ArenaNet Releases First Guild Wars 2 Raid, Spirit Vale

ArenaNet's cranked up the difficulty in Guild Wars 2, with the introduction of the game's first raid, Spirit Vale, the first wing of which goes live today. The other two wings will go live in future patches, and there will be reward bonuses for each wing when it's new.

Instead of "bosses," ArenaNet refers to each encounter in a raid as... well, an "encounter," and that might include a boss fight or something more like a dynamic event in the GW2 world. Each wing consists of a number of encounters, and I got a chance to try out the big boss/encounter of the first wing, a nasty fellow called Gorseval the Multifarious, pictured above. He smashed me and the raid group -- which was 80% ArenaNet employees -- quite handily.

If you want to try out Spirit Vale, you'll need to purchase the Heart of Thorns expansion, which you can do here.