I placed my order for Guild Wars: Eye of the North and the Prerelease Bonus Pack today. The Bonus Pack access key was scanned and e-mailed to me a few hours later but I’ll only get the Bonus Pack package when the retail copy of GW:EN arrives.

I’m a little nervous about the situation as it means my Bonus Pack access key is somewhere in the store right now. What if — gasp! — someone adds my key (accidentally or deliberately) to another account?

Suggested new ritualist skill: Paranoid was Gobi.

Anyway, I added the access key to my account earlier without any problems. I now have trial access to the three campaigns, bonus items and access to the upcoming preview.

All things considered, the Prerelease Bonus Pack for GW:EN is a bit of a letdown. All the more so when compared to the Nightfall Prerelease Bonus Pack which included additional (and much appreciated!) character slots.

Now you can only play the expansion with existing characters but additional character slots are always welcome. There are 10 professions altogether and even if you own all three campaigns and bought the Nightfall Preorder Bonus Pack, you would only have 9 character slots. You can always buy additional character slots from the online store but a free character slot would have been a great way to reward those who placed preorders for GW:EN.

The trials for the three campaigns are completely useless to me as I not only own all three campaigns but have completed each multiple times.

/bonus

The bonus items are decent but if you have put enough hours into the game, it’s more than likely your characters would have items that are much superior.

The best thing about the bonus items is that they can be spawned multiple times. Just keep typing “/bonus” and as long as you have inventory space, you’ll get the items if you don’t have them in your inventory already. You can’t salvage raw materials from them or sell them but there’s one good use for them.

Previously, I would equip my Heros with items from drops or collectors but these bonus items will do just as well. Plus, they do have nice skins and effects.

There’s an item for every profession except the Assassin, Dervish and Paragon. The latter two professions received bonus gear from the Nightfall preorder bonus pack so it’s perhaps understandable why there are no bonus items for them this time around. Assassins get screwed, however. I suppose they’re used to this by now.

The main draw of the bonus pack is the Sneak Peek Weekend. Taking place next weekend, this will give gamers a chance to play through the initial areas of the game before the gates officially open on August 31. The cool thing is everything you do and acquire during the preview weekend will count when the game officially goes live a week later.

The head start will be particularly nice for folks living outside the US. I’m not sure when the US retail boxes will arrive locally — one local retailer is expecting it on September 1 — but I doubt any Malaysians will be GW:EN-ing on September 1 unless they’ve ordered the game through the in-game store.