars fans will be getting their hands on the title before the end of the year. Sadly, however, there's no news yet of a firm release date.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2012/01/23/guild-wars-2-beta/1
The general release will be for one second to midnight on New years eve and the whole thing will be withdrawn 3ms later when their servers all crash leading to a year's delay before another try is attempted. :tinhat:
Keeping a careful eye on this, there is plenty of detail out there too on the various races, classes and game play you should expect from it. Graphics from the demos look pretty smart too.
New gameplay seems far more massively multi player than previous with few if any 'go out and kill 10 goblins' type quests. You don't team up either, everyone in the locality counts as part of your team and will be rewarded if you are successful.
The trinity of tank, dps and healer is also broken, there is to be no dedicated healer class, everyone will have skills that can heal.
Beta sign-up page: https://beta.guildwars2.com/ (only open for 48 hours).
I suspect some aren't even going to get past the character creation screen for quite some time...
Seems that you can pre buy this on the 10th of April. play.com, Amazon, HMV and Shopto.net will have the normal version, Zavvi has the collector's edition which will probably have a price well in excess of £100 :(
I'll be buying it asap, whether i'll find the time to play it is another matter. :muttley:
Latest, there are 3 games options, basic, moderate and ridiculously damn expensive. They can be got from many retailers as a pack or directly from https://buy.guildwars2.com/
For the basic pack there seems to be two ways of getting it, the ones from the above and some others offer access to the Beta event weekends. Unfortunately others don't seem to offer that same access, so packs bought from game.co.uk don't have the beta weekends.
It seems most expect release in 2-3 months but that may be delayed.