Over the last two days, Guild Wars 2 Hub published a great two-part interview they had with Guild Wars 2′s Lead Content Designer, Colin Johanson. In it, he discusses some behind-the-scenes design details about the beta weekend events, renown events, the difficulty of the game, the impact of player feedback, the goals of the design team, and the atmosphere at the office. Good stuff!

Here’s one of the questions that was asked, with an answer that hits close to home for many MMO gamers:

Lewis B: Something that many people continued to say to me during the first Beta Weekend Event was that they couldn’t believe how polished the game was, that it could undoubtedly be launched tomorrow. Do you think this is a fair assertion? Where are you in terms of your overall timeline and assessment on the products level of “finish”?

Colin: First, let me say that we’ve seen that comment a lot, too, and it makes us, in particular our QA team, extremely proud of the hard work everyone has been doing. In an age where new-game releases have been ripe with bugs and unfinished products, one of our goals is to try to buck that trend and release a truly finished game that is as bug free as possible. We’re all gamers first at ArenaNet, and honestly we’re sick of paying for released games that aren’t ready to be released—it drives us nuts and we don’t want to do that to our fans. Quite frankly, we wouldn’t want to play our own game if it wasn’t ready for release either.

Make sure and check out Part 1 and Part 2 of the full interview!

Today, GW2Hub put out their second part of their interview with Jon Peters where they discussed a bit of everything from social interaction to changes in the game. Here’s a quick clip:

Sardu: And that kind of interaction also helps promote more of the social aspects of the game which are obviously very important in GW2.

Jon Peters: I played in the beta weekends before the Prophecies release, and now I’ve been able to play in the beta events for GW2 as well. What’s interesting is that we’re currently right back in that stage where people are deeply theorycrafting builds, deciding what the cornerstones of X build should be based on Y.

So we’re seeing that exact same cycle repeat itself now, and I expect that will be even more the case when the next beta event hits. At that point, a lot of theorycrafted builds will be put into action and people will begin to discover why they may or may not work the way they expected.

Source: Traits and Builds Interview with Jon Peters Pt. 2

After the MMORPG.com panel on Saturday, Sardu from Guildwars2hub.com got a chance to talk to Jon Peters on traits and builds. Make sure you read the full article for all the details. Here’s a little snippet:

Sardu: Between the press closed beta (CBT2) and the more recent closed beta event (CBT3) I noted there were a lot of changes to traits. The overall system mechanics remained largely the same, but could you talk a bit about some of the specific changes to the traits themselves?

Jon Peters: In the first of those events we had enough placeholder traits to show the process of how you would click on certain slots and there would be choices. That’s basically what those were for. So for the second one (CBT3) it was more like this is how many choices you’re going to have and most of these are real, so all of those were actually built in that three week span in between tests.

Source: Traits and Builds Interview with Jon Peters