ArenaNet unveiled its long-rumored next big project, the action/adventure MMORPG Guild Wars 3, during Summer Game Fest. The game was among those titles that registered the biggest wishlist increase on Steam following the announcement, with over half a million users already signaling their interest.
A few days later, Studio Head Colin Johanson reiterated ArenaNet's desire to innovate in a genre that has known stagnation for many years. Official information has continued to trickle in, and yesterday Johanson revealed in a new blog post where to place Guild Wars 3 on the MMO spectrum: somewhere between the first and second Guild Wars.
Guild Wars Reforged is, at its core, a game about a small team: a player and their assembled team of henchmen or hero NPCs or other players they want to bring along with them, overcoming challenges in a predominantly instanced game. Unless you invited them along, you never saw other players except in the game's social hubs. When we released the original Guild Wars, we branded the game as a CORPG (cooperative online RPG); however, the branding never stuck, and everyone informed us we'd released an MMORPG. We even won multiple MMO of the year awards! We gave up on the CORPG angle since it didn't stick with players, and we simply embraced what everyone told us: we'd shipped a unique kind of MMORPG.
Guild Wars 2 is the opposite. At its core, it's a game about giant-scale experiences in an expansive open-world setting. Giant world boss battles, map-wide meta-events, and PvP on a massive scale are what Guild Wars 2 is most known for, although the game offers a wide array of different experiences. Unlike other large-scale MMO worlds, there are no servers or worlds you join that restrict the players you might meet within that giant setting; instead, the game is organized into maps using our megaserver system, and players are able to play with anyone who chooses the same region of the real world they play the game from.
Guild Wars 3 lands near the middle of the MMO spectrum, which supports the goals we have for our movement and combat systems. While it fits the definition of an MMORPG significantly more than Guild Wars Reforged does, it doesn’t try to replicate the large-scale gameplay pillars that so uniquely define Guild Wars 2. This ensures that all three of our games can coexist as different experiences on different timelines, telling different stories about the world of Tyria.
Essentially, it sounds like Guild Wars 3 won't have the massive PvE and PvP "zergs" that defined Guild Wars 2 through map-wide meta events and World versus World mode, focusing instead on smaller player counts. That said, players should still expect to find others organically as they explore the map.
ArenaNet hasn't shared yet whether the game will still rely heavily on dynamic events for open world gameplay. I personally hope it does, as it would be a step backward to return to static PvE content. Anyway, more details will certainly come to light as we get closer to the Fall 2027 beta on PC and PlayStation 5.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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