I Got a Brief Look at ‘Guild Wars 3,’ and I’m Excited

Hardly a year goes by without me whistling the Guild Wars 2 loading theme, rewatching clips of the original to soak up that Pre-Searing Ascalon nostalgia, or subjecting my wife to yet another Grawl impression. (Gui-la-la!) That's how monumental ArenaNet's MMORPG has been in my life. So you can understand my excitement when the game developer announced Guild Wars 3 earlier this summer, with a beta set to launch in late 2027. I spent countless hours playing Guild Wars in middle school and high school, and an ungodly amount of time playing Guild Wars 2 with my roommates in college. Guild Wars always felt like the dark horse in the MMORPG world, never reaching the scale and attention of World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XI, yet maintaining a massive user base with a cult-like following. (It uniquely did not require a monthly subscription.) You wouldn't hear anyone talking about it in the school cafeteria like you would the other two titles (I was not a Cool Kid). Still, it always had a grand scale of wonder, adventure, and lore that drew me in—props to my older brother for discovering the game and its many discs, and building a PC to run it. Guild Wars 3's setting predates the events of Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, which means you don't really need to know anything about the series to dive in. It marks the first time the franchise is heading to console with a PlayStation 5 release alongside PC. And while developers typically wind down support for predecessor titles ahead of a sequel, ArenaNet plans to maintain both the original Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 for years to come. (It recently released the original game as Guild Wars Reforged with system enhancements and a mobile port.) Details on the game—built on Unreal Engine 5 and in development for 4 years—are limited, but ArenaNet gave me a brief glimpse of early alpha footage showcasing gameplay components that have me excited to jump back into the world of Tyria. Joy of Movement Gliding is already a movement mechanic in Guild Wars 2, but when you stop and start running, the transitions are awkward and slow. All of that is becoming more fluid in Guild Wars 3, alongside some new range of movements. In some ways, it brings the game closer to an action RPG. You can jump into a ravine, start gliding, and now wall-run to reach your desired destination, all in a series of fluid movements with no awkward transitions, though there is a stamina bar as a limiter. Colin Johanson, ArenaNet’s studio head, says this unlocks “truly expressive and free-formed joy of movement.” Much of this centers on character momentum—using speed, weight, and directional inertia—a philosophy massively multiplayer online games have historically avoided due to network latency and server-client synchronization issues. Momentum doesn't only affect how you get around, but combat as well. For example, you can build up speed to ram into enemies and smash them into cliff walls to stun them—they can do the same to you—or use momentum to kick them off a ledge, King Leonidas-style. (What happens to their loot if they fall off a cliff? ArenaNet hasn't figured that out just yet.) While the basic movement mechanics are the same across all character classes, each class has a unique spin on it. The Warrior class, for example, can sprint up a wall and use downward momentum to plunge their weapon and slam the ground, causing area-of-effect damage to nearby enemies. I recall enjoying many of the collaborative fighting mechanics when Guild Wars 2 first debuted—like an Elementalist dropping a fire ring on the ground so an ally could shoot arrows through it to inflict burning damage. That's still a crucial component in GW3. Warriors can angle their shield to act as a launchpad for allies, catapulting them into the air for elevated strikes. Rangers have an ability that creates an ice vortex, and a Warrior can jump in, ride the vortex's lift high, then plummet down to cause big (icy) damage. Some of these moves are GW3's new “contextual skills," which only show up during specific contextual windows. If a Warrior is in the air, that's when they can use the skill to bomb down and hit the ground with power. In one encounter against spiders, a Warrior set his weapon on fire, which in turn lit his allies' weapons. They sliced through the spiders quickly, and the fire also spread through the webs to clear them out. Players can adjust and customize their builds on the fly in the open world, though some build aspects are restricted until they're back in main hub locations. “Customizing your build to defeat different enemies more easily is also an important part of the Guild Wars franchise,” Johanson says. “It's one of the key pillars of Guild Wars 1, and we're bringing it back more heavily in the combat system in Guild Wars 3.” Conditions you place on enemies are multiplayer stackable, so if one player starts freezing an enemy, the cold effect builds, and the enemy's animation slows down; their attacks are slower. As more people put more cold on the enemy, they'll move slower and slower until they become a block of ice that blocks their moves for a short period. If the enemy is low on health, a character with a knock ability like a Warrior can slam into the ice block and, if it kills the enemy, shatter them into tiny ice cubes, causing damage to nearby foes. There's lots ArenaNet didn't talk about in this gameplay showcase, like the spirit mounts from the game's initial teaser—Johanson says there will be more to share in the future. Also, how will PS5 players, who can't really take advantage of the game's text-based chat systems on PC, communicate? But he confirmed that there will be a player-versus-player (PvP) mode, along with “high-trust coordinated dungeon-like experiences.” In general, combat will feature a “heck of a lot less” user interface over the screen than a traditional MMO. ArenaNet says the scale is different compared to Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, with the former sitting at the smaller scale of the MMO market and the latter sitting on the opposite end. “Internally, we call Guild Wars 3 more of a meaningful MMO, where it's more about each player on-screen really matters and makes a difference,” Johanson says. That's because GW3 uses an evolved version of the megaservers from GW2, allowing for fewer loading screens and an open-world cap of roughly 20 players in active combat zones—a number that scales up significantly higher in social hubs, like cities and towns. “We've seen very few new MMOs in the last decade, and the overwhelming majority of us are still playing the same games from 10 to 20 years ago,” Johanson says. “We see MMO fans constantly clamoring for something new and saying this genre desperately needs something new to move it forward right now, and I think that is when ArenaNet is at its best.” Expect a slow trickle of information over the next year as the beta launch for Guild Wars 3 approaches. Until then, I'm going to dust off Guild Wars 2, which has been seeing its own sudden influx of new players. As the Norn say, “May the spirits guide you.”