ArenaNet: No Guild Wars 2 expansions planned for now

With little over six months gone by since Guild Wars 2 launched, community members wonder of ArenaNet's possible plans to open up additional tracts of Tyria and beyond. The arrival of more content and more powerful characters, gear, and monsters is something of an inevitability in the churn-prone MMORPG genre, but the studio appears content focusing on improving Guild Wars 2's current offerings. Speaking to IGN , Director Colin Johanson states his team "doesn't have a timetable" for developing an expansion.

"Expansions are definitely something that we'll potentially look at in the future, but we don't have a timetable on it," Johanson says. "We're open to it, but I think our major focus as a studio is making the living world concept as strong as possibly can for the players that we've got."

That policy definitely shows through the game's meaty patch updates typically bringing extra quest types, mini-games, PVP overhauls, and story arcs. When asked on the possibility of seeing a far-off Guild Wars 3, Johanson reiterated ArenaNet's commitment to its current title.

"We want to be able to have teams developing new, innovative features that change the way you play our game and grow that experience so it feels like you don't leave Guild Wars 2," he explains. "Guild Wars 2 becomes Guild Wars 2.5 or Guild Wars 3 and it continues to grow."

Here's a couple of quick comparisons: Burning Crusade, World of Warcraft's first expansion, appeared after Blizzard spent nearly three years adding and updating raids and PVP features in the vanilla content. Star Wars: The Old Republic's first expansion, Rise of the Hutt Cartel , is now in closed and public testing a few months after the game celebrated its first anniversary.