Hey, folks,

We’re down to just eight days now until the launch of Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™! This is an extremely exciting time for everyone. We know you’re all ramping up to get ready for the release of the expansion—and all of us here at ArenaNet have been working like crazy to try and provide the best possible experience we can.

Our journey is nearly over—very soon, you will be gliding through the jungle canopy, battling to level 100 in fractals, building a guild hall with your friends, overcoming challenges in the jungle to unlock your elite specialization, competing with your friends and guildmates to get to the top of our new minigame adventure leaderboards, battling in the epic new World vs. World Borderlands map and waging war against enemy guilds with guild claiming, competing in Stronghold to kill enemy teams’ lords, joining with a party of ten to go on incredibly challenging raid runs, setting off on epic legendary journeys to build legendary gear, competing in Player vs. Player leagues for awesome rewards and prizes, and reading epic run-on sentences! And those are just some highlights of the countless new adventures that await you in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns!

In the time leading up to the launch of the expansion, we’ll be counting down each day by putting a spotlight on a part of the expansion. Each spotlight will provide a summary of links and videos to basically every detail about that feature we’ve revealed up until now—so you can get a full, handy-dandy recap of all the info about each of our major features. That carries us up until October 23. So when exactly will you be able to play Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns for the first time?

On October 23 at 12:01 AM Pacific Time (UTC-7), Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns will go live! In the hours leading up to the launch of the expansion, members of the Guild Wars 2 dev team will be coming by to visit and chat about the expansion on our official Guild Wars 2 Twitch channel. In the final minutes of the countdown to launch, we’d like to invite all of you to join us live on the stream for a champagne toast with our dev team as we “press the button” and launch Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns live.

As developers, this is the most exciting time for all of us: to finally have something we’ve spent over a year of our lives pouring our hearts into get released to all of you. We cannot wait to put Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns live and to get out there and play the game with all of you. We hope you enjoy the expansion as much as we’ve enjoyed making it, and a special thanks goes to all of you who have helped make the game through beta testing in our BWE weekends and giving amazing feedback. Without you, this expansion wouldn’t be near the game it will end up being. For the final time before we launch, we’ll see you soon in Tyria—an epic journey awaits!