This has been a heavy week to be a Guild Wars 2 player.
Colin Johanson - Studio Head, Game Director, and the most visible face of Guild Wars 2’s development since before launch - has left ArenaNet. Eleven years. He was part of the original team that shipped Guild Wars: Factions, helped build GW2 from the ground up, and spent the years since as the person the community most often directed its hopes and frustrations at. Now he’s gone, and the timing - in the same week ArenaNet announced the suspension of Generation 2 legendary weapon development - has made this a difficult few days to process.
I want to take a breath and talk about both things clearly. Not with panic. Just honestly.
Key Highlights
- Colin Johanson has departed ArenaNet after 11 years; co-founder Mike O’Brien confirmed the news in a Reddit AMA on March 4
- O’Brien has stepped into the Game Director role; new leads have been appointed for WvW, Raids, and other game modes
- The six-person Generation 2 Legendary Weapon team has been disbanded; resources redirected to Living World content
- The last Gen 2 legendary completed before the suspension is the shortbow Chuka and Champawat
- Wing 2 of the Forsaken Thicket raid - Salvation Pass - launched March 8, three bosses, significant difficulty jump from Spirit Vale
What We Don’t Know Yet
- Whether the Gen 2 legendary weapon program will resume in any form, or in what timeline
- What O’Brien’s long-term plans for the Game Director role look like - is this a permanent appointment or a bridge?
- What “resources redirected to Living World” actually means in terms of content cadence for the second half of 2016
What Happened
Mike O’Brien confirmed Johanson’s departure in a Reddit AMA that covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time. He described it as amicable - Colin left to pursue an opportunity closer to his family, and the parting was mutual. O’Brien stepped in as interim Game Director while the team settles.
The same AMA addressed the legendary weapon situation directly. The six-person team that had been developing Generation 2 legendary weapons has been reorganized. Those developers are now working on Living World content. The reasoning: ArenaNet believes Living World episodes - regularly released, story-driven map content - are the most effective way to keep the active player base engaged and growing. Concentrating resource there, they argue, serves more players than a legendary weapon program that benefits a smaller slice of the population.
That’s the official position. I’ll get to my read on it in a moment.
What Colin Built
Before anything else: eleven years is a career. Colin Johanson has been part of this franchise since Guild Wars: Factions. He helped ship Guild Wars: Nightfall, Eye of the North, and he was in the room when Guild Wars 2 was being designed from scratch. The living world storytelling format - seasonal events, the original Living World, the way the game tells stories through the landscape rather than through loading screens - came from a team he was leading.
He was also unusually accessible. The State of the Game posts, the developer AMAs, the Twitch streams where he’d take questions from the community - those were partly his doing. Not every studio head is willing to put themselves in the line of fire of a vocal MMO player base on a regular basis. Colin did, and he did it for years. That’s earned him genuine goodwill even from players who disagreed with specific decisions.
He made calls that didn’t land the way he hoped. The megaserver rollout had problems. Some of the Living World Season 1 storytelling was divisive. But the guy cared about this game, and it showed. Every developer AMA, every PAX panel, every time he wrote “see you in Tyria” - that was real.
So: thank you, Colin. Genuinely. This game exists the way it does partly because of work you were part of for over a decade. We hope you find what you’re looking for.
On Legendary Weapons
Now for the harder conversation.
The suspension of Generation 2 legendary weapon development is a problem. I’m not going to dress it up as something it isn’t. Players who purchased Heart of Thorns partly because of the promise of a new generation of legendary weapons - the collection-based journey system that Chuka and Champawat introduced - are right to feel that promise has been walked back.
The argument ArenaNet is making - that Living World content serves more players - is probably true as a raw numbers claim. More players will engage with a new map and story episode than will craft a Generation 2 legendary. That’s almost certainly correct. But it doesn’t address the specific commitment that was made. Players planned around it. Some of them farmed gold for it. That’s not an irrational thing to feel frustrated about.
Here’s where I land: I think this is a hard call made under resource constraints, not a cynical bait-and-switch. The six-person team working on legendaries is small. Redeploying them to Living World isn’t evidence that ArenaNet doesn’t care about legendary weapons - it’s evidence that they’re making a triage call about where limited development hours go. That context doesn’t erase the frustration, but it’s worth holding.
The question I’ll be watching is whether “suspended” means suspended or quietly cancelled. If Living World Season 3 launches, gains momentum, and legendary weapon development remains indefinitely paused, the trust damage compounds. If - six months from now - ArenaNet comes back with a plan to complete what they started, the narrative changes significantly.
Right now, this is a moment that requires patience we didn’t sign up to need. I get that. But I’d rather wait for something done right than get six more weapons that feel rushed.
The AMA and What Comes Next
Mike O’Brien’s Reddit AMA on March 4 was worth reading in full. He came in with specifics: new leads named for WvW and Raids, explicit acknowledgment that the WvW community has been underserved, and a stated commitment to improving reward structures across game modes.
A few things stood out:
WvW is explicitly on the radar. The January State of the Game post mentioned a WvW overhaul that wasn’t ready. O’Brien reiterated that it’s being worked on. He named a new WvW lead. That’s more concrete than we’ve had. Whether it translates to actual updates is the next question, but the acknowledgment that WvW players have been waiting too long is at least accurate.
The “reducing grind” language is promising. O’Brien talked specifically about reward structures feeling unsatisfying - that players should feel good about what they’re earning for their time, not just grinding for distant goals. That’s the right framing. Whether the Spring update delivers on it is what matters.
O’Brien is approachable. He responded to follow-up questions in the thread, engaged with criticism directly, and didn’t deflect the hard questions. Some of his answers were honest admissions that ArenaNet got things wrong. That’s not nothing.
The transition here is real, and transitions in live games create uncertainty. But O’Brien co-founded this company. He built ArenaNet. The idea that Guild Wars 2 is somehow in less capable hands because he stepped into a more active leadership role is hard to sustain. This is his game too.
An Honest Take
2016 has been a rough start for the community’s relationship with ArenaNet. The post-HoT content gap has been wearing on everyone, the legendary suspension stings, and losing Colin Johanson as the visible public face of development is a real change.
But here’s what I keep coming back to: this game has been through hard moments before and come out the other side. The original Living World Season 1 was divisive and they rebuilt the model entirely for Season 2. The megaserver launch was messy and they iterated on it. ArenaNet has shown, repeatedly, that they’re willing to course-correct when something isn’t working.
The pattern I’m asking you to hold onto is this: every time this community has sustained pressure around something that mattered - not just complained, but kept the conversation going with specifics about what needed to change - ArenaNet has eventually responded. Not always as fast as anyone wanted. Not always perfectly. But they respond.
The legendary weapon suspension is worth fighting for. Keep the conversation going. Make the case for why it matters. Just don’t mistake one hard month for the end of the story.
What to Watch For
Salvation Pass, Wing 2. It launched March 8 and it’s a genuine difficulty jump from Spirit Vale. Slothasor, the Bandit Trio, Matthias Gabrel - top guilds are reporting that Slothasor alone is taking multiple sessions to down. If you’re in a raid static, the community discussion and the training guild resources are worth tracking closely.
Spring quarterly update. This is the next concrete test of the “depth” commitment. What ArenaNet delivers there will set the tone for how the community reads the rest of 2016.
Any signal on legendary weapons. Watch the official ArenaNet blog and r/Guildwars2 for any indication that “suspended” has a timeline. If there’s movement, we’ll cover it immediately.
Mike O’Brien’s next public appearance. The AMA was a start. How he continues to show up in community spaces over the next few months will tell us a lot about what his version of the Game Director role looks like.
This community has been through harder things than this month. We’ll get through this one too.
See you in Tyria.