IGN published an interview with Chris Lye, Director of Marketing at ArenaNet, and Ben Miller, Design Lead for Guild Wars Eye of the North, to find out exactly what to expect from the expansion, as well as the upcoming sequel, Guild Wars 2.

ANet posted the offical GW:EN FAQ on Guildwars.com today. While most of it is old news if you read the guild wars forums. There are some new/confirmed pieces of information:

• Release date is still set for 3rd quarter 2007
• There will be a Prerelease Bonus Pack for GW:EN. No details yet.
• No demo or preview weekend planned.

Key features are as follows:

* All-new content designed exclusively for your existing Guild Wars characters
* 18 huge, multi-level dungeons to explore
* Monuments commemorating your Guild Wars achievements that give access to special items and titles in Guild Wars 2
* 150 new skills (50 of which are special, roleplaying-only skills) to use against your foes
* 10 new Heroes to help in your adventures
* 40 new armor sets suitable for the great heroes of the land
* A first look at some of the exciting, playable races in Guild Wars 2
* Numerous new items, weapons, and titles

You can read the whole FAQ here.

Gamespot published an awesome interview with Guild Wars designer Ben Miller. He talks at length about improving the quest system:

Improving on the Best, Burying the Rest Going into quest design for Guild Wars: Eye of the North, we started with two basic tenets: First of all, we wanted the rewards to matter. This is all level 20 content, and we wanted players to get a huge sense of accomplishment every time they completed a quest. In short, we wanted quest rewards that mattered to level 20 characters. One of the main ways we are accomplishing this is to bring back the quest reward most requested by Guild Wars players—skills. Many GW:EN quests will reward you with new skills that you can then add to your Skill Bar and use on your further adventures. This is one of the most direct ways of giving players something that can improve their character, and we’re happy to be able to bring it back to the game.

The other dictum we carried with us into the development of GW:EN was that quests should be varied and fun. We wanted to avoid designing any delivery (or “fedex”) quests at all. In fact, we put a sign on the door to the quest design area that said: “Every time you make a fedex quest, Abaddon will feast on puppy eyes.” We want the quests in Eye of the North to present players with new goals, new challenges, and new ways to play the game.

Read the rest here.

GamingNexus has exclusive information on some new creatures from Eye of the North:

Fleshreavers are horrible, fleshy monsters with an unusual method of evolution. A young fleshreaver is born as barely more than a small skeleton; the parents assure the survival of their young by layering muscle, tissue, and flesh over the delicate newborn. Sewn together by older fleshreavers, they use only the finest musculature and bone from prey to flesh out the body and wings of their young, carving horns from the discarded bone fragments. Once a fledging fleshreaver has been fully created, it must continue the handiwork of its parents, acquiring new flesh pieces and better musculature to attach to its skeletal structure in order to supplant its rapidly growing form.

Ice Wurms
Distant cousins to the sand, chaos, and desert wurms, the great ice wurms are particularly unusual members of the species, making their home in the frigid marches of the Shiverpeaks rather than the warm territories their brethren favor. A thick layer of blubber beneath their tough skin helps insulate them from the cold. These wurms are significantly stronger and more deadly than their southern counterparts, able to burrow through upper layers of stone, as well as dirt or sand. Such abilities, of course, make them much more formidable opponents.

Krait
Found along the Tarnished Coast, the Krait rival even the Charr for viciousness and cruel ingenuity. These semi-intelligent creatures are vicious and xenophobic, attacking all other species on sight. Little is known about the elusive krait, but a few witnesses describe an army of slithering, serpentine warriors that seem able to transform in the middle of battle into numerous—and much more dangerous—forms. The reports are incomplete at best, as survivors of these encounters are often too hysterical to recall any salient details.

Guild Wars comes in at number 7 on GigaOM Top 10 Most Popular MMOs. They state that Guild Wars has 2 million active users, although I don’t think that is an official number from ArenaNet.

AICN gets an early peek at Transformers and has good things to say :

Exhilarating, and then some. This movie is exactly what a 2 hour live-action Transformers episode should be. In fact, I’m going to go as far as say that this is very possibly the best TV to big screen adaptation I can recall (having only recalled The Fugitive, Mission Impossible, The Mod Squad and Charlies Angels: Full Throttle). Transformers totally recaptures the euphoria of being 7 years old, sitting on the carpet in front of my old television set, TOTALLY engulfed by the awesomeness of fighting Transforming robots, neglecting my rice bubbles until they neither snap, crackle nor pop.

Read the rest here.

ForeverGeek.com has some new info on the OFFICIAL Transformers Theme song (and it’s not that piece of garbage we heard last week… thank God.) It is by a band called MUTEMATH, and you can listen to the entire theme on their MySpace page.

Just posted on the official Guild Wars wiki: Skill Balances and PvP Changes and Chat Channels and Trade “Spam” Lots of buffs in this skill balance. Including changes to Soul Reaping:

Soul Reaping: Energy gain now triggers 3 times every 15 seconds (if you are already at maximum Energy when something dies, it does not count toward this limit). You now gain full Energy when a Spirit you control dies; you gain no Energy when other Spirits die.

I think the Soul Reaping changes will work. It’s not as good as it used to be, but much better than the 5 second timer.

I wonder if they are going to make an in game announcement on the trade spam changes or at least give a warning before banning your account.

Some technical facts about Guild Wars from these three articles:

• Their servers run on blades – originally all IBM, now more varied. Generally these are 2.8 gigahertz dual-processor Xeon IBM blades with 2.5 gigs of RAM.
• There are a number of different categories of servers. These include: Authorization/log-in, game update download, actual gameplay, database cache, DBMS, several secondary game functions (e.g. guild membership, tournaments), and watchdogs overseeing the rest.
• Gameplay servers can support 2500-3500 users each, with the main limitation being addressable memory. (They run on 32-bit Microsoft Windows.) 3500 users is a bit uncomfortable.
• There are 4 ½ million total lines of code.
• Runs on Microsoft SQL Server, mainly Enterprise Edition.
• 1500-2500 transactions/second all day, spiking up to 5000 in their busiest periods.
• They have no full-time DBA (This seems absolutely crazy to me….)

Found via Guild Wars Guru Forums.

MMORPG.com has some new information on Guild Wars:Eye of the North and this frick’n sweet screen shot!