During the past two years of development we made huge advances to our game engine, adding a persistent world with free-form movement and exploration, day/night cycles, cutting edge support for dungeons and interior environments, numerous graphical advancements including support for more detailed environments and models, better lighting and shadows, new animation and effects systems, plus new audio and cinematics engines, a more flexible combat and skill-casting system, and so on.

The basic structure of the game is very different from what players saw in Guild Wars. While we will still make use of instancing (e.g. for quests and dungeons) players will find Guild Wars 2 to be a large open and persistent world where they can meet up with old friends or make new ones while out adventuring.