My personal history with Guild Wars , ArenaNet's dark fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game, is an interesting one. I was obsessed (and that's an understatement) with the original Guild Wars upon its launch in early 2005, and this only grew with each of the following two expansions. Hell, I created a skill matrix spreadsheet for my main character -- a ranger that I created when Guild Wars: Factions launched the following year -- in an effort to snag every single skill in the game. I never quite got there, and boy, is that a funny story.You see, I reached a miserable point where I'd played Guild Wars so much -- I completed almost every quest that existed in the game, up to and through the Guild Wars: Nightfall expansion -- that I went a little nuts. I made a rather emotion-fueled blog post over at 1UP.com (where I was employed at the time), which I became somewhat infamous for in the Guild Wars community. I quit the game in a huff, and I never really mended my relationship with it; Guild Wars: Eye of the North (the game's last proper expansion) failed to win me back, and that was that.I share this story for transparency's sake, as I want you to know where I've been with this series. It's been a good four years since this all unfolded (trust me when I say that it was quite melodramatic at the time), and I'd like to think I'm a... well, calmer person these days. I've watched Guild Wars 2 with what began as guarded optimism, and eventually blossomed into full-on really-looking-forward-to-it, which is a rare thing for me to say about an MMO. I tend to regard this as a very stagnant genre, one whose creativity largely ceased with the release of World of Warcraft and the bandwagon mentality that's shadowed it ever since.My excitement for Guild Wars 2 is threefold. First, I'm eager to see how the public quests play out. Second, Guild Wars 2's world actually seems like a. And third, the class makeup is about the first fresh stab anyone's taken at MMO team dynamics in seven years. I got a taste of all three during a visit to ArenaNet's offices earlier this week -- and I was quite taken with what I saw and played.Public quests were a novel-yet-half-baked bullet point back in the horribly underwhelming Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning: You wandered into an area where something was happening (Kill 100 bad mans! Pick up 25 of a thing!), cooperated with whoever happened to be tackling the same goal (which, by the way, dwindled to pretty much no one pretty quickly), and earned rewards based on your contribution. Guild Wars 2 takes the same basic tack, with one notable exception: a complete lack of traditional solo quests. Where Warhammer Online supplemented its standard quests with public ones, Guild Wars 2 revolves around the latter.The reason that ArenaNet pulls this off is by attaching consequences to action (or inaction). Guild Wars 2's public quests add a constant ebb and flow to the world of Tyria; lose a town to an invading horde, and it's off-limits until you've routed them. The promise of such pronounced persistence is leagues ahead of the original Guild Wars' abundant over-instancing -- which turned adventuring areas into little more than interconnected dungeons, and towns into lobbies of group-seekers. Guild Wars 2 dispenses with this sense of isolation for something else entirely.Of course, the dungeon-crawling game exists in this new-and-improved Tyria, and it's where ArenaNet's clever turn on group dynamics gets to shine. The tired healer/tank/damage-dealer trinity of other MMOs is nowhere to be found here; five thieves could conquer a catacomb with as much effort as a "balanced" group of warriors, elementalists, and guardians. ArenaNet accomplishes this by giving each profession the power -- and the built-in impetus -- to switch roles on the fly by equipping different weapons and accessory sets with the click of a button. I took the engineer class on a stroll through a dank dungeon (with three other engineers and thief, incidentally), and mostly stuck to an MO of dual-wielding pistols, immobilizing foes with net traps, and dropping stationary turrets for extra firepower. For a few rough patches, I strapped on a med-kit, dropping constant bandages for my teammates to mend themselves with. A fellow engineer wielded a havoc-wreaking flamethrower almost exclusively, while another engineer dropped about a dozen landmines per encounter (you know, just to be safe). Once we started acting like a team, we cleaned the entire place out. And it was chaos, too; Guild Wars was notable for just how damn chaotic its fights got, and Guild Wars 2 carries on that proud tradition. Helpful (and hard-relearned) tip: Always kill the monk first.From what I saw, Guild Wars 2's dungeons fulfill a story role similar to the first Guild Wars' myriad mission areas. I'm told that conquered dungeons contain extra areas with repeatable content, similar to the customary instance grind in most every other MMO -- though with much more accommodating loot drops, in the form of tokens that guarantee at least one good piece of armor per run. These aren't the kinds of group challenges that coddle you, either (hey there, World of Warcraft!); ArenaNet's making the dungeon content intentionally difficult. My group wiped five or six times on a basic monster group (hence the aforementioned monk tip); let's not even discuss what happened when we arrived at the string of late-dungeon bosses.I don't know when Guild Wars 2 is coming (ArenaNet president Mike O'Brien, ever the Blizzard Entertainment alumnus, won't get more specific than "when it's finished"), but I know I want it. And I can't remember the last time I said that -- really said that -- about an MMO.