Release Date Speculation!

So, a Gw2guru site has a section where people speculate when they think gw2 will ACTUALLY come out (I know right..., it really will...one day)

So post back on your input!

(Yes I extended the poll options pretty-high, I'm saying Q1 2012 ~ Most logical I think...but I'm very hopeful on a Q4 2011 (this year) release...)

i've heard an open beta will be released in november, but as for the actual game idfk

Zombifi3r wrote:i've heard an open beta will be released in november, but as for the actual game idfk

There's an interview from EuroGamer where Colin Johanson says that there will be a closed beta by the end of the year.

Source

O MY! Somebody voted for Even more, I would hate to live in your head! lol

The developers aren't in sync with the marketing people at ANet. If they had been, there would have been a Q4 2011 release set to coincide with the holiday shopping season. Everyone running around with money in hand going out to spend it.

Imho they will probably set a date that doesn't mess with the economy of GW1 and farming around Halloween, Wintersday, or Canthan New Year. That would have revisions to current content wasted by people jumping to the new game.

2 things.

1. They said at both PAX and Gamescom that they were "on track" for closed beta towards the end of this year.

2. They have said repeatedly that they want a short beta-cycle. A long beta for an MMO is about a month.

Lets say, one month closed, couple weeks open. My money is on January-March.

None of the 4 Guild Wars releases were near the Christmas season and they all made big money; I am sure ANET is not worried about release windows.

Can I get some perspective onto the people that have voted for "Even more..." do you really think it will take that long? (Why?)

Q2 at the earliest. ANet does iterative development. So if they go into closed beta in November or December, then the code will be locked down and no changes will be made so they don't risk breaking things that have already been verified.

Lets say they remain in closed beta for at least a month. Reasonable for a game this scale.

The testing will generate new bugs or improvements that need to be fixed. Both code and content bugs. Optimistically, they could only generate two or three iterations of work, which could be between 1 - 2 months.

Then they go into a locked down state again. Not a whole new beta phase, but more of regression testing to validate the fixes and changes. Perhaps two weeks of testing.

If that goes well they will go into open beta. Open beta will stress test the servers, expose exploits, balance tweaks and other bugs just because of the volume of players in the world.

So add a few weeks of open beta time for the team to generate new builds and push them out to testers based on data collected.

FINALLY, the game will be submitted to the ESRB which will take a few weeks for classification before it can be sold. You can't submit a game to the ESRB until it is "content and feature complete", so post closed-beta regression or open-beta.

Closed beta does not mean anywhere close to done. It means the game is feature complete and has most of its release candidate assets and content.

I believe Q2 is the soonest they could possibly be done. Q3 is the safe bet. And Q4 if open beta exposes a ton of high priority defects than cant be patched post release.

Well, I just read on the blog that they have been tinkering with the Engineer's tool belt, and ranger pet handling.

Lest we forget, they still have 1 more profession to release. The last one introduced was the Engineer, and they did that back in what May? They have also added 11 new quests in the War in Cantha series to placate us while they continue to work on the new game. I had originally responded Q1 of 2012, I would now push that back to Q3 at the earliest.