Originally Posted by
Colin Johanson
Guild Wars 2 is one of the rare games that has the luxury to actually find issues with the game (via our beta weekends) and be given time by the publisher (thank you, NCsoft!) to address those issues. Because of that, we’re not crippled by the insane crunch and madness that usually accompanies other games to release; instead, we have the time to make intelligent design decisions, test them, and get them right so when we release the game, it’s one we’re truly proud of.
In an age where new-game releases have been ripe with bugs and unfinished products, one of our goals is to try to buck that trend and release a truly finished game that is as bug free as possible. We’re all gamers first at ArenaNet, and honestly we’re sick of paying for released games that aren’t ready to be released—it drives us nuts and we don’t want to do that to our fans. Quite frankly, we wouldn’t want to play our own game if it wasn’t ready for release either.
That being said, the stuff we’ve shown in the beta weekend is just a tiny percentage of the total game that is Guild Wars 2, and those areas are much more polished than the rest of the game, which we’re working on feverishly to try and polish as well. We can’t work on the game forever, and every single game released always has some bugs in it, but we’d like to get to the point where we’ve got a very clean, polished game across its entirety before we release it.