Guild Wars 2

As well as the familiar battleground instances, Guild Wars 2 will also feature a tournament mode where bracketed teams will face off against each other in an escalating series of matches.

"Those are ranked games that include as few as four teams, or a massive number of team," says Johanson. "You play your way through the bracket and the winning team gets a whole bunch of rewards for winning the tournament. In the competitive straight-up tournaments, teams are always five-on-five. And for the hot-joinable games it ranges from five-on-five all the way up to 10-on-10."

To make the system accessible to all, the traditional carrot-and-stick method of seasonal gear upgrades is abandoned, placing all players, newcomers and veterans, on an equal footing - individual skill aside, of course.

"From the second you get into the PVP game, you are as powerful as anyone else. You have all weapons, skills, items and stats. Everything becomes instantly unlocked and everyone is equal. The achievements and the rewards you're trying to get from there are basically prestige things and bonuses - things to show off, all the great stuff you've done.

"If you buy the game six months after it's out, we want you to be able to jump in, play competitive PVP, and not be at a disadvantage from someone who's been there the whole time - other than the fact that they know the game better."

Johanson is tentative about the number of instanced maps that the game will ship with (less than 10 is as close to an answer as we can get), but the ranked and unranked battles will form just one part of a PVP system that also allows players to travel between worlds in order to compete against other servers. Grander in scale, these games are also played over a longer period of time.

"Your server is matched up against two other servers in a two-week-long battle royale, including keep sieges and castle battles. This means hundreds and thousands of players fighting over maps together. At the end of the two weeks, the server that has the most points is the winner and that server gets a load of bonuses for everyone. After that, you get re-matched against two new servers for the following two weeks, so you're constantly fighting for the pride of your server.

"If I'm level 80 and you're level 30, I can bump you up to level 80."

Colin Johanson

"We call it the Mists. You go through a portal to get there and you're transported into a world that's in the middle of all these other worlds. You basically leave your server to go there and fight against the other servers. Then you drop back into your player-versus-environment.

"You don't have to know everyone and you can actually level up entirely in this mode. You can take your PVE character, go into the Mists any time you want, then come back. When you kill other players, their corpse will drop what a monster would and you'll get loot from them - you can level up your experience entirely there.

"We also have a sidekick system, so players can boost you up to their level. If I'm level 80 and you're level 30, I can bump you up to level 80 so you can actually compete in world-versus-world-versus-world. You won't be quite as good as everyone else, but you'll be able to compete."

ArenaNet is currently in a state between refinement and core gameplay build: polishing what exists and working on the incidental details that have become expected of an MMO in recent years.

"Right now, almost all of the major systems are in the game, playable and working, and we're mostly just iterating on things like how skills unlock. That's something that we've been play testing a lot - we're close to alpha and we're looking for feedback.

"Other than that, there's a profession that we haven't revealed. World PVP is something we're going to go into a lot more detail on and show a lot more gameplay in the future. We'll show new PVP maps and we haven't shown the Sylvar starter experiences. There are a lot of core things left that we'd like to go over such as achievements and guilds. That's really the core stuff left to get in - everything else, we're just revising and cleaning up at this point."

Johanson deftly deflects any questions surrounding release with the air of a man who may have been asked this question once or twice already over the weekend. "We're going to go with a closed beta before the end of this year for sure," he says.

"Based on the outcome of that closed beta, that'll determine our open beta schedule. Based on the outcome of the open beta, we'll determine the release date. We really don't know when open beta or release is going to be, because we want to be able to have the time to react to things."