Guild Wars 2 Launches For Pre-Purchase Customers

In the wee hours of the morning, ArenaNet launched their MMORPG Guild Wars 2 worldwide. Anyone who pre-purchased the game now has exclusive access for a couple days

The servers went live at roughly midnight EST today. The original plan was to bring them up three hours later. However, ArenaNet launched the game early in order to ensure that the servers would be able to handle the crunch. They mentioned in an email that they might do such a thing, so a substantial amount of players were able to jump in as soon as the server were flipped on.

Guild Wars 2 seeks to shake up MMO conventions. Instead of just giving players a series of quests, the game generates dynamic events throughout the game world for large groups of players to participate in. The combat is more reflex-based than in other games, with players able to dodge enemy attacks or launch combos. One of the other "game-changers" ArenaNet touts is World vs. World combat, in which entire servers face off in two-week-long wars.

The game's uniquely suited to handle launch time crunches, too. If your server is full, you don't just sit in a queue. Instead, you play your character on an "overflow server" with identical content until your server has room. I played last night at launch time for a few hours with zero issues.

It's been a long journey for ArenaNet. They first envisioned Guild Wars 2 as a campaign for the original Guild Wars, but really it was too large to be a mere expansion. The company announced Guild Wars 2 back in 2007. Closed alpha and beta testing began in 2011. Testing was ultimately opened to all pre-purchase customers this spring.

If you merely pre-ordered GW2, you'll be able to access GW2 on August 27th. The public launch of the game will occur on the following day. Presumably both periods will begin just as the pre-purchase access, with a 3AM EST official start time but a wink-wink midnight start time.

Also, the game's official website appears to still be selling GW2 pre-purchases. You could buy the game and start playing right now. Just sayin'.