We've all seen the brand new
Guild Wars 2 trailer from last week, right? The one that starts out with lightly-animated concept art, but eventually breaks into actual in-game footage? That in-game footage caused one of the strangest sounds to erupt from the
Guild Wars fan community: a mix of a sigh and a squee. It's quite a unique sound. You should try it.
With so much time being taken between our last bit of news and this full-blown trailer,
GW fans were beginning to seriously lose hope. I have been an advocate for
Guild Wars 2 since the day it was announced, although I did have some reservations about the divulged game mechanics at first. It seemed
ArenaNet was giving up on its unique approach to online games and what the founders learned at Blizzard, and converting it into every other MMO out there. The original
Guild Wars broke so much ground that it literally raised a new generation of gamers. Solved were the problems of finding a group, grinding for XP, discovering which server your friends played on and camping spawns.
Guild Wars popularized the solutions to these problems and offered them in a streamlined package that didn't cost you a dime each month. It's exactly what many gamers were waiting for to get them into the MMO space, including myself.