[SOLVED]Q: For Gaile/Dev: I'd love to dive into GW1, buy from it'store, but what if it ends soonish?

Hello Gaile, Devs and fellow gamers,I just participated to a poll about GW1 (Do you still play GW1?), and hell yes I'd like to go for a playthrough. I own the game for a loong time but I never ventured further from the point that I needed a group to progress.

The GW1 store has companion slots (NPC's to fill up your group) for sale. I'd LOVE to buy them if I knew I could play this game for, let's say next 3 years? I'm already amazed that ArenaNet keep these servers running after all this time, but for me there's always this dark doomish cloud of pulling the plug scenario above me.

Gaile, is there any guarantee that the GW1 servers will be up for x-time? I wouldn't blame ArenaNet for ending support, it's simply business. But I'd rather invest that amount of money into my flourishing GW2 account if GW1 won't be here for too long.

Maybe it's a delicate question from business view, and I shouldn't poke my nose into, but I hope you understand that I prefer to invest into GW2 if GW1 is near it's end. Still I'm terribly curious about GW1 story content, I only know recently that King Joko was already in GW1. How much story did I miss....

• Grampybone

You don't need to buy extra Heroes/Companions; you can use the ones the game provides.I don't think there are any plans to close down the GW servers; I think the Devs might have spoken about that in the Guild Wars Forum Chat. That, or on Reddit, perhaps.Regardless, the servers have been up for this long, and I doubt they would have just recently (within the last month) updated the program a few times if they had plans to shut it down any time soon.

Good luck.

It is on maintenance mode, it is unlikely to be shut down whilst anet/gw franchise is active

The statements made indicate that gw1 will likely be running as long as gw2 is up. It's running off the same servers, and it's extremely light-weight.

I doubt it will be closed down. A lot of people have gw1/gw2 accounts linked with accompanying AP and titles. Since these can disappear when the gw1 servers drop connection between the accounts then closing the game will probably bug out those AP and titles.

If you are worried about loss of purchase funds, you can always read the entire story in the Guild Wars Wiki.

Good luck.

First point: like someone else said you don't need to buy the hero unlocks in the store to have NPCs in your party. Every town and outpost has Henchmen you can add to your party - NPCs with preset builds and equipment. Or if you have Nightfall or Eye of the North you can unlock Heroes who you can use anywhere, then you can set their skills and equipment.

The store upgrade just makes it possible to use your own characters as heroes. Some people like it just for the idea that all their characters can be in a party together, and others like it because it gives you more customisation. There's only a few heroes of each profession, whereas using your own characters you could have 12 necromancers, or any other combination you want.

As for GW1 being shut down it's highly unlikely to happen any time in the foreseeable future. Shortly after GW2 was released Anet got it into maintenance mode where it needs minimal work to keep it running, which means there would be very little benefit to them in shutting it down. Plus then no one would be able to get more HoM rewards and they'd have to find a way for people to keep the ones they have without GW2 being able to check against the GW1 servers. Not to mention all the people who still play it regularly.

If they ever did shut it down I think they'd have to give us a lot of notice - several months at least. But all the evidence we've got so far suggests that as long as GW2 is still going GW1 will as well.

plus we've gotten upgrades to gw1 graphics twice now over the last few months - so its running, will keep running, and has devs willing to put their own time into making sure it does run.

Your issue has been brought up on GW1 subreddit. Devs assured that GW1 is very cheap to maintain and they do not plan to shut it down. They even updated the game recently with some graphic shenanigans to make game more suited for modern PCs.

That sounds great, I'm relieved! Thanks everyone for the info!