Guild Wars 2 Teases Anniversary Plans

Guild Wars 2 will celebrate its first anniversary on August 28, and game director Colin Johanson has revealed some of the ways ArenaNet plans to celebrate this in game.

In an interview with IGN, Johanson revealed that characters will receive a present on their birthdays as was the case in the original Guild Wars, and also explained what the team hopes the anniversary patch will show players about the game's future. Additionally, it's set to change the world forever; something the team are keen to see happen more often.

"We’re going to do a release on the 20th that is intended to be our big anniversary release celebration," he explained. "That release is intended not only to provide a lot of awesome content for people to experience, but to also set the tone for what they should expect for the living world and the types of things we want to do with events in the year to come.

"It takes the story of the last year and brings it all together. It makes it clear where everything has been going and really closes a lot of open questions that players have had. It’s a story that really affects the entire world and permanently creates content and change for the entire world game-wide, which is really something that’s important to us and we want to showcase that that’s where stuff is headed.

"I think we have some really ambitious plans for next year for what we want to do with the event system, and this kind of showcases a little step of where that can go."

Alongside the new content, Johanson explained players could expect to receive a present on their character's birthday, as was the case in the original Guild Wars. While Guild Wars 1 saw players usually receive mini pets on character birthdays, it's unclear just what members of Guild Wars 2's community will be gifted.

"We will offer a gift to players; it’s something we did in Guild Wars 1 and we’ll bring it back in Guild Wars 2 when their character turns one year-old," Johanson revealed. "There’ll be a gift that becomes available, so that’s something for them to look forward to, and we’ll compliment this with a lot of other exciting stuff as well."

Guild Wars 2 recently announced some of its plans for the future in terms of content, as well as switched to a two-week cycle for major update releases. How do you feel Tyria's first year has gone? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Via: http://www.ign.com

Guild Wars 2 - Sky Pirates Patch Preview/Guides/Achievements

Achievements

• Around 20 achievements, divided into 3 categories 1) Kill x aetherblade pirates in various regions of Tyria, 2) Achievements for getting aetherblade cache in 7 existing jumping puzzles/mini-dungeons 3) Achievements for the new dungeon - some are for completion, others are more skill based
• Kill based achievements require you to interact with the same hologram projectors you encountered in Dragon Bash. They now have a 50/50 chance to spawn Aetherblade pirates when you walk near them (some of them will still spawn holographic minions). You can also get these achievements by killing the pirates guarding the various caches if you don't feel like running around.
• Cache based achievements are basically a bunch of existing jumping puzzles/mini dungeons with a new cache (jumping puzzle chest) placed into them. They don't give any special loot but getting them give you an achievement. It is a way to recycle content basically. You will need to do Goemm's Lab, Obsidian Sanctum, Vexa's Lab, Fawcett's Bounty, Hidden Garden etc to name a few. Some caches are located near entrance but others are located at the very end.
• Dungeon achievements - some are the standard killing bosses achievements while others are more skill based (i.e. avoid a boss mechanic or kill the boss within a time limit).
• Completing 12 of the achievements will reward you with a mini pet modeled after a boss in the new dungeon: http://imgur.com/a/7yOu2

Dungeon - Aetherblade Retreat

• Like molten facility, if not harder. Very interesting boss mechanics not unlike raid boss mechanics seen in other MMOs
• Temporary dungeon, only here for the duration of Sky Pirates but may appear in some form later on
• You get a guaranteed rare from the boss chest and 1 gold every time you complete it. The dungeon is hard enough that Arenanet feels it is justified to give 1 gold for every completed run.
• 5 player dungeon, will upscale players to L80 but low level players may have a hard time.
• Boss chest has a chance to give you an exotic, tradeable monocle headpiece with berserker stats:http://i.imgur.com/MmLXHPW.jpg
• You may also find the recipe for an infinite tonic that will transform you into one of the bosses - you can jump with it and the tonic is tradeable once crafted: http://i.imgur.com/rYDUxRd.jpg

Aetherblade Armor (gemstore)

• I think alot of you have already seen this from datamining. You get 3 sets, one set for each armor type (i.e. light, medium heavy). They are suppose to be purchased from the gemstore I was told.
• Unfortunately both Charr and Asura uses the male model for both sexes.
• Here is a preview of some of the armors you can expect in case you can't access the link above:http://imgur.com/a/QKgRM

Scavenger Hunt

• Ingame scavenger hunt to promote the launch of Sea of Sorrows book, not really part of the Sky Pirates theme.
• Need to find 12 Marriner plaques. You can find all 12 of them using clues given inside the book (or just look for them blindly like I did) . You get an achievement and one time use consumable that give you 5 skill points.

Jumping Puzzle

• Not released until second week on July 2.

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2