Character Panorama

Just a bit of eye candy (click for bigger version):

That's all my current characters from Guild Wars, excepting the neglected and unplayed PvP-only character, who serves right now as a mule. Maybe next time I do a panorama (which will probably be after I get more folks in elite armors), I'll include her. Ryn is a multipurpose mule; he's also placeholding a name for Guild Wars 2 for me. (A "mule", for those who don't know, is a character made principally to hold excess items. There's storage in GW but even with all the paid add-ons, not enough for a packrat like me.) He's been played a bit, too, but probably won't get much more play time overall.

Guild Wars 2: Profession Speculation (Part 3: Non-Scholars)

I've got several possibilities for medium-armor types, but I actually only have one solid idea for the second soldier class, so I'm going to combine them into one note.

Guild Wars 2: Profession Speculation (Part 2: Scholars)

Now for the fun part: pure speculation. The speculation is based on four things: profession-related concept art, the silhouetted place-markers on the official site's profession page, some additional art and information in the art book (which I, alas, do not have, but have seen a few pictures from online and read discussion of), and a healthy smattering of wishful thinking.

This post will feature speculation about the "scholar" type professions. I've included more than two (the remaining unknown ones) here as possibilities, because narrowing it down further than that is hard, though I'll try to narrow it down to two.

Guild Wars 2: Profession Speculation (Part 1: Intro)

♫ Anticipation... anticipation... it's making me wait. ♫

One of the unfortunate side-effects of following a game's development is that it can take a very long time for confirmed information to start being released by the developers. And those wily bastards, knowing it will keep people paying attention, often release things such as concept art, or little dribs and drabs of information with no details. Naturally, this leads to a great deal of speculation in the community about the game, which is just what they want. I've seen a fair amount of this, and have my own to boreentertain you with.

Guild Wars 2: Pew Pew Clang Boom

Now that they've released the second profession and some more combat-related information, I wanted to talk a bit about combat. I'll also be doing a post filled with guesses about the remaining professions, because wild guessing is fun!

Quick diversion first: for those of you non-existent readers who haven't checked it out yet: Guild Wars 2 Official Site, from which you can also get to their blog, which sometimes has extra details, and where they also do a link roundup of official interviews and write-ups by game and MMO sites.

Guild Wars 2: It's mmoRPG

The design of dynamic events are likely to put the "multiplayer" more strongly to the forefront of Guild Wars 2 than some MMOs achieve, particularly with persistent results. But that's not where they're stopping with trying to make things more dynamic and interesting all-around. They want to emphasize the RPG influence as well, through the use of a personal storyline.