Guild Wars 2 expansion delayed

Last year, ArenaNet announced that it was going to delay the Steam launch of Guild Wars 2 to focus on its next expansion, End of Dragons, which was due in late 2021. In a new blog post the studio has said that it's going to need to delay that as well, and End of Dragons is being pushed back to early 2022.

Studio director JT had this to say: "As expansion development has progressed and the real-world challenges of the past year and a half have changed the way we live and work, it’'s become clear that we need a little more time to deliver our creative vision for Cantha."

As well as End of Dragons, ArenaNet is working on upgrading Guild Wars 2's engine to DirectX 11. Later this year an opt-in beta will let players try that out for themselves. "An important note is that the upgrade to DX11 itself isn't a magical fix for frame rates on its own", said head of live operations Josh 'Grouch' Davis. "Some players may not notice a difference at all. However, upgrading to DX11 opens a lot of doors for improving performance—CPU multithreading for instance. It also paves the way for some potential graphics upgrades down the road."

Another feature coming in beta is World Restructuring, aka Alliances, which will rebalance world-versus-world conflict "by dynamically creating matchups using WvW-designated guilds, alliances (a player-made collection of guilds), and active WvW players as the inputs." That'll be available as a multiphase beta, which means "we'll release a part of the World Restructuring system, test it with you in the live game, gather your feedback, and then iterate on it for a future release."

In the meantime, a first-look livestream to give everyone a gander at End of Dragons is due to take place on July 27.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.