Guild Wars: Guild Wars 2: Games to Look for in 2008

Rock, Paper, Shotgun is running a series of articles chronicling the games to look forward to in 2008. Today's article hits on Guild Wars 2. Even though beta testing isn't likely to start until late 2008, it blips on the radar as a must-have for many players:

That's the big change that Guild Wars 2 could lead to. A change of people's minds. Making people more actually question the mathematics of a monthly fee - because something would have to be significantly more than Guild Wars 2 to even justify it, yeah? I was slightly incredulous when I interviewed Arenanet about this upon the games' announcement - "How on Earth can you do it when no-one else can?" was what I was trying to ask without just saying it straight out. Their position was that it's just what they design for, and have always designed for. Bandwidth getting cheaper as years go by helps, of course, but it's they're designing a system to be as efficient as possible. They did it with Guild Wars and, with the passage of the years, they think they can do the same thing with Guild Wars 2.

Which of course begs the question to every single other MMO developer in the world... well, why don't you do that then?

It's not quite fair to everyone else, of course. But there's nothing fair about people's minds, and the better Guild Wars 2 is, the harder the question becomes.

Read the rest and see some nifty screens at the link above.