ArenaNet reveals more information on the Guild Missions coming next week.

The next big content patch for Guild Wars 2 is less than a week away, and today ArenaNet released a blog detailing one of the major features in the patch. Leah Rivera, Guild content team designer at ArenaNet, wrote the blog where she talks all about Guild Missions. Not only do we get her nice words, ArenaNet released a trailer for the missions:

The Guild content team wanted to provide guilds with fun things to do together now, but also be able to expand the system to include new styles of content in the future. To that they came up with three things: Guild missions, guild merits, and an expanded unlock system.

Guild Missions - These missions are unlocked through the guild tech tree. These missions are designed for group play, so starting them without any help would probably not be good. All of the missions however, take place in the open world. So if you are in a small guild (or just no one is online at the time) your guild can rally other players to help.

With the February release we will get five missions types:

• Guild Bounty - Track down and capture various targets for the Orders.
• Guild Trek - Find the list of locations before time runs out.
• Guild Challenge - Challenges based off the existing event system but are geared to require multi-group, coordinated play.
• Guild Rush - "A mad dash over harrowing terraing, traps, and other hidden dangers. Just remember, there's safety in numbers!"
• Guild Puzzle - One part puzzle, One part jumping challenge. Requires multi-group coordination as well as individual jumping skills.

Guild Merits - Completing Guild Missions will reward players with a personal reward and Guild Merits. These merits will show up in the guild panel and can be used to unlock new guild upgrades. The new upgrades will include rewards like combo banners, gold find bonus, reduced waypoint costs and the other guild missions.

A few days ago Colin Johanson was in London and had lunch with some Guild Wars 2 fans. Of course, he didn't get away before being asked a few questions and our friends over at Dragon Season were there to get all the details. While they are still busy transcribing the 2-hour long lunch, some information about Guild Missions is already available.

When asked about kicking off the guild missions, Colin said that they would be an option in rank permissions much like the queue or activating upgrades. The appropriate rank would then be able to kick off content whenever they want to. Going into the actual missions he used the Guild Bounty as the example:

"With bounty hunts, you can pick which tier of bounty hunts you go on and it randomly generates bosses in different zones that get spawned because the bounty hunt started and it spreads your guild out all over the place. If you do a really big bounty hunt it will actually spread your guild across five different zones, where there is a boss in each and you have, say, 15 minutes to kill all five of them. So, you actually have to split your guild into five different groups and send them to all the maps and find them to take them out."

It is this Guild Bounty mission, according to Colin, that guild will have available the day of the patch. The other mission types would need to be unlocked through the tech tree. Colin said that "it's literally going to take months" to unlock all of the guild missions.

Matt "Mattsta" Adams