Guild Wars 3 Could Be Just What The MMO Industry Needs Right Now

Cue up all your “It’s actually happening!” memes because Guild Wars 3 is a thing! Rather, it will be a thing that we can get our grubby little mitts on in a little over a year, with a beta scheduled for Fall 2027.

ArenaNet made the big announcement this weekend at the Summer Game Fest, supplemented by websites, posts, interviews, and a podcast explaining its strategy for all of the games in its Guild Wars library. Here are all of the most important links (that I’m aware of):

The initial teaser trailer announcement.

The press release on NCSoft’s corporate site:

The Guild Wars 3 site.

GW3’s page on Steam and PlayStation.

The future of the Guild Wars franchise.

Studio Head Colin Johanson’s interview with IGN.

Back from seeing all that? Great! By now, you should be as hyped as the rest of the community over the potential for the first new game in the Guild Wars universe in roughly a decade and a half. So am I, and I’ll be there on day one to try it out – when it’s ready, of course.

That said, I can’t help but feel some trepidation over the announcement and what it means for all of Guild Wars and ArenaNet in general. I’ll get to those thoughts later, but for now, let’s focus on the good as we pose the most important question: Why is ArenaNet creating Guild Wars 3 now?

Our Time Is Now

Guild Wars 2 launched in 2012, following over a decade of, well, massive growth in the massively multiplayer online gaming world. After World of Warcraft’s 2004 launch, many of the games that entered the market were perceived (fairly or not) as “WoW clones.” The time was right for something a little different, and GW2 met those needs.

Now, in 2026, the MMORPG industry is going through a rough spell, to put it charitably. Where we once had a glut of same-y feeling (though often solid) MMOs, we now have a dearth of quality games in the genre. The time is right once again for a new contender to emerge, one that can reshape the environment and rekindle some of that magic we felt two decades ago.

Colin Johanson agreed with that sentiment, saying during Tuesday’s livestream that “the industry, the genre, and ArenaNet are ready for it.” He’s expressed the notion that ArenaNet can once again innovate in the MMO genre, addressing common player pain points and again striking gold with a game that appeals to a wide audience, aided by Guild Wars 3’s impending launch on the PlayStation 5. Guild Wars 3 is like a wizard: not late, not early, but arriving precisely when it needs to.

From a personal standpoint, I find myself playing MMORPGs very rarely these days, when they were roughly all I did from dawn to dusk in the late '00s and early '10s. Nowadays, whenever I see a new MMO announcement, I think about all the reasons I’ll have to not play it, rather than any excitement I might have to play it. Honestly, I think the last time I was truly hyped for an MMO was Guild Wars 2; years of disappointment have taken their toll, but the Guild Wars 3 announcement has given me some hope for the future.

From the standpoint of where Guild Wars 2 is as a game, the time is also right, and maybe has been for a few years. That game’s story was built around the Dragon Cycle and the fight against the Elder Dragons of Tyria, which was players’ primary focus for a decade. That ended in 2022, however (with a brief coda the next year). Recent expansions seem to be building to a larger overarching story, but that “oomph” factor hasn’t quite been there since the last Elder Dragon fell. I like the idea of starting fresh with a new, long-term focus, the likes of which a new game can provide.

And while Guild Wars 2 is still a very pretty game, it’s showing its age a bit in that department as well, especially when compared to modern PC and console games. Graphics aren’t everything, but they aren’t nothing either, and a brand new game gives ArenaNet the chance to apply a fresh coat of paint and update the franchise’s look for at least another decade or so.

Never Asura Thing

Any new MMORPG launch represents a huge risk for the company making it, and in recent years, those risks haven’t paid off. To be sure, ArenaNet is one company I’d trust to get it right, but while the promise of Guild Wars 3 is alluring, I’d be lying if I didn’t have a few reservations about it as well.

I don’t want to speculate too much about the game itself, since we know next to nothing about it apart from it being a prequel to previous Guild Wars titles. That in and of itself is a bit of a bummer to me, since it means we won’t see the effects our actions in GW and GW2 might have had on the world, and it might restrain storytelling to fit the “future” narrative. But it’s an artistic choice that I’m sure ArenaNet decided on for a good reason.

My greater concern is what this means for Guild Wars 2 and ArenaNet as a whole. The company is naturally saying all the right things regarding the future of GW2, but it’s still going to be awkward, both for players and for devs. GW2 is still doing quite well, going by NCSoft’s recent financial data, but GW3 will cut into its revenue. Regardless of what players might be saying now to convince themselves, many players won’t have the time (or money) to split across both games. I know my time commitment will undoubtedly take a hit.

The best comparison I can think of is Path of Exile 2 and how it affected Path of Exile. According to Steam Charts, in the 18 months prior to PoE2’s launch, PoE averaged 29,886 players per month. In the 18 months since, it’s averaged 20,820. PoE is still fully supported, with regular content updates, putting it about on par with what we might expect for GW2 going forward, but it still lost about 1/3 of its player base. The numbers are still healthy, though, and PoE2 has more than made up for the difference.

Closer to home, fellow NCSoft title Aion has seen a similar drop in revenue – about 1/3 – since Aion 2’s Korean launch last November. That brings us to another comparison: Aion was doing decently but not spectacularly for a number of years now, which is probably one of the reasons NCSoft decided on a sequel. Could Guild Wars 2 have been in the same boat of doing well, but not well enough?

Active MMOs don’t typically get new installments unless the current game isn’t doing so hot – why risk the expense and potential for failure if everything is going great? Think of the Destiny, PlanetSide, and Final Fantasy (counting XIV as the “sequel” to XI) franchises as cases where a new game “replaced” a lackluster (at least in terms of revenue) initial game and was highly successful in doing so. Those games only get sequels if they’ve fallen off, like Destiny 2 has (with Bungie essentially “replacing” that game with Marathon).

GW3 will have to hit it out of the park (a fitting metaphor when you realize that NCSoft owns a baseball team) to justify the reduction in revenue for GW2 and the additional expense of developing a totally new game. Using our previous comparisons, PoE2 has averaged over three times as many players as the original game, while Aion 2 has brought more than 10 times as much revenue as Aion, while both games have been active. Can GW3 outperform GW2 in a similar fashion? Based on how GW2 did in its first year, it’s certainly possible, but the risk is always there.

The desire for a new MMORPG is sky-high, and the number of potential competitors is low. If any company with the proper vision, talent, and resources was going to succeed, this would be the time to go for it, and ArenaNet is shooting its shot with Guild Wars 3. There are hurdles to be overcome, but ArenaNet knows that this is the best chance it will ever have to produce a sequel and take MMO gaming to the next level – whatever that means in this era of the genre.