Over the last two days, Guild Wars 2 Hub published a great two-part interview they had with Guild Wars 2′s Lead Content Designer, Colin Johanson. In it, he discusses some behind-the-scenes design details about the beta weekend events, renown events, the difficulty of the game, the impact of player feedback, the goals of the design team, and the atmosphere at the office. Good stuff!

Here’s one of the questions that was asked, with an answer that hits close to home for many MMO gamers:

Lewis B: Something that many people continued to say to me during the first Beta Weekend Event was that they couldn’t believe how polished the game was, that it could undoubtedly be launched tomorrow. Do you think this is a fair assertion? Where are you in terms of your overall timeline and assessment on the products level of “finish”?

Colin: First, let me say that we’ve seen that comment a lot, too, and it makes us, in particular our QA team, extremely proud of the hard work everyone has been doing. In an age where new-game releases have been ripe with bugs and unfinished products, one of our goals is to try to buck that trend and release a truly finished game that is as bug free as possible. We’re all gamers first at ArenaNet, and honestly we’re sick of paying for released games that aren’t ready to be released—it drives us nuts and we don’t want to do that to our fans. Quite frankly, we wouldn’t want to play our own game if it wasn’t ready for release either.

Make sure and check out Part 1 and Part 2 of the full interview!

We got a chance to ask Guild Wars 2 Lead Designer, Eric Flannum, a few questions about the game ranging from World vs World, class balance, PVP vs. PVE progression and more. We’re very excited to share this with, especially on the same day that Arenanet has announced that the game’s launch is August 28, just two months from now!

GW2 Junkies: Guild Wars 2 has some amazing character models, ranging from gigantic norn to tiny asura. With any competitive MMO, players worry about hit boxes and how character models affect gameplay. Since a player can get hit by stray damage, how have you designed the hit boxes for all the varied sizes and shapes that GW2 has to offer—asura are short, norn are tall, charr are wide (and low to the ground when they are running), etc.?

Eric Flannum: Every player character in Guild Wars 2 has the exact same sized collision cylinder. For asura this means that the cylinder is larger than they are and for norn it means that it is smaller. Very early in the process of making the game we knew this was going to be the case, so the min and max sizes of our races are heavily influenced by this.