Guild Wars 2 MMO News, Guides, and Features at Ten Ton Hammer

Ten Ton Hammer: There were a lot of world changing events at the end of Eye of the North. Even though Guild Wars 2 is set 250 years in the future, will we see any of the direct impact of those events such as what became of the dwarves or that type of thing?

Jeff Grubb: Yes actually. The game is set in Tyria which was the setting for Prophecies. It is 250 years later and a lot has happened in those 250 years. The dragons have been awakening and they do not come quietly into the world. You see from the trailer that Zhaitan, the undead dragon, brings Sunken Orr back up from the bottom of the ocean which causes devastation on anything costal in the area, and basically brings the dead back to life to serve as his minions. So basically there are world changing effects.

Things that have happened in Eye of the North such as the dwarves have all left, they’ve gone into the depths to fight Primordus and the Great Destroyer’s minions, but now their areas back on the surface are abandoned and who moves in? Who takes over?

There will be places that we’ve been calling ‘legacy sites’ in design as we go through the maps. So this was a place that was important place in Guild Wars 1 – what’s there now? How has it changed? Who’s living there? Are there ruins? People who are fans of Guild Wars 1 will see areas and say, “this was a location that I remember well” while new players will say, “wow, that’s really cool, I wonder if there’s a story behind it.” That sort of thing helps us both with old players and new.

Ten Ton Hammer: I noticed that even in the trailer where the camera goes underwater, it almost looks like massive parts of the Great Northern Wall.

Jeff Grubb: That does look like Ascalonian architecture. We’ve had devastations, all sorts of changes; another dragon has awakened and basically leaves a brand of its breath all the way through one of the nations. So everyone has been affected by the dragons, and just by the passage of 250 years.

The humans were our dominant race in Guild Wars 1 and they’ve been pushed back - they’ve lost territory, the Char have succeeded, other races are coming up – so they’re a little more in battle, they’re a little more resilient basically because they’re fighting for their last great nation.

One of the great things about the books is this allows us to fill in that space between the two time periods without having to give you a huge block of text within the game itself.

Ten Ton Hammer: The original Guild Wars had henchmen who were characters you meet early on and your character almost grows with them as the storyline progresses. Each of them have their own fun little personality quirks and sub-plots if you follow things like their idle or combat dialogs. Will that type of interaction with some of those types of signature characters be a part of Guild Wars 2?

Jeff Grubb: It’s not so much signature characters we have here, but we do have those iconic characters that are part of your story and progress with you throughout the game, though perhaps not in the same ways as companions do, or continually like companions. But yes, we do have that type of story functioning within the game.

Our story is multilayered – there’s the story of the world, the story of iconic characters and then your story – and we use different tools to tell those stories. That makes it a very full, very rich world.

Mike O’Brien: So there are definitely people you’ll get to know throughout the game.