Guild Wars 3 Dev Says MMOs Have 'Stagnated'

Guild Wars 3 developer ArenaNet believes its upcoming MMO will offer something genuinely new in the genre, which it believes has become “stagnated.”

One of the biggest announcements at Summer Game Fest 2026 was Guild Wars 3, the sequel to the hugely popular Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. Speaking to IGN at IGN Live, ArenaNet studio head Colin Johanson said Guild Wars 3 will follow in the footsteps of its predecessors by going against the grain in the MMO space.

Guild Wars 1 came out in 2005 and was notable for not having a subscription fee at a time when most MMOs had one. Guild Wars 2 followed in 2012 with a unique approach to offering content called “horizontal progression.” And Guild Wars 3, Johanson said, will offer something unique for MMOs once again.

“We feel like right now, the genre that we make our game in, in the MMO genre — and we’ve consistently heard this from all of you too — that you feel like this genre is ready for something new, that it is stagnated, that we’ve all been playing the same games for the most part for over a decade,” he said. “And I think this is when ArenaNet’s at its best, when we challenge ourselves and say, ‘Let’s go solve for the problems and innovate.’

“And it’s risky. It’s a challenging thing to do. We could trip and fall flat on our face by trying to invent new ideas and then wrap our game around those. But I don’t think game genres move forward unless people are willing to do that. And so we are going to fearlessly charge forward and try a bunch of new ideas. And we really hope people love them and we’re going to find out over the next couple of years.”

So, how exactly will Guild Wars 3 achieve this? Johanson spoke about the importance of “the joy of movement,” which it’s pushing in Guild Wars 3. The developer is hoping to bring some of the elements you’d traditionally find in action games into an MMO, with momentum playing a key role. In Guild Wars 3 your momentum transfers between all the different things you do, which should feel unique for an MMO given how static movement can often feel in other games in the genre. Elsewhere, Guild Wars 3’s combat system sounds like it will be unique for an MMO, and given Guild Wars 3 is coming to console as well as PC, those action RPG elements will be front and center.

This all ties into the idea that Guild Wars 3 will be an MMO for anyone and everyone. It’s set 1,200 years before Guild Wars 1, just before the first Guild War breaks out, and just after one of the gods has been deposed. Due to this, all players are coming in on a relatively equal footing, given there is a small amount of recorded history about this timeline in the lore. So, there will be plenty of mysteries to solve in what feels like something of a reset moment for Guild Wars.

But beyond game mechanics and the plot, ArenaNet is completely rejecting subscription fees and battle passes for Guild Wars 3. While no subscription fee isn’t particularly surprising given how the previous games have worked, no battle passes is certainly news at a time when so many games — MMOs included — have embraced them.

“You have to think about questions like that fundamentally from the very beginning as you construct your game,” Johanson said. “And I think we have a very long history at ArenaNet. Again, when you start with solving for player problems and making games for players first, it forces us to ask a lot of these questions. How do we make a game that players can play as much or as little as they want? I think there’s a lot of challenges with the MMO space right now, where there’s a perception for players — and I’m sure many of you have felt this — of like, hey, somebody tries to tell you to go play this next great MMO and your first reaction is, ‘I don’t have time for that.’ It’s like a second job, and you have to basically give up a chunk of your life to engage with many MMOs.

“And I think that perception and solving for that perception is something that we’ve always wanted to continue to solve for at ArenaNet. We started it with no subscription fees. Our concept of horizontal progression, where you can play our game for a while, take a break, go play other games. That’s okay. We don’t have anything that’s holding you hostage to keep playing. And then come back when you see something cool you want to play again. All of that inspiration and concept is being applied to Guild Wars 3 as well.”

“I think there’s become a modern version of the subscription that we’ve seen evolve over the last few years and even longer than that, in battle passes and paid battle passes, where it’s basically a subscription kind of hidden and wrapped with other stuff around it,” Johanson continued. “We’ve challenged ourselves to ask the same question: can we make a game like this that doesn’t have a subscription fee and doesn’t have a battle pass fee buried in it as well? Because we think players are sick of those, too.

“So this will be a game, you can buy it. You can play it as much or as little as you want. We will respect our players’ time. And if they love it, we’ll have other stuff that they can buy from us in the future. But we’re not going to hold their time hostage and we want them to be able to go play other games.”

Guild Wars 3 goes into beta at the end of next year, so it’s early days. There will be much more to learn about its mechanics and content delivery between now and then, so we’ll get a clearer idea of what to expect before the beta goes live. In the meantime, ArenaNet has announced that it plans to continue to support Guild Wars 1 and 2 “far into the future.”

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Guild Wars 3 Dev Says MMOs Have ‘Stagnated’

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