I don’t really intend this blog to be a “gaming news” blog, nor do I expect to usually blatantly advertise a particular game like this - but I’m so completely looking forward to Guild Wars 2 (and there’s been so little information about it for such a long time) that with the release of the trailer just a couple of hours ago, I’m entirely giddy.

First of all, the trailer is amazingly beautiful. You can find it on the official Guild Wars 2 site. Nor is the trailer the only thing you can find there - the FAQ also has answers to some nagging questions that I’m quite glad how they turned out. For starters, Guild Wars 2 will be like the original in that it will not have a subscription fee. I think this was a great factor in the original’s success, and I think that it’ll give Guild Wars 2 a leg up on any potential competition as well - not that it seems like it will need any, if the trailer is any indication. Other things confirmed by the FAQ include a full 3D world (no fake z-axis this time - in fact, some of the environments are even underwater!) and also that unlike the original, Guild Wars 2 will not be limited to instanced areas only - some portions of the world will be non-instanced (but there will still be many instanced portions as well to help drive the storyline).

I’ve added a lot of screenshots from the trailer to this post - click past the jump to see them all.

I apologize that in a couple of the shots, there are some artifacts, but that’s just a fact of life when taking the shots from an encoded video - if you see artifacts, trust me, they’re just due to that; the actual rendering is amazingly detailed. I tried to mostly take shots from the portion of the trailer which wasn’t cinematic in nature - as far as I can tell, most of these shots are from actual 3D environments rendered in the engine. There are, however, a couple of concept art pieces as well.

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