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Here is the info from Kotaku.

Guild Wars 2

By: Brian D. Crecente

The Arena Net guys are messing with me.

Jeff Strain, former Blizzard coder and co-founder of the dev team behind Guild Wars, is clearly enjoying having me on the hook while I'm on the horn.

He's talking up Guild Wars 2 when I break in with the most, I believe, relevant question: Are you going to charge a monthly subscription fee this time around?

"With Guild Wars 2 we will be introducing a persistent world," he says, as almost an excuse. "We will have playable races. Everything you expect in a subscription system..."

He pauses for dramatic effect.

"...and we decided not to charge a subscription fee."

Strain and the people on his side of the phone call break into laughter.

"Funny," I say, genuinely amused.

The phone call is about two things, first that Guild Wars, what NC Soft believes to be the second largest massively multiplayer online game around, is getting a final expansion and that the final expansion will prepare gamers for Guild Wars 2.

Guild Wars 2
Since the game is essentially starting with a clean slate, Arena Net decided to make some pretty substantive changes to the game.

First, and most importantly though, the game will remain subscription free.

This time around the game will have a persistence world, one still set in Tyria, but now hundreds of years after the events that took place in the original Guild Wars.

"The big new feature is a persistent world," Strain said. "I think Guild Wars has some very radical departures from typical role-playing. One of those was the instancing model.

As each of the campaigns was released we took greater and greater pains to do that.
On the other hand, there are things we missed out on, like the more organic type of community building where you wandering through the area and hook-up with other people."

"In Guild Wars 2 we wanted to have the best of both worlds. We are retaining the strengths of instanced areas, but we are also integrating a persistenced world. We are not making a World of Warcraft clone here, we are not trying to do what other MMOs have done."

Arena Net's new spin is sort of an amalgam of both instanced and massive environments, where instanced events can have domino effects on other parts of the world, or zone..

Here's one example of this Strain used:

You are wandering through the countryside and you see a dragon flying overhead. You and a group try to stave off the dragon. If you are successful the nearby town gives you a treasure.

But if you don't drive off the dragon, the bridge will be destroyed. This will lead to a team of carpenters gathering at the bridge to try to fix it and then you will have to protect them from bandits.

"The idea is that there will always be something going on in the world," Strain said.

He said that there will be hundreds of these types of events that happen in the world, some daily, some hourly, some will be triggered by specific player actions.

"That is what persistence allows us to do. That is the type of content and play experience that we can offer in Guild Wars 2 that we couldn't offer in Guild Wars."

Another major change will be in the way the game handles player versus player.

In Guild Wars 2, the same character you use in-game will be used for player-versus-player conflicts that will take place in the Mists, the place between the many worlds, aka servers, of this new Guild Wars. Despite having several worlds, the game uses a global database so you can instantly transfer between worlds, Strain said.

And these inter-world battles in the Mists, which Strain says almost play like a large real-time strategy game, can have a real impact on the worlds.

"By achieving victories in these battles there will be benefits to your world," Strain said. "Bonuses, advantages, maybe everyone gets increased energy regeneration or healing rate or enhanced loot drop rate."

Strain says the world-versus-world match-ups will be shuffled every couple of weeks to make sure things stay fair.

Every week or every two weeks we will shuffle who is matched up.

Arena Net, it seems, is trying to tackle many of the biggest drawbacks most current massively multiplayer online games face. Chief among them is level capping. Why, once you top out, should you stick around in a game?

Guild Wars 2 is trying to deal with that issue by using a system with a high level cap once that could be set to 100 or even boundless.

"So there is not a level 20 cap," Strain said. "Either it will be a high level like 100 or unbounded, we haven't decided."
Besides these significant changes to the game, Guild Wars 2 will also introduce plenty of smaller ones, like the ability for your characters to do things like jump, swim, even climb trees.

The combat though, Strain says, will remain purely RPG

"Our belief is that role players aren't playing a RPG because they want a twitch action," Strain said, "there is a difference between playing a game like an RPG and playing a game like God of War."

Guild Wars 2 is expected to hit public beta next year, but no release date has yet been set.