Guild Wars 2 video talks innovation and design aims: "we just don't want players to grind"

The latest Guild Wars 2 trailer is supposed to show off some of the ideas laid out in Arenanet's " design manifesto " for Guild Wars 2. "If you hate MMOs, you'll really want to check out Guild Wars 2," they say. The quest system that offers up objectives as you wander the world, encounter creatures, or find other players fending off attackers hopes to remove the grind of picking up objectives from town NPCs. "Our games aren't about preparing to have fun, or about grinding for a future fun reward. Our games are designed to be fun from moment to moment," say ArenaNet in their blog post.

Update: As many have pointed out, this video was first shown a while ago. D'oh! We'll leave it up, though, as it's triggered some interesting discussion. Join the debate in the comments below.

This'll be music to the ears of any player who has bounced off the regimented quest systems and cooldown combat favoured by many MMOs, but it remains to be seen exactly how different Guild Wars 2 will feel from the likes of Rift, TOR and WoW. For me, the best parts of the video are those gorgeous locations. Tyria is a place I can't wait to explore.

Recently, More than a million people took advantage of the two day beta sign-ups window to put forward their names for a chance to test Guild Wars 2 in the next beta session, which is set to run at the end of March. We've spent a bit of time on previous betas, and have aimed to answer all of your Guild War 2 questions , check out our list of 20 things that you might not know about Guild Wars 2 for even more info on one of this year's most anticipated titles. Do you think Guild Wars 2 can revolutionise the MMO?

Tom Senior

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.