Guild Wars 2 redefines massively multiplayer online roleplaying games with visceral, action-oriented combat; a gorgeous, living world full of constantly evolving dynamic events; customizable personal storylines that are unique to each player; intense Player vs. Player combat between small teams or massive armies; and most importantly, a shared online world where players work together as allies instead of as rivals — all with no monthly subscription fee.

As expansion development has progressed and the real-world challenges of the past year and a half have changed the way we live and work, it’s become clear that we need a little more time to deliver our creative vision for Cantha. As a result, we’re delaying the release of Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons from late 2021 to early 2022.

We appreciate your patience as we take the time to give the expansion the attention it deserves. I’m incredibly proud of the work the team is doing to bring Cantha to life, and we can’t wait for you to see and experience it for yourselves. Don’t forget to tune in on July 27 for the Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons First Look livestream.

It’s been an eventful couple of months for the live team, starting with the Summer 2021 Live blog post we published back in April. It’s a little nerve-wracking to publish detailed release dates that far in advance—game development can be a little unpredictable at times. But in general, I believe the benefits outweigh the risks, and we intend to push for this level of communication as much as we can going forward. It’s new territory for ArenaNet, but we’re excited about this direction.

In addition to Living World Return, that road map announced some major additions coming to the game this summer, namely the Twisted Marionette and the Legendary Armory. We prioritized these features because we know they’re important to you—you’ve told us as much. With that in mind, we’d like to give two more long-awaited updates that we know are important to many of you.

Alliances When?

This year.

World Restructuring (also known as Alliances) is a feature that aims to deliver a more balanced World vs. World experience by dynamically creating matchups using WvW-designated guilds, alliances (a player-made collection of guilds), and active WvW players as the inputs. This is in comparison to the current system that relies on worlds and world linking. The system will give us more flexibility and granularity when creating new matches and help address natural fluctuations in population over time. It’ll also give players more agency in choosing who they want to play with on an ongoing basis.

World Restructuring is a big change to WvW, and we want to get it right. We’ve read a lot of your feedback on the system—thousands of posts over the years. It’s clear that there isn’t total consensus on how the feature should work, and that’s okay. It’s a big fundamental change to how the mode works, and that can be daunting. In the past, we’ve sometimes made the mistake of releasing the “final” version of a feature and finding that it didn’t quite meet your expectations, meaning that we wasted time and resources. To avoid this, we’re going to do things a little differently this time around to make sure that your voice can help inform the development of World Restructuring.

World Restructuring features will be released in a multiphase beta. What this means is that we’ll release a part of the World Restructuring system, test it with you in the live game, gather your feedback, and then iterate on it for a future release. The feature components will be functional, but not fully polished, meaning we can more easily react to your feedback without having to rewrite a bunch of code. Once we’ve worked with you to lock down the design and implementation, we’ll polish it up and take it out of beta. We’ll be back in August to share an overview of how World Restructuring works and the timing of the first live beta events.

Our communication regarding this feature over the last few years missed the mark. In the past, development priorities shifted away from WvW, and unfortunately both World Restructuring and our players suffered as a result. Our new leadership team views WvW as a cornerstone mode of Guild Wars 2, and it will be a focus of ours going forward.

Client Performance Optimization

We’ve heard you loud and clear—Guild Wars 2 needs better frame rates. We agree. We’re actively working on upgrading our engine to DirectX 11, and we expect to be able to roll it out in an opt-in beta later this year. An important note is that the upgrade to DX11 itself isn’t a magical fix for frame rates on its own. Some players may not notice a difference at all. However, upgrading to DX11 opens a lot of doors for improving performance—CPU multithreading for instance. It also paves the way for some potential graphics upgrades down the road.

We’re investing in our infrastructure, engine, and graphics because we’re looking to the future. This is a long-term effort.

Until Next Time

We’re very excited for the rest of 2021, and we can’t wait to celebrate with you on July 27 during the Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons First Look livestream! We’ve got a new trailer, feature reveals and information, news about elite specialization beta events, and details about the story, characters, art, event design, and more. We want to make sure you have many secrets to discover when you visit Cantha yourself, so while we won’t be spoiling things, we still have lots to share between now and release! We’ve planned more Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons livestreams through the rest of 2021, and they’ll each bring you more news about the expansion.

Our community is the lifeblood of all we do. Thank you for being a part of it.