Guild Wars: GW 2 Preview at Kotaku

Gaming site Kotaku has posted a fairly comprehensive preview of GW 2 and Eye of the North gleaned from a phonecall between editors and Arena Net's Jeff Strain. Accompanied by several screenshots including a logo for GW 2, it's a good read.

With regard to Eye of the North:

This first expansion brings you back to Tyria, the setting and storyline of the original Guild Wars. In it, Strain says, you will be finding out what happened to some of the storylines and characters that peopled that first game.

The game will feature 18 new multi-level dungeons, 150 new skills across all ten Guild Wars professions, 10 new heroes and 40 new armor sets.

And for Guild Wars 2:

First, and most importantly though, the game will remain subscription free.

This time around the game will have a persistence world, one still set in Tyria, but now hundreds of years after the events that took place in the original Guild Wars.

"The big new feature is a persistent world," Strain said. "I think Guild Wars has some very radical departures from typical role-playng. One of those was the instancing model.

As each of the campaigns was released we took greater and greater pains to do that. On the other hand, there are things we missed out on, like the more organic type of community building where you wandering through the area and hook-up with other people."

"In Guild Wars 2 we wanted to have the best of both worlds. We are retaining the strengths of instanced areas, but we are also integrating a persistenced world. We are not making a World of Warcraft clone here, we are not trying to do what other MMOs have done."

Arena Net's new spin is sort of an amalgam of both instanced and massive environments, where instanced events can have domino effects on other parts of the world, or zone.

Some other intriguing details were revealed about PvP. Head over for a read. It's worth the effort.