Guild Wars 2: Wants to beat World of Warcraft

 First a little history that some people might not know, Mike O'Brien the founder of ArenaNet, started this company in 2000 after leaving Blizzard(interesting isn't it?). Initially ArenaNet was called TriForge until it was acquired by NCsoft two years later.

 After the success of the first Guild Wars they are back in full force.

"Guild Wars beat all of our expectations and our company grew as we put out four expansions and we came together as a team and learned how to build content," - Mike O'Brien

 After years of waiting Guild Wars 2 is finally at the door, and their aim has changed since the first one. They are no longer content with surviving the MMO market, no longer will they remain in WoW's shadow.

"We’re in it to win it this time,...We were number two to World of Warcraft with Guild Wars, now we want to beat them. We’ll be satisfied when the Guild Wars 2 is the most successful MMO. I think we have something unique here and players are going to see it and understand why dynamic events are a way better content model than people have experienced before in online worlds. Word-of-mouth will get people to understand that we really are doing something new and different. The sky’s the limit once this game is out. Online worlds have a networking effect. People will bring friends to Guild Wars 2. We hope all the people who play the beta weekend will tell their friends about it." - Mike O'Brien

 It is indeed a bold claim but Guild Wars 2 certainly does have the capability for it, however he tried to soften the "WoW-killer" slogan by saying:

"Nothing is going to kill WoW other than WoW. Games just don’t die...One MMO has been on the top of the heap for seven years now, but there’s been a progression in the industry for other games being able to attract more and more players. And we’re set to climb to the top."

 Now with only 2 days away from open-beta(on the 27th), it is time for us to be the judge. Will it meet out expectations? I'm sure it be great but we shouldn't raise our expectation to be too high, after all no game is perfect which is why most of us hop from game searching for one we can call home.

On a side note, its interesting how the game is coming out on the year of the dragon, with the dragon being the main theme of GW2 and how the open beta opens in weeked as the 7th year anniversary of the first GW.

 I'm trying to setup a live stream in http://www.twitch.tv/sive0n, hopefully i will be able to play the game while recording with my outdated CPU, though they have announced in the forum that GW2 is currently using more CPU than the Graphics card, which will more than likely be a bad thing in my case.