Guild wars 2 free to play for free#

As we get ready to ship our first expansion for Guild Wars 2, we want to ensure that we keep the business model friendly and simple.

It doesn’t seem right, and we want to do better. When you’re coming in as a new player to a game that has a bunch of expansions, what exactly should you buy in order to play with your friends? The base game and also every single expansion? We’ve seen examples in the industry where that kind of thing has gotten out of control. And we’ve delivered more than 40 major content releases, with world-changing events, Living World episodes, and feature packs, all free of charge.Įxpansions are the one place where the buy-to-play model gets a little tricky. Since launching three years ago-almost to the day, today-we’ve sold more than 5 million copies of the game. This business model has been fantastic for Guild Wars 2 and our fans. It’s good for gamers and good for developers. We’ve been championing this as a great business model for MMOs since launching the first Guild Wars® a decade ago. Guild Wars 2 has the simplest of business models: buy the game and play it as long as you want with no monthly fees. With Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™ launching soon, there’s no better time to introduce the game to your friends. Today we’re happy to announce that the Guild Wars 2 core game is available for everyone to play for free.

Guild wars 2 free to play for free#

If you would like to see a list of the full restrictions in place for free accounts, head here. The game they are playing is exactly the same game that they were playing Friday, no changes at all.' Everybody can try, and I am confident that when people get into the game it’s going to be exactly the same. 'You don’t have to read a big list of changes and tweaks and restrictions, because we’re opening it up the day we announce it. O'Brien's message to players is simple: try it. You’re going to have a bunch of new players but it’s going to be the same friendly community-the same protected community-that it’s always been. 'If we did our jobs right,' O'Brien says, 'and I totally believe that we've done this right, new players coming into the game are going to get the full authentic experience, but the community is not going to change. I ask O'Brien if he's worried about what effect going free might have on the community-a group that ArenaNet has frequently praised for their helpfulness and friendliness. We've been working on various iterations of this for about a year now, making sure that we tweak and get this right' 'It’s really important to me-I think it's really important to all of us-that we protect this great community that we have, and so we’ve been tweaking and tweaking. 'It’s really important to me that we protect this great community.'įor O'Brien, it's essential that ArenaNet safeguard the existing community. We just make sure that people play the game before they can get into a position where they can disrupt other players.' 'If you didn’t have to do that,' says O'Brien, 'then there’s no way that we could keep people who were being very disruptive from going back into world versus world over and over with new characters. The example given is World vs World, which will be unavailable until players reach level 60. We would delete the account, and they would create a new account and spam everyone in the game.'įinally, ArenaNet has taken steps to stop new players from disrupting the game's more competitive modes. 'If we didn’t have a subtle restriction like that in place, then a spammer could spam everyone in the game. 'You can whisper to anybody you want to,' he says, choosing one example, 'but you can’t create new whisper conversations more than about once every 30 seconds.' It's a small restriction, but one that shouldn't impact regular players. According to O'Brien, these are all subtle measures. Secondly, protections have been put in place against spammers. Firstly account storage-something ArenaNet views as a luxury. There will, however, be some restrictions in place for free players.