How Guild Wars 3 Might Be Looking To Innovate In The MMO Space

We don’t know much about Guild Wars 3 yet, apart from a few high-level concepts and ideas, but what we do know – or at least what ArenaNet has claimed – is that it will seek to innovate in the MMORPG space and address lingering issues that have frustrated fans of the genre for years.

That’s pretty much exactly the same basic plan that was laid out for Guild Wars 2, when it was first in the planning stages nearly 20 years ago. As ArenaNet spokespeople have said, the MMO landscape has changed dramatically since then, and players’ expectations are sky-high for what a new game could, or should, be.

Everyone’s got their own opinions on what GW3 should offer, and I’m presenting a few items on my wish list here. Are they realistic? Maybe. Are they pie-in-the-sky hopes and dreams that might never be realized? Possibly! If someone at ArenaNet sees my ideas, will they think they’re laughably naive and impossible to execute? Almost certainly.

But this is the time of dreams, when virtually nothing is known about an MMORPG, and we can all imagine it in its perfectly realized state, before we get any of those nasty details that invariably wreck our narrow worldview of the ideal game.

Chonky Choices

Let’s start with probably the biggest dream that MMOs have never really managed to fulfill after nearly three decades on the market. For Guild Wars 3, I’m drawn to this description in one of the game’s blogs:

“Instead of threats being distant or abstract, the things you do have a more immediate impact on the world around you. You’ll see the results of conflicts play out in the places you spend time in, and, over time, your relationship with those places – and most importantly, the people who live there – will start to evolve.”

The cynical among us (Me? Never!) might interpret this as little more than a reputation grind, or something akin to voice lines changing here or there based on your actions. Or maybe it will be something like Sun’s Refuge in Guild Wars 2, which becomes populated with familiar characters as you do content related to that area, giving it more of a “lived-in” feel as you progress.

The real Golden Ticket, though, would be something larger, some kind of real impact on the world and how it looks, not just to you in your personal instance, but to everyone in the world. MMORPGs are notorious for presenting you as the “Chosen One” – alongside the other 10 million Chosen Ones in the world – and not making any real changes to the world, no matter how many times you kill the big bad guy(s), because that would change other players’ perspectives and alter their heroic journey.

There are obvious reasons why this is the case. Guild Wars 2 flirted with the idea early in its life cycle, presenting the one-time-only Karka Queen battle when Southsun Cove was first opened, as well as the limited-time Season 1 Living World content. Those were cool for the people who were there, but not so much for the people who missed it. And even a veteran like me, who was there, wishes he could visit old Lion’s Arch (the achievement to do so is too much for me) or even Kessex Hills before the Tower of Nightmares popped up.

15 years on, maybe ArenaNet will have figured out a way to balance the desire for having a true impact on the world with the need for players to not miss out on content or feel like they’re insignificant to the larger world. I can vaguely remember similar ideas being bandied about during the time when EverQuest Next was in development. I loved the promise they offered, so I’m hopeful ArenaNet will be able to “find the fun” where Daybreak Game Company couldn’t.

Better Big Boss Battles

Love it or hate it, Guild Wars 2 combat was different. It mixed a little tab-target, and a little action combat, sprinkled with a mix of its own micro-innovations that just felt good – to me, at least. (I can’t tell you how often I’m playing another MMO and want to be able to move while I’m channeling an ability.) Its giant mega-events weren’t exactly new – Rift had the nod there – but GW2 committed to them as its main form of content and refined the concept over the years.

One paradox of those kinds of events, though, is that you want to take down some huge monster, like a dragon or a giant, for the cool factor, but the simple scale of the beast as compared to your character makes presenting such a battle difficult. Either you’re zoomed in and hacking away at its ankles, or you’re zoomed out so far that your party looks like a swarm of ants.

Let’s head to the GW3 announcement post for some reading that might offer some hope:

“This is a game built to bring the magic of Tyria to life, where you will master a combat system that emphasizes strategic skill use, positioning, and movement, and where action RPG combat meets Guild Wars build-making – creating a unique combat experience.”

Yeah, I know, that’s got all the typical buzzwords you would expect to hear about an MMO’s combat system. Strategy! Positioning! Action! The same could have been said about Guild Wars 2’s combat (and essentially was).

But that post comes with a picture that also makes me wonder:

Again, we could just be looking at an idealized view of fancy combat that has little to do with how the game will actually play. Maybe we will still be hacking at ankles most of the time.

But then Colin Johanson said this about the image during his interview with IGN:

“This is really an inspiration piece, going back to “What are we trying to do with combat in this game?” I mentioned earlier [that] one of our goals is to take elements you would traditionally find more in action games and to try and figure out which of those can make their way into an MMO experience … This concept art piece really is aspirational for us. This is the type of experience we want to chase after. Can we make more action combat in a way you wouldn’t have seen in an MMO before?”

Some of Colin’s words are presented as wanting to make a game that can be played just as easily by mouse-and-keyboard players on a PC or controller players on consoles, and trying to make combat that feels good for both groups. And maybe he’s just describing the piece in generic terms, effectively saying, “Doesn’t it look cool that one guy has a magic bow and another is using a lightning sword?” Sure, it does, but we’ve seen that before.

But if I’m going to dream big, the desire to make GW3, particularly a battle like this one, more like a “console”-ish game gives me strong Monster Hunter vibes. Instead of everyone beating down a giant pile of hit points, will big monsters have individual parts, like the arm on this one, that they should target? Some GW2 battles have experimented with players filling different roles in battle or attacking different targets, but there’s plenty of room to expand on that concept and make it unlike anything we’ve seen in MMOs.

Currency Consolidation

You knew we weren’t going to get through all of this without me talking about inventory management, right?

When I was first interviewing ArenaNet about Guild Wars 2 circa 2011, I was told that there were three main currencies in the game: experience points, coin, and karma. To say that we have more now is a slight understatement, and that’s hardly an issue limited to that game, as this Reddit post indicates.

I know why games do this: It’s so you don’t just use the easiest-to-obtain currency all the time to buy everything, and you’re actually required to do new content and get the currency you find there instead of always using the old stuff. Over time, though, that leads to a bloated inventory system, even when the currencies are just kept in a wallet as they are now in GW2. (Old-school fans remember when they weren’t and the pain that brought.)

GW2 has been better about this as the game advanced, but the base the game was built upon probably doesn’t allow for radical changes. With a new start, Guild Wars 3 can better incorporate (i.e., limit) its currencies, akin to how some other games (Final Fantasy XIV’s Tomestones come to mind) and even GW2 itself have done via the Wizard’s Vault.

Now, if I’m really going to dream big (again) about inventory, I’d love to see gear also be put in a kind of “wallet” where I could just pick what I’m going to wear, rather than having to cart around entire suits of armor and piles of weapons that I need to keep track in my bags and swap out when I want a different build. Yes, templates help, but we already have GW2’s legendaries existing in this nebulous void that I can pull from anytime I want. Let me do the same with my other gear, OK? I promise, you’ll still get us to buy inventory tabs somehow.