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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.
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.