Is Guild Wars 2 on your radar yet? If not, it should be. It’s one of the few AAA MMOGs expected to come out within the year, but why should you follow it? The original Guild Wars still has a very large, active player base five years later thanks in large part to its free-to-play for life revenue model. Yet, it’s not your average free-to-play game with shoddy graphics, terrible quests, and a complete lack of interesting content. Guild Wars is full of nothing but awesome and is the exact reason you should be looking forward to GW2.

ArenaNet has spent the last five years releasing campaigns and expansions, adding massive updates to the game, and growing it from a simple game with one campaign to a lengthy continent spanning epic that has one of the biggest MMOG gameworlds out there. Nightfall alone is larger than Azeroth (World of Warcraft), Dereth (Asheron’s Call), Oblivion, and Grand Theft Auto III. If you combine the worlds together then you can easily take down most video games on the market. Of course, size isn’t everything; it’s the content within the world that matters.

Dynamic events is one of the biggest things you should be looking out for.

That’s one area where ArenaNet truly excels. It’s hard for us to acknowledge that every game cannot be perfect and there have been problems with Guild Wars. Yet, these small annoyances are dealt with either through content updates or in the new campaigns. ArenaNet takes feedback seriously and you can see it as you progress through each expansion.

Guild Wars: Prophecies is a lengthy epic adventure from one side of the world to the other and back again. You escape over mountains, flee into the hands of religious zealots, undertake various trials in the desolate desert, flee across the mountains again, and take on the unseen in the fiery pits of Hell. Yet, the long adventure is daunting and in many places quite, how to say, dull.

Guild Wars: Factions takes and builds on that, fixing many of the problems players had with the original campaign. Level 20 is a lot quicker to achieve, there are more henchmen, the world is more compact, there are branches in the storyline to give it more replay value, and is much shorter to reach the end (12 total missions required to beat the campaign, 14 available missions in addition to 2 competitive missions, 5 challenge missions, and 2 elite missions). It was not without its problems though. It seemed like Master Togo was more of a hero than the player while the overall story was considered to be rather weak.

Again, ArenaNet learned from its experiences creating Prophecies and Factions and created Guild Wars: Nightfall which is to date the most complete, amazing, and totally awesome campaign in the series. It addressed the issue of the character not being the hero by making you start off as a simple warrior and growing through the various trials and tribulations until you’re capable of destroying the gods themselves. It replaces the insanely fast or long leveling curve by averaging it out and compensating with heroes and higher level henchmen.

Many new races will be added in GW2 and many old ones will return

Guild Wars: Eye of the North was treated as an expansion instead of a complete campaign, but it did add something very interesting. The Hall of Monuments serves as your personal base of operations through the expansion and can be customized with various decorations (that will ultimately have an effect on new Guild Wars 2 characters). This is a lot like the Normady in Mass Effect, which is interesting because Bioware is a developer that’s all about allowing choice for the player.

Guild Wars is all about choice, especially in the later campaigns. You had to choose a side to fight for in Factions which determined the missions and areas you’d explore, while in Nightfall you had to choose many different branches in the story. In it, you built your story by choosing which heroes to take and which to forget and what areas to explore and which to pass on. Guild Wars 2 is going to build heavily on this same concept with its dynamic events system.

Of course, finally, I’d just like to point out how much content is within all three campaigns and the additional expansion and bonus mission pack. I have over 1,000 hours logged to my account, most of which was played during 2005, and there are areas in the game I did not know exist. I still get shocked when I need to find an elite skill in a place that no longer is brimming with quests but also is so far out of the way you’d never find it without a map or dumb luck.

So that's why Guild Wars is really awesome, but what about Guild Wars 2? Well, for the most part there isn't a lot of information out about it. You can read all about the various previews and reveals here in-depth. What we do know is that it's going to involve a lot of new mechanics, new professions, a dynamic event system that changes the world so it's never the same based on the playerbase's decisions, and a personal story that's just yours. More information is coming out all of the time showing how awesome the game is going to be.

More importantly, my point is that there is no way GW2 won't be amazing because GW1 has gotten better and better over time. It now stands as an amazing game five years after launch. All that experience will translate directly into something that will amaze everyone.

Screenshots like this should make you instantly want to follow GW2.

In summary, you and perhaps even the gaming industry as a whole should pay close attention to Guild Wars 2 over the coming months and more of details about the game are revealed. We’re not sure if the game will be an absolute success, but I can say that ArenaNet does not disappoint, it learns from its mistakes, and is behind its games 100%. Not only that, but it rocks the free-to-play world with exciting content that is engrossing and lengthy enough to be satisfying. The individual campaigns can take 40-50 hours to complete, the average length of most single player RPGs, and that’s not even counting the countless hours of entertainment that competitive PvP in Guild Wars provides.

If I haven’t talked you into following it yet, then perhaps you should come to our forums and discuss why you think it won’t do well. Do you think it’ll be a blockbuster hit straight out of the gates? Come share those thoughts as well.