Back in January 2012, a blog post appeared on the ArenaNet website, written by none other than Mike O’Brien who is, as you may know, the president of ArenaNet and also the leader of the design team of Guild Wars 2. On this blog entry, O’Brien called 2012 “The Year of the Dragon,” which was a crystal clear reference to Guild Wars 2 being released later on in 2012. That is obviously good news—at least now I can rest assured that I can get to play it later this year—but I still wish the release of this game was sooner.

That said, there is a very good reason why this game still does not have a Guild Wars 2 release date. According to the O’Brien blog entry from January 2012, Guild Wars 2 just completed its very first beta test that was closed. If you know anything about games, you know that a beta test is the part of the game development process that is very important to the people like you and me who want to play games. A best test is the part of the development process that makes sure that as many bugs and glitches as possible are discovered in the game and removed as soon as possible. In other words, without this crucial part of the game development process, you and I would be subject to bug after bug when we would play Guild Wars 2!

O’Brien has also promised us Guild Wars 2 fans that more and more movement toward a completed version of this game is just around the corner. In the same blog entry, he said that February of 2012 would see select press invited to take part in the beta testing, and March of 2012 and April of 2012 would see a greater number of players invited to beta testing events! If you are itching to be one of the select few who will be invited to a Guild Wars 2 beta event, you can just keep up to date with ArenaNet announcements that are to be found on its official website, blog and even Facebook webpage.

Sadly, though, the reality of the matter is that the majority of us Guild Wars 2 fans are never going to be picked to be beta testers; that is just the way the cookie crumbles. While I know how upsetting that can be, I have decided to do the next best thing. Even though I probably will not be picked to take part in an upcoming Guild Wars 2 beta testing event, I still have gone ahead and pre-ordered Guild Wars 2 for later in 2012.

If you want to go ahead and pre-order Guild Wars 2, which I am really recommending you should, you are in luck because Amazon has a webpage already set up to take any pre-orders for this game, right now. I think that it is the best course of action to go ahead and pre-order a game like this, as you do not know how many people will swarm to buy it when it the Guild Wars 2 release date finally hits later on in 2012! If you are like me, you believe that there is absolutely nothing worse than waiting for an awesome video game to be released, only not to be able to play it when it comes out because you failed to order it ahead of time.

This MMORPG is still currently in development by ArenaNet, which is a bummer of sorts, as I want to play it right away. I can’t wait to explore the world of Tyra and see how the Destiny’s Edge angle of reemergence is treated by the developers. Even though the Guild Wars 2 release date is still a ways of and later in 2012, I am very excited for this release. I hope that this game’s unique feature—its storyline that will supposedly be responsive to my actions as a player—will be worth the wait.