14 DAY TRIAL // Guild War is set to be sustained in the new year by a Live team established in 2008 that will use its time to deliver both monthly updates and bigger content packs. Still, the game is not getting a straight up expansion as ArenaNet, the developer, seems to be hard at work on Guild Wars 2.
The monthly updates are set to include “small skill balance changes, tweaks to AI, or bug fixes on an as needed basis” and the team hopes that this will make the game very responsive to the requests and complaints made by the players.
The bigger content updates will arrive at a distance of three to four months one from another and will contain big changes, some of them even related to aspects of the game that until now we're too difficult to change. The first of them is set to arrive in April and will bring, for starters, increases to account-based storage, improvements to character-based storage and account based changes to the Hall of Monuments.
Guild Wars was significant on its release because it did not require players to pay a monthly subscription. ArenaNet hoped to sustain the game by releasing expansions set to develop the game world while introducing new classes and races.
Since the beginning of 2008, rumors have begun swirling around regarding the development of Guild War 2, which was supposed to be released in 2009. But both ArenaNet and NCsoft are not talking about the title yet so it seems unlikely that the game will arrive this year. Seeing how several high profile MMOs, like Hellgate: London and Tabula Rasa, have gone down in flames not one year after their releases, the developer and publisher are probably thinking that they should capitalize on the relative success of the original Guild Wars rather than launching a new game in an uncertain environment.