Guild Wars 2 closed beta 2011 "for sure"

By Robert Purchese Published 27 September, 2011

Dev wants "time to react to things".

A Guild Wars 2 closed beta test may be only months away - developer ArenaNet said the accolade-scooping MMO will enter closed beta this year "for sure".

The last time ArenaNet talked to us about a beta was in May.

Late last week, a French site translated a Korean report (via MMOCrunch) about Guild Wars 2 being shown at Korean game show G-Star (November 10th to 13th), "following the start of the Beta West". November, then?

"We're going to go into closed beta by the end of this year for sure," lead content designer Colin Johanson reaffirmed to Eurogamer at the EG Expo 2011.

"We're in closed alpha right now. We're going to go into closed beta by the end of this year. Based on the outcome of the closed beta, that will determine our open beta schedule. Based on the outcome of the open beta, that's going to determine our release date.

"If we tear through the beta and everything's super positive then obviously it'll come out faster. And if we go into the beta process and we see things we want to change, then we have the luxury of having the time to be able to sit down and fix that stuff.

"We really don't know when release is going to be, because we want time to react to things and upgrade and everything."

Johanson said "we don't know yet" how people will be informed of the open beta. "How we're going to announce it and how to get into it - we haven't decided that yet either," he added.

The content available within the beta phases is also still being worked out.

Guild Wars 2 was playable on the Eurogamer Expo 2011 show floor. Special press PVP sessions were held, and our impressions of it will be with you soon.

Guild Wars 2 was yesterday crowned The Eurogamer Expo 2011 Game of the Show.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (7) Latest comment 5 months ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • rodpad #1 5 months ago

    Want!

  • Vistrix #2 5 months ago

    So many good memories from the first guild wars beta... Definitely in on this.

  • Gearskin #3 5 months ago

    What kind of rig do we think this will need to run nice? Not being funny, but the original Guild Wars is still one hot looking game and, at the time of release, it could be played on fairly modest PCs with the settings at maximum.

    ... Or will I need a new machine?

  • Tyranix #4 5 months ago

    Guild Wars 2 runs on a heavily modified version of the Guild Wars 1 engine. It seems to scale very well and be optimised for a wide range of pc specs.

  • login_name #5 5 months ago

    @Gearskin
    I believe they play on machines that have components that are so old you can't even buy them anymore. They are optimising for low end. Their focus is on art style rather than power hungry graphical effects and high poly counts.

  • Zaiz #6 5 months ago

    Guild Wars has always been very good at having an extremely scalable engine. I'd imagine its so robust at this point that its ridiculous, since they only improved it with every expansion pack they released. People playing on absolutely atrocious laptops could get GW to run.

  • Raziel #7 5 months ago

    Shit yeah!
    Hope they'll have a date soon. I have too many vacation days left and this is a good way to spend a few of them.