I'd love to say more, but we're not ready to start making news just yet. Remember that we were public about our decision to work on Guild Wars Gold right from the beginning, so unlike most development teams, we didn't have a long period of working in secrecy before fans knew about the game and started wanting updates. So I know that it has been a long wait for the fans, but when they do see the game I think they'll agree it was worth it.

IGNPC: What's next for the original Guild Wars franchise? How many more years does it have? Do you plan to introduce any new content in terms of updates or patches or even expansions, or is everything going to transition to Guild Wars 2 at this point?

Mike O'Brien: We plan to keep supporting Guild Wars for a long time. We have a dedicated Live Team that's focused exclusively on Guild Wars, listening to the fans and looking at what type of new content we can release. You see that philosophy in practice this week, as our company is hard at work on Guild Wars 2 but taking time to release a major update to Guild Wars Gold.

IGNPC: Last question. What are some of the lessons that ArenaNet has learned over the past four years? What assumptions did you get right? What did you get wrong?

Mike O'Brien: We were right to make an online RPG in the tradition of Magic: the Gathering instead of Dungeons & Dragons. We founded this company because we wanted to bring players innovative new experiences, and I think Guild Wars Gold has done that. But since Guild Wars was really the first game of its kind, we made some mistakes and learned a lot along the way, and we can apply those lessons to Guild Wars 2.

For example, we were right to build the game around character skills, but we were wrong to let the number of skills grow to Magic: the Gathering-like proportions. It's unnecessary, and it's too much to absorb in a real-time setting. With Guild Wars 2 we can accomplish more with fewer skills.

We were right to believe strongly in the potential of instancing. Our use of instancing allows us to tell compelling stories, and to enable players to really impact the world in a way that's just not possible in most persistent-world games. But there are benefits of persistent worlds too, like the ability to casually make friends as you encounter people in the world, and there's no reason why Guild Wars 2 can't have the best of both worlds.

Overall, I think we were very right to take risks with both game design and business model. In a genre full of very similar games with similar business models, Guild Wars Gold stands apart from the crowd. That's something we're proud of and that we'll continue to do.

IGNPC: Thank you for your time!