I bet you’ve been wondering about all the stuff I said I was going to lay on you from my trip to Seattle? Well, two long plane trips, two scheduled family dinners, and a round of EverQuest 2 later, I now have time to get everything down in blog format.

We’ll start here with my impressions from the hands-on walkthrough of the expansion, and follow that up with two interviews. It’s going to be a busy Friday here, so I hope you’re interested in this Guild Wars thingie; from the comments on the morning briefing it sounds like a lot of you are.

This here is of course where I have to try to think with my blogger hat on, and not let my memories of the event be coloured by the general human propensity to empathize with people we’ve met face to face. It’s a challenging line to walk, and if I slip a bit here I apologize in advance.

That said, I do want to start off by giving you my ‘high level’ impressions of the trip.

Guild Wars: Eye of the North (GWEN) is not a strange beast tacked on to the end of the game as a stopgap to keep people from leaving before GWII comes out. It’s not a cheap marketing ploy; if it is a marketing ploy, it’s a ridiculously expensive one. The folks at Arena.net are focused, intelligent, and passionate game makers.

If their goal was merely to put on an attitude of dedication for the press, they did an incredible job of it. An entire wall is covered in statements people have sent in praising them for their work on the game. Everywhere in the Arena.net offices are reams and reams of concept work from the people they have slaving away in the art pens. I’m not going to lie and say it was some sort of magical land where everyone was happy, mining the fun from the rich veins of gaming they discovered underneath their corporate office complex. It was an office. People were at desks (albeit desks with toys), typing at PCs, earning their paycheck. It wasn’t a magical experience.

What it was, though, was a group of people that clearly put in a lot of fricking overtime making this game. It’s a group of people who have poured their souls into a package of entertainment. And they’re working still; we saw several gamebreaking bugs still hanging around because of a previous build we were working off of. They still have a few last minute things to nail down, some kinks to work out. But (and this is a big but) they still enjoy playing the game. I watched them very carefully whenever one of the designers sat down at a terminal: in between discussing new features and plot elements, these guys were still having fun playing their own work.

I dunno what better yardstick I can give you than to say that they still like (and obviously play) their own game. Bad designers don’t play their own game. Good designers play their game but don’t like it. Great designers, I think, are the ones who can still get excited about a trip through a dungeon or quest even though they’ve played it a hundred times before and (perhaps) made it themselves.

By my vote, that’s the mark of designers who have done good work.

I’ll try to share my impressions of the game itself, and you let me know if you agree.

Other Coverage:

There were, of course, several other folks at Arena on Tuesday. Check out their impressions from the same event:

• Gamespot Interview (watch for my air elementalist near the end of the video; I’m the guy in the coat)
• Destructoid
• GameSpy With Jeff Grubb (wanted to write this article really bad)
• IGN
• Games Radar