Guild Wars - Development To Be Halted and Automated Suppport

Couchpotato

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ArenaNet announces on the Guild Wars website that all support, and development for the original Guild Wars is halted.

It's hard to believe that there's been more than eight years of Guild Wars. So much has happened since our release in April of 2005: two additional campaigns, an expansion, two major live story arcs, new festivals, new content, countless new features, and quality-of-life improvements have been added to the game. The change has happened so naturally over time, it's hard to believe how stark the difference is between when the game first launched and how it stands on the live servers now.
Over time, our focus has shifted to updates that not only help maintain Guild Wars but help the game maintain itself. With this focus in mind, we'll no longer be releasing any new content for the live game except in support of automation. Our goal is to get the game to a place where it can continue to run and be available to all of our fans. We have a lot of love for Guild Wars—it's the game that made us what we are today—and we want to continue sharing it with everyone!
I want to make sure that players correctly understand our intentions behind these changes and the overall push for automation. As I've said, we want the game to be in a place where it's able to take care of itself. While we will not be producing new content, the Live Team will still be around to perform critical fixes for crashes or other serious issues. We want to support the players who made us successful by ensuring the game provides the best service possible without constant supervision and attention. Reducing the need for manual intervention makes it easier for us to keep Guild Wars running in the years to come.
More information.
 
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Although Guild Wars 2 is pretty good (with touches of awesome), it's still an MMO in the WoW mold and designed to be all things to all men; and it suffers from the seemingly unavoidable faults of the genre - after a relatively short levelling mini game it devolves into grinding gear and cosmetic items.

Guild Wars 1 is something different and more polarising, in that you max out very early in the game and then the progression is mostly horizontal, so you can find challenging play all over the game, especially with hard mode. Also, with heroes it is more like a single player game with optional multiplayer, although that wasn't really Arenanet's intention. Despite GW2's strenghs, I sort of wish they had made a proper sequel to GW1, rather than just a variation of what everyone else is doing.

It maybe that the spiritual successor to GW1 will be something like Shroud of The Avatar, which appears to have similar mechanics. The only worry here being some odd features such as exclusive persistent housing.
 
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