A reddit AMA with Mike O'Brien has word from the ArenaNet boss that Guild Wars 2 game director Colin Johanson is leaving the company, saying this is on good terms, and they remain good friends (thanks Marvin T. Martian). Mike says he will be stepping in as game director for Guild Wars 2 for now, and that while he is excited about returning to such a role, one of his goals is to eventually hire someone to replace him to guide the MMORPG sequel. He also takes the opportunity to lay out plans for the game's future:

We recently started PvP season two and we’re about to launch the next raid wing. After that we’re packaging up and preparing our next big quarterly update for April. The April update is about reducing grind, clearing away some tedium, getting quickly to the fun, and improving rewards. We’ve always said that Guild Wars should be about having fun rather than preparing to have fun, and this will be a back-to-our-roots kind of update. After the April update, we’ll start live beta-tests of improvements to WvW. Our goal is to be very incremental and visible with the changes we’re making there, so that players are involved every step of the way. Further on, we’ll launch the next raid wing in May or June, then Living World and the next quarterly update.

You’ve seen in past years that we went through times when the whole company worked on one thing. In 2013, the year we shipped 21 Living World updates, pretty much the whole company was working on Living World. In 2015, we were all working on the expansion. Going forward we’re putting ourselves in a more sustainable mode where live and expansion don’t compete with each other.

We have about 120 devs working on the live game, 70 devs on Expac2, and 30 devs on core teams that support both. Within these groups we have cross-discipline teams with focused missions. For example on Live we have the PvP team, the WvW team, the Fractals team, the Raids team, the Living World team, the Legendaries team, and a couple others. The teams are charged with carrying a feature from inception and design through completion. When they finish, we typically package work from multiple teams into a single release, then we hand it off to release teams for final voice integration, localization, QA, and release management.