At first I would like to point out that I am a Guild Wars fan (perhaps even a fanboy) and I have big hopes for GW2 so by no means I am looking to question potential merits of this game. I am just curious. What exactly happened and when did it happened that caused GW2 to be such a highly anticipated game? I mean, GW2 is all over the place right now. One could even get an impression that it is regarded by some as a savior of the MMO genre. I keep asking myself how did this happen. I played GW1 since its release in 2005 and I loved it. But the fact remains, that I know very few people who actually ever even tried that game. Over the years of playing WoW I met dozens of players, some of them very hardcore. Many of them played different MMO games as well or at least tested them. And yet I know only maybe four folks who tried GW1 (aside from the community which I had in GW1 itself naturally).
And now we have GW2 launching next week and I suddenly realize that everyone and their mom wants to play it. Some on-line friends I didnt heard from since months are contacting me and asking about server choice in GW2 and things like that. Honestly, I am a bit in a WTF state becouse of this. What exactly happened and why? Is PR work from A.net really that good? Not that I mind if it is, I would like their game to succeed. But the fact is, I spent few thousand hours in GW. I loved their lore, their game mechanics and style. That is why I believe in Arena and I believe they have what it takes to make GW2 an awesome game. And there are many people like me around the world I guess. But why people who never had any interest in GW (or some of them wasnt even aware of such game existence few years ago) are now suddenly going like "OMG GW2 GW2 GW2!!!"? Is this some sort of self-propelled hype mechanism? Someone noticed when it exactly started and how? In case of a sequel (which GW2 is) shouldnt the good experience from the original game be a key element needed to build up such hype? And as I mentioned before, most of people hyped by GW2 that I know never even knew or cared about GW1.
In the end I really do hope that GW2 will succeed. I would like to play this game for years to come and for Arena.net to have motivation to release more and more good expansions. I am just curious (and a bit cautios at the same time) about all that hype that surrounds it in the recent months.