Can't get enough info on Guild Wars 2? Interested to learn more about the Sylvari, Norn, Asura, and Charr? Read this interview to find out all sorts of little details about your favorite race!

ZAM: That seems like one of the challenges of creating a sequel… you definitely want to transition a portion of the player base into Guild Wars 2, but you still want to support the original game to a degree, right?

Soesbee: Exactly, but you’d have to talk to the live team with what they’re doing on that front. That said, it’s the problem that all sequels have, which is this idea that you loved what we did the first time, but we can’t just repeat what we did. However, we can’t change the whole world drastically either.

So how do we do something that’s between a radical change and what players have already seen? It’s a fine line to tread. The only way to really be successful is to identify what people love and do those things. In the A-Team, people really liked the smart humor and watching things blow up… but you didn’t necessarily have to have the exact same storyline to key on those facets.

In Guild Wars, people love the heroism and the depth of story. People ask us questions on the forums, and if a thread has 400 responses, it’s obviously something that people are interested in. We definitely pay attention to those threads.

ZAM: Do you have any examples of areas of the game people love?

Soesbee: Sure. A lot of questions I’ve been receiving lately are focusing on the “Charr vs. Human” war and what the source of it was and where it came from. We’ve released some information on Ascalon and what happened at the end of King Adelbern’s reign. There’s also been some questions regarding what original Asura life was like while they were underground. Where the Sylvari come from and why… we can’t answer that one at all because it’s a big part of the GW2 story. *laughs*

There are just so many tiny facets of lore – I mean we get tiny questions like “Why don’t the Norn have beards?”

ZAM: It’s a good question – why don’t the Norn have beards?

Soesbee: It’s because we didn’t concept them with beards, and we just thought that if someone doesn’t want a beard, they don’t have to have a beard. And if they do want a beard, they can have a beard.

Another question we received was if the Asura base their virility or “macho-ness” on their ears because we had a quest where an Asura had small ears and no one would date him because of the size of his ears.

So that’s the sort of questions that we receive and people often ask if we’re going to follow some of these models in Guild Wars 2… these tiny little details you can get gigantic stories from.

ZAM: Make sure you check back with us over the next few days to see Part Two of our Guild Wars 2: The Second Coming of Tyria interview!

- Cody Bye, Director of Content