ArenaNet is at EGX Rezzed in London this weekend showing off the Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns demo. While this is the same demo that they showed at PAX East last weekend, ArenaNet will be showing off the new World vs World desert Borderlands map during a panel on Saturday, March 14. Starting at 8am Pacific, the panel will go over all of the core features of the expansion before giving an in-depth tour of the new map. For those who can't make it to Rezzed, the panel will be streamed on the EGX Twitch channel.

Last week I had the chance to visit the ArenaNet studios to get an early look at the Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns demo that players will be able to play at PAX East this weekend and again at EGX Rezzed in London the following weekend. Alongside being able to play the demo, I had a chance to interview Jon Peters and John Corpening, which you can read right here on ZAM.

There have been hints dropped left and right about where Guild Wars is heading, and now we have some solid data on the direction they are going. It looks like they are making it a point to change-things-up a bit for those of us who play regularly.

There's three tiers of update information: Monthly Maintenance, which isn't anything unexpected, Content Updates, which are welcome and look to be larger than the previous content updates, even if they are going to be spaced out a trite bit more than before, coming out roughly every three to four months rather than every patch.

We are even expanding the Live Team to offer more of the best quality support and content that we can for Guild Wars . With this new system, we release our new content in fewer yet more substantial updates. We want players to feel connected to what we are developing even though it may be months away from release, so during development we will be more open about our process and what we are working on.

Like most of you, we've been waiting patiently for information about ArenaNet's (mostly) announced Guild Wars 2 project. Unfortunately, despite all of our efforts, we've still been unable to get anything definitive. Having said that, Guild Wars has an amazingly unique art style that made the opportunity to sit down with Daniel Dociu, Creative Director at ArenaNet, so appealing to us. During the interview we talked about the work he did on Guild Wars, the future look of MMOs, his role in Valve's Half-Life 2 and of course, my failed attempt to get information about Guild Wars 2.

Tamat : Hey Daniel, thank you so much for sitting down with me today to talk about Guild Wars.

Daniel : Hello! My pleasure.

Tamat : First of all, can you just talk a little bit about your history in the industry?

Daniel : Well I got into games around 1993 if I recall correctly. My first job was with Squaresoft as an art director, back in the days when they had a studio in the Seattle area. Then I moved on to EA for a couple of years. The next one was Zipper Interactive which is currently owned by Sony. I was there for about four years. I then went back to EA for a couple of years and then I did freelancing for a few months in-between EA and ArenaNet. I've been here at ArenaNet for a little over five years now.