Guild Wars 3: Our Take After Seeing The Game In Action For The First Time

Do you remember the first time you saw the MMORPG that would become your main game for years to come?

My first looks at Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 were both press demos I received in 2004 and 2011, respectively. Now, 15 years later, I’ve gotten my first real look at gameplay for Guild Wars 3, thanks to an event hosted by ArenaNet over Discord on Tuesday (and for some, at Gamescom last week, I believe).

We first got a narrated slice of GW3 gameplay that lasted about 12 minutes, followed by a Q&A session with Game Director Colin Johanson. Everything is currently in a very early alpha state and subject to change, but he was refreshingly forthcoming about several key aspects of the game.

As a long-time GW2 player, I’m obviously interested in the game, but both I and the gaming landscape have changed a lot since 2011, and I’m still questioning whether there’s enough out there to convince me that GW3 will become my next MMO obsession.

I’ll get to my personal feelings toward the end of this piece. For now, here’s the low-down on what we saw.

Building Momentum

By now, you’ve probably heard about the “Joy of Movement” as a central pillar of Guild Wars 3 gameplay and combat; if you didn’t, you’d have heard it plenty of times during our preview. Cliff climbing/running looked as smooth as you’d expect, and will open up loads of new avenues for traversal, while probably also giving developers headaches as they try to take into account all the different ways people will speed through maps.

“Momentum” is the term used to describe how characters can shift from one mode of travel – running, gliding, climbing, sliding, and (not seen in the video) mounted riding – to another, while maintaining their impetus. While relatively rare in MMOs (Palia comes to mind), I had a hard time telling in the video how different it was from, say, a GW2 character leaping off a mount to gliding to running. It’s probably one of those things that will feel better and more intuitive once I’m behind the controls.

The true strength of the momentum system comes in combat. Once the fighting began, the warrior we saw leaped down from her glider to deliver a punishing blow to a raptor. The strength of the attack was based on her speed and height, and she was able to run up a nearby cliff to repeatedly drop down on her foes, or dash around to shield bash and stun enemies. You can even knock enemies off ledges, either to fall to their deaths or just get them out of your hair for a while as they scramble back up.

In this way, positioning is very important, and choosing where to fight your battles is key, both in terms of offense and defense, since the enemies also have the capability to knock you around in a similar manner. Guild Wars 2 encouraged movement more for defensive purposes, such as dodge-rolling, so it’s interesting to see Guild Wars 3 take a more offensive approach to things.

There is an endurance resource that determines how often you can utilize such moves, but it refilled quickly. The system is neat, but I can imagine it might look a tad goofy when you have a dozen-plus players in a battle repeatedly running up cliffs and dropping down during a big fight.

Better With Friends

Speaking of other players, our warrior was joined by a necromancer as the two took on content in a ruined temple of Dhuum, recently usurped by the god of death by Grenth. The warrior held out her shield, which allowed the necromancer to leap off her and get the jump on nearby enemies. Unlike GW2’s combo fields, which were rather passive – place down a field and hope an ally interacts with it – combo attacks in GW3 will require conscious effort and execution by players.

Another example that Colin Johanson told us about (but we didn’t see) was the ranger’s Polar Vortex skill. While airborne, a ranger can do a “Legolas-style move” and shoot arrows while slowfalling. Polar Vortex creates an ice tornado that a ranger, or one of their allies, can use to temporarily take to the skies and unleash ice-based attacks. For instance, a warrior can use it to smash down with a giant AoE ice attack.

One of the things I talked about in my wishlist article for Guild Wars 3 was the hope that some challenging enemies would have weak spots that players could exploit. This was on display during a battle against a “Burner,” which had an explosive backpack. The backpack was damaged more easily than the Burner itself, and exploded after just a few hits, taking the Burner with it; fortunately, the players dashed away so as not to get caught in the ensuing inferno.

Another combat encounter against a group of spiders showed off the wider impact of some effects. The spiders’ webs could be burned away with fire attacks. It was explained that customizing your build to include particular skills, similar to how the first Guild Wars worked, would make such encounters easier.

Elite skills have been standard in all iterations of Guild Wars, and Guild Wars 3 is no exception. They need to be charged up, via actions you take in combat. We saw the warrior’s Rampage, which increased her attack speed, damage, and impact (for knocking enemies around), while providing the visual effect of a red lightning-like glow around the character.

Regarding those visuals: A stated goal of Guild Wars 2 was that you would have greater feedback regarding the state of character – player and AI – so you wouldn’t have to rely so much on icons near health bars. Suffice it to say, that hasn’t panned out, not when you can have boons and conditions running halfway across your monitor.

In the Q&A that followed, Colin Johanson iterated that this was a further emphasis for GW3, and the spider fight in particular grabbed my attention; they were literally lit on fire. When he explained Polar Vortex, he said that ice attacks will stack, making an opponent move slower and slower until they’re totally frozen, at which point the right attack will shatter them, causing ice shards to split out and damage enemies.

One other thing I noted during the gameplay preview: While enemies did have health bars on screen, there was no “target” per se. Does that mean Guild Wars 3 is full action combat, with no targeting, at least for melee characters? (We never saw the necromancer’s point of view.) I didn't think to ask this during the session.

Perhaps that's so, and the overall UI seemed extremely minimal – though Johanson said they’re still iterating on exactly how many skills you can have equipped at once, and the active skill UI we saw in the demo had “literally changed in the last week” – but that might have just been a choice for this demo to highlight other aspects of the game.

After the gameplay session, Johanson took questions from the assembled press. I’ve already briefly broached the subject when I talked about an endless stream of players cliff-jumping, but he told us that the team (which currently numbers about 350 at ArenaNet) was looking to have around 20 players max when it came to big battles. That’s in line with how he previously said fights would fall somewhere between Guild Wars’ max of eight players and Guild Wars 2’s triple-digit effects-fests.

A commonly stated goal of Guild Wars 2 was that ArenaNet didn’t want other players to be a detriment, whether it was by kill- or crafting resource-stealing, or generally interfering with your gameplay. That’s still the case in Guild Wars 3, though it’s been expanded to other players being a benefit, rather than not being a detriment. The combos we saw and heard about are an extension of that, and the hope (at least on my end) is that they’ll be more visually and tactically interesting than GW2’s combo system. I can’t wait to bounce off some random warrior’s shield and dive-bomb a mass of bad guys!

As far as other social aspects of the game, there will be something similar to, but not exactly the same as, GW2’s megaserver system, which Johanson said would be covered in more detail at a later time. Separate or merged servers for NA/EU and PC/console players was also something that he couldn’t discuss at this time, though he’s aware of how console players have limited communication capability; proximity chat was brought up by one questioner but neither confirmed nor denied.

The Big Question

There was one thing, though, that has been concerning me about Guild Wars 3 since its announcement, which I discussed in my first article about the game: Namely, why do another game in the series now?

Assuming you’re not already a Guild Wars fan, if you’re still playing another MMO, or any of the thousands of games on Steam or elsewhere, why should you pick up Guild Wars 3? What can ArenaNet do to make it stand out the way Guild Wars 2 stood out when it launched? What “problems” in the MMORPG genre is it going to “solve”?

I had a long, rambling question on that topic typed up, but someone else in the session phrased it more succinctly. Colin Johanson’s answer was long but did an admirable job of addressing that question.

He echoed the sentiment I had that it was “really good timing” in the MMO space for something new to come along, and that “minute-to-minute gameplay in an MMO has stagnated,” while other games have implemented “quicker, more rewarding gameplay moments,” leading to GW3’s focus on movement and combat.

Those changes, at least from my perspective of not having actually played the game, don’t feel like enough to base an entire MMORPG around. Games have been promising “better” combat for decades now, but everyone’s definition of what’s “better” is subjective. Some people like World of Warcraft’s or Final Fantasy XIV’s slow-paced tab-targeting, while others prefer more action-based combat like in Elder Scrolls Online or any of a number of non-MMO action games. I’ve known a few people who didn’t like Guild Wars 2’s “improved” version of MMO combat and dropped out of the game early in its run.

What Johanson said next, though, was the most insightful part of his commentary, a topic that he said “permeates into every decision we make about this game.”

When someone is invited to play an MMO, a common reply is “I don’t have time for that.” Between logging in, checking your gear, getting to the quest location, managing your inventory, assembling your friends, and so on, you often spend more time preparing to have fun than actually having fun. As someone who’s been putting off sorting his inventory across his 11 GW2 characters for weeks, I feel that pain. “If you don’t have a couple of hours available, you’re just not going to play an MMO,” Johanson said.

When I got that first demo of Guild Wars in late 2004, I was working for Scrye, a magazine that focused on collectible card games but had recently expanded to include some video gaming content. ArenaNet’s reps tried to link those elements, saying that Guild Wars was like a CCG, in that you had to build your limited skill loadout like you would build a deck for Magic: The Gathering, and that no two characters, like Magic decks, would play exactly the same.

Magic was created by Richard Garfield as an attempt to give gamers something to do in “downtime” between other games, that a match would only take 15 or 20 minutes and that you could go back to your “real” game when you were done. Obviously, Magic became its own phenomenon, with its “simple” rules for an off-time game expanding far beyond anything anyone could have expected.

It seemed like Johanson was echoing similar goals for Guild Wars 3: that is is something you can play in small chunks, like game of Magic over your lunch break, but if you want to dig into it for four hours or more, that’s an option, too. “One of the most fundamental problems we focused on for Guild Wars 3 is, how do we make this genre have a limited amount of ‘preparing to have fun’ and be much more approachable, while also still having the depth of an MMO so that players who want to play that much can do so?”

Also along those lines, he stated that ArenaNet wants to “double down” on the notion that you can set it aside for a while and come back to play later, similar to how the first two Guild Wars games tended to respect one’s time. He saw that overall vision as a “foundational” pillar of GW3 design that is the “biggest opportunity” to increase the reach of the game, for both a general gaming audience and MMO fans in particular.

Johanson said he couldn’t get into exactly how Guild Wars 3 was going to address those issues at this time, but said they were definitely going focus on it in the future. I think it can be done, but it will require rewriting how MMOs have done certain things for two-and-a-half decades (hello, inventory management). If ArenaNet is innovative and brave enough to pull it off, then we’ll have something to talk about.

That’s what I’m waiting for: the “Wow!” moment that will make me (and others) stand up and really take notice of Guild Wars 3. I don’t feel like the game has done that yet; as nice as it was, the combat slice looked and felt like any of a number of action games currently on the market. Compare that to our early tastes of Guild Wars 2, which included things like dynamic events, giant boss battles, spectacular views of Tyria, and even the Manifesto video, which laid out the foundation of the game’s design and focus for everyone to see, right at the start.

If Guild Wars 3 is to have a similar moment, it might not be as visually stunning as Guild Wars 2’s reveals were, and maybe that’s why ArenaNet isn’t choosing to showcase them at this time. Colin Johanson’s final messages have done enough to convince me that more is coming, that ArenaNet still has a few cards up its sleeves (so to speak), and that we’ll someday learn more about what truly sets Guild Wars 3 apart – when it’s ready to be revealed.