We all have things we love about Guild Wars 2, places that make us cheer out and say “yes, this is my ultra-mega place!” We all have classes, abilities, and features we’re passionate about, either negatively or positively. This is a place to share all that. A couple times a week I’ll be raising a Guild Wars 2 question to the community– hopefully an interesting one– and we’ll share our opinions. I’ll start off with my opinion just to get the ball rolling, but these questions will not have any right or wrong answers, so feel free to argue with me to your heart’s content!

Guild Wars 2 is filled with some very gorgeous maps and locations, and not just locations situated plain in sight, open to the air. Even hidden caves and light-filled crevices can be quite beautiful, which kind of adds to the whole exploration theme the game has going on. Another place of beauty is underwater. The oceans and inlets around Lion’s Arch are some of the most beautiful underwater spots in the game, full of tropical life, plants, and just about everything you’d expect in a real ocean. Props to the environment team! The ice-covered lakes out in the middle of the snowdrift-covered areas are also particularly enchanting, in my opinion.

Arenanet has published another dev blog, but this time in the form of Video! Keep reading to watch the videos, or you can find them on Anet’s dev blog page.

Earlier in the development of Guild Wars 2 we released our MMO Manifesto video, a high-level look at the philosophy behind the design of the game. As we approach the launch date, now is the perfect time to talk about the outcome of that design philosophy with a look at the core ideas that the game is built on: personal story, dynamic events, combat, and PvP.

The only video missing is for WvW! But Anet is promising that is coming soon.

Today brings another Dev Blog from Ben Miller, a Game Designer for Arenanet. In this blog Ben goes over almost every aspect of designing a game. He talks about MMO combat, UIs a sense of character development and much much more and provides a really great insight in the mind of a game designer.

Some developers might wish there was a secret recipe book for designing an online world—some big ol’ Betty Crocker-style book with chapters like “Combat System” and “Interactive Story Telling,” containing recipes for “Melee Weapons” and “Compelling Main Characters.” And they’d wish all you had to do was add in the particulars specified and work on each bit for the required amount of time.

The truth is that designing an online world is a lot like the real world. It’s messy business. It’s organic. It’s chaotic. The mental space in which you are creating is different from moment to moment with assumptions and extrapolations piling into a confusing tangle that only your gut has time to sort out. It’s like a turbulent ocean storm of ideas, processes, people, and collaboration.

Source: The Golden Rules of Guild Wars 2

Many players eagerly walked into Guild Wars 2′s first beta weekend unsure of what to expect. Some of these players found themselves surprised at the game’s difficulty level. For some, this surprise quickly turned into appreciation. Others were disappointed and frustrated. Opinions are always going to be widespread and varying in a beta event for a game of GW2′s size, but with the case of the game’s difficulty, some interesting opinions, critiques, and reviews surfaced. Which held water? I’ll let you be the real judge, but for now, let’s take a look at some of the beef regarding GW’s difficulty.

Guild Wars Insider released nine more of their exclusive exclusive screenshots late last night. These morsels of eye candy show us some pvp combat!  Since we can’t kill people ourselves in Guild Wars 2 yet I suppose these will have to do. For now…

Over the last 10-15 years players have seen little evolution in MMORPGs.  Classes, combat, and quest systems generally are extremely similar even across the usual sub-genres; fantasy, sci-fi, and horror.  Due to  most releases up to this point reusing the same foundations with slightly different graphics the  experience playing them is nearly identical across the board.  This is partially why every game is called a “WoW clone”  even though World of Warcraft was an Everquest clone which was a DIKU mud clone and so on.  Guild Wars 2 seems to be trying to break the mold in many ways, most notably the dynamic event system at the heart of their game.

NowGamer.com takes a closer look at why Guild Wars 2 can be a perfect 10. In their review, they discuss why Guild Wars 2 is different; discussing dynamic content, skill-based positional combat, PVP, and more. Here’s is just a quick taste of what NowGamer is saying about Guild Wars 2.

The quests of MMOs have been a running joke for a long time now, resorting to typical fetch quests and ‘kill 10 boars’ style of objectives. Needless to say, that’s worn a little thin now.

So here to save the day is ArenaNet, who has decided to cut out those irritating quests for something a bit more fluid. Dynamic, you could say.

What it means is that objectives are activated by a series of unknown requirements – from speaking to a certain NPC, finding a certain item or just visiting an area at a specific time of day.

This spawns a chain of events that act as quests yet, regardless of outcome, keep offering a new objective to work for – enemy goblins may well capture a fort after ‘failing’ one event, but that just opens the new objective to free it once again. There’s a lot of longevity here, and could well be the element that gets the most praise from critics.

Read the full article over at NowGamer.com.