Guild Wars 3, the MMORPG I won't have time to love

MMORPGs and I are a great love story, though these past few years the relationship status has read "it's complicated," since a four-year-old daughter leaves little room for guild nights that end at two in the morning. I cope through denial, telling myself it's only a pause while suspecting it will last years, but hope keeps a man going. And now ArenaNet has gone and relit the whole thing by announcing Guild Wars 3 at Summer Game Fest^[1], and the veteran I thought had retired caught himself drawing up battle plans before the trailer even ended.

Twenty-five years of parallel lives

It all started about twenty-five years ago with Ragnarok Online, its adorable sprites, and its too-short nights. Then World of Warcraft launched in France and swallowed me whole from day one, to the point where my studies spent some time on the bench^[2]. I played at a very high level in a competitive guild that ran for a while in the European progression race, roughly from Vanilla through Burning Crusade, an era when "raid at eight" was the load-bearing sentence of my calendar.

My guild and I grew older together, scouts of a genre still finding itself. We roamed through Star Wars The Old Republic, whose class storylines remain some of the best writing the genre has produced, then AION and its wings, then ArcheAge, where I fell hard for the trade runs you haul yourself, the player housing, and the piracy, because every cargo convoy naturally summons its pirate. We finally settled down in Guild Wars 2, even though I had hated the original Guild Wars and its instanced zones^[3], being the kind of player who swears by open worlds where you bump into actual strangers.

World vs. World, nostalgia with siege weapons

That's where I discovered World vs. World, a player-versus-player mode in which three servers spend a week fighting to capture and hold fortresses with siege weapons^[4]. You defended your server's honor and, since the European servers were largely national, your country's too, which gave the battles the flavor of a permanent World Cup. France held its rank remarkably well, and I still remember our clashes with the Spanish and Russian servers, ferocious opponents we met again week after week like old neighborhood rivals.

Building a trebuchet at four in the morning to retake an outnumbered keep serves no purpose whatsoever in a life, which is probably why I remember nothing but the good parts.

What we know about Guild Wars 3

ArenaNet is keeping details scarce, but the menu is mouthwatering. Guild Wars 3 takes place in Orr, about a thousand years before the first game^[5], an Orr green and very much alive that Guild Wars 2 veterans mostly knew as a sunken kingdom crawling with undead. You'll play a Vaelwarden, a guardian of the land, in an action MMORPG promising a momentum-based movement system with gliding, riding, and wall-running, playable solo or in co-op^[1:1]. The game is coming to PC and, a first for the franchise, to PlayStation 5, with a beta announced for fall 2027^[1:2].

Above all, the studio confirmed there will be no subscription and no battle pass, with studio head Colin Johanson promising to stick to the franchise's model: buy the game once, then fund it through expansions and a cosmetic shop^[6]. He says he wants to avoid mechanics that trap players, and I find the stance all the more commendable because it finally fits me. With my playtime shrunk to almost nothing, a subscription is rent on an apartment I never sleep in, whereas I'll happily pay for a skin nobody will ever look at, to support the developers and to treat myself, in that order on my better days.

See you in fall 2027 for the beta, then, where I fully intend to start an adventure I will never have time to finish. But let's dream a little: my daughter will be six by then, and word is the good guilds recruit early.