If you caught even the tiniest bit of the Guild Wars 2 Flashpoint AMA last night, you already heard the big news: Mike O’Brien confirmed that the expansion is coming after the end of season three, slotted right into the release cadence before the beginning of season four, though he warned players it will “will probably take longer than the 2~3 months we normally allocate between episodes.” Either way, the consensus seems to be fall.
But there was more to the AMA than just that huge announcement from last night! In fact, there were several notes for PvP and WvW players.
- “We like Skirmishes and are looking to support this with rewards in the future. In general, for WvW, our priorities are rewards and ascended equipment.” ETA is “this year.”
- “The WvW team releases their content when it is ready. We have a variety of things in work, some further along, some still early in development. The team wants nothing more than to deliver great content for WvW but making changes for the game mode is rarely trivial. The team wants to make sure that large system and content changes are given proper due diligence and are in a position to have the best possible impact for WvW players.”
- “We are working on a solution to further support competitive modes within the game. We do like the idea of Guild Wars 1’s Automated Tournaments and are drawing inspiration from that. We’ll have more on this as we get closer to releasing any changes or additions.”
Other highlights:
- Legendary weapons will continue to roll out, future expansions not required. “We have no plans to release another set of legendary armor in the future,” Paul Ella wrote. As for sigils? “We had originally intended that you should be able to change the sigils in the same way as runes for armor (so we had thought of it for everyone out there who thought we forgot),” he says. “However, when we started our economic impact analysis it became clear that we needed to do a deeper investigation to assess potential risks we had not previously foreseen. The investigation is currently ongoing.”
- Work on the Mac client continues. There are no plans to switch away from DirectX 9.
- There are no plans to “adjust the overall balance” on old raids.
- Fixing Charr clipping issues isn’t in the cards. “No plans to make changes to the rune swapping mechanism for the armor” either.
Finally, while he didn’t address questions about what legal actions ArenaNet might pursue, Mike O’Brien did have this to say about the massive leak from yesterday, reminding people that opening Christmas presents early spoils some of the delight and asking players to be GW2 “evangelists”:
And yes, multiple players pointed out the problems inherent in expecting returning players to shell out large sums of money to play the living story, as well as trying to sell new players seeking longevity on a game whose immediate, let alone distant, future would be mostly a mystery but for leakers.
