During gamescom we asked to submit your questions to us over twitter so that we could take them and have them answered by Martin Kerstein. While he couldn’t answer all of your questions, in our interview we did manage to talk about the upcoming launch, updates for the future, the extended experience and more!

GuildMag: You’ve been with this game since its production started. How does it feel to launch the game and that you can finally say that it’s ready?

Martin Kerstein: It feels amazing, in one of the other interviews I got asked what are the highlights, and the day when Mike O’Brien was asking every team lead: ‘Hey, is your team ready to ship on that date’, everyone was like: ‘Yeah, we are!’ And we were: ‘Alright, let’s announce our launch date!’ – That was very special and it felt great, after all this long time, to finally let people play and keep playing, that’s amazing. I’m pretty sure that when we actually push the button, there will be a big celebration in our studio.

GuildMag: What are some of the plans you’ve got for the near future in regards to supporting the game via the live team and how regular should we be expecting updates?

Martin Kerstein: Yeah, we’ll definitely have a live team and our goal is to have regular updates to the game, obviously we will do balancing if it’s necessary, there will be holiday events like people know them from Guild Wars 1. It’s basically the beginning of the journey, it’s not like: ‘Here’s the game, we’re done with it.’ It’s more like the start of it. So we’ll be constantly adding and refining stuff to make it fresh and to keep it good for the people.

GuildMag: If we look at other MMO’s they have regular content updates, will we also get updates like those for free or will we have to purchase those from the cash shop?

Martin Kerstein: That’s not my field of expertise but like I said, we’ll add regular updates to the game for free, but we’ll also probably ship expansions. But let’s first ship the game and then talk about the future.

GuildMag: We’ve heard that for your extended experience you’ll be working with the community, what drove the decision to take this route?

Martin Kerstein: It basically all had to do with prioritization. At one point you will have to pick your priorities and the priority was: ‘let’s ship this game.’ By having an API and work with the community, it’s a strong tool for community building, there are a lot of really creative people out there. I have, myself, no idea if we on our own will also develop stuff for that, it is possible, but I don’t really know.

GuildMag: What happened to earlier applications that you hinted at, like the cross application chat or checking what your friends are up to on a map?

Martin Kerstein: We were looking at them and playing with them, but they were not at a point where we could ship them. Like I said, it’s about priorities and our priority was to polish the game, everything else is flavour.

GuildMag: A lot of our followers are wondering if Guild Wars 2 will ever see the Alliance feature from Guild Wars 1 back in the sequel, what can you tell them?

Martin Kerstein: It’s a thing that we hear people like it, some people have been asking for it. I don’t know how that would work with the way that our guild system has been set up, just from a pure programming and technical point. I can’t say we will add them, or we will never add them, because it’s a decision where we’ll have to look how popular the feature is for the community and then how easily it would be to implement it.

GuildMag: The same goes for guild emblems, will we be seeing more of those upon launch?

Martin Kerstein: There will definitely not be more at launch, considering that we’re constantly adding and updating the game, there might be more after launch. As far as I know, in Guild Wars 1 we had a limited batch at first and just added some more so it’s a possibility, but definitely not at launch.

What kind of applications would you like to see build by the community? Do you think alliances are a feature that needs to be implemented in the future?