The developers have set the bar extremely high for the new Guild Wars installment – but perhaps they have good reason to boast.
ArenaNet unveiled its long-rumored next major project, Guild Wars 3, during Summer Game Fest. The action-adventure MMORPG was among the titles that saw the biggest increase on Steam’s wishlist after the announcement, with more than half a million users already indicating their interest. A few days later, studio head Colin Johanson repeated ArenaNet’s intention to bring innovation to a genre that has stagnated for years. In a blog post, Johanson revealed where Guild Wars 3 sits on the MMO spectrum: somewhere between the first and second games.
“Guild Wars Reforged is fundamentally a game about a small team: a player and the team they assemble, whose members can be henchmen, hero NPCs, or other players they want to bring along, and together they must overcome challenges in a predominantly instanced game. Unless you invited them, you never saw other players except in the game’s social hubs. When we released the original Guild Wars, we positioned the game as a CORPG, or cooperative online RPG; however, that label did not stick, and everyone informed us that we had released an MMORPG. In fact, we won several MMO of the Year awards! We gave up on the CORPG approach because it did not resonate with players, and simply accepted what everyone told us: we had released a unique type of MMORPG.
Guild Wars 2 is the exact opposite. At its core, it is a game that offers large-scale experiences in an expansive open world. Guild Wars 2 is best known for huge boss fights, map-wide meta-events, and massive-scale PvP, although the game offers many other experiences as well. Unlike other large-scale MMO worlds, there are no servers or worlds here that restrict who you can meet in this huge environment; instead, the game is divided into maps using our megaserver system, and players can play with anyone who chooses the same real-world region they play from.
Guild Wars 3 sits in the middle of the MMO spectrum, which supports our goals for movement and combat systems. Although it fits the definition of an MMORPG much more than Guild Wars Reforged, it does not try to copy the large-scale gameplay principles that so uniquely define Guild Wars 2. This ensures that all three of our games can exist as different experiences on different timelines, telling different stories about the world of Tyria” – Johanson wrote.
Essentially, it seems that Guild Wars 3 will not feature the enormous PvE and PvP “zergs” that characterized Guild Wars 2 through map-wide meta-events and World versus World mode; instead, the game will focus on smaller groups of players. Players can still expect to naturally encounter others while exploring the map. ArenaNet has not yet revealed whether the game will continue to rely heavily on dynamic events during open-world gameplay.
We will surely hear more about Guild Wars 3 as we get closer to the beta launching in fall 2027 on PlayStation 5 and PC.
