The recent announcement of Guild Wars 3 hyped up the MMORPG community and has made everyone hungry for more details. Luckily for us, Colin Johanson, Studio Head of ArenaNet LLC, just recently shared a blog regarding the core philosophy that defines the way they make games.
There are certain aspects of Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 that are extremely important to the team, and they shared four specific core elements that will be implemented within Guild Wars 3.
These four core elements can be viewed as expectations that the team know players want to see, and they are consistent with some of the innovative ideas already implemented in the other Guild Wars games. These four core elements are listed below.
1.) No Subscription Fees
Yes – it’s true. There will NOT be any subscription fees associated with Guild Wars 3. The team strongly believes that “players should be able to buy the game and play it on their own terms.”
With that being said, the team confirmed that Guild Wars 3 will by a buy-to-play game at release, and there will be no subscription fee.
They continued to make this even more clear by stating that there will be “no monthly fees and no battle pass subscription fees. Just buy the game and play when you want.”
2.) No Pay-to-Win
Another big win for most of the MMORPG community is that Guild Wars 3 is confirmed to not be pay-to-win. The teams thinks players should have the opportunity to spend money here and there on items that provide cosmetic appeal or other ways to “express themselves” or even spend money towards a few time-saving convenience items, but that it’s never okay for players to be able to spend money to get an unfair advantage over players who haven’t.
3.) Respecting Player Time & Investment
Continuing with the no pay-to-win is the core element that Guild Wars 3 will be designed to respect your time and investment spent within the game. This core element is quite a bit different than some other MMO games out there regarding the developers’ respect on players’ time spent in-game.
Their goal is to make your time spent playing Guild Wars 3 feel meaningful – whether that’s 30 minutes or 5 hours. This is an ongoing, growing issue across many existing MMOs as some can even be viewed as a second job at times (requiring MANY hours to stay caught up with others).
For existing players, their will even be a new Hall of Monuments system that connects your Guild Wars 2 account to your Guild Wars 3 account, making the time you’ve invested in Guild Wars 2 meaningful as you jump into Guild Wars 3 for the first time. More details about this system is coming soon.
4.) Innovating & Evolving the MMORPG Genre
This last one is a big one. The team has acknowledged that player expectations today are very different from where they were when they were developing Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. They stated that, “Guild Wars 3 will be its own kind of game.”
So what exactly does that mean?
Well, they shared that they plan to have Guild Wars 3 land “near the middle of the MMO spectrum”. This means that it fits the definition of an MMORPG quite a bit more than Guild Wars Reforges does but also doesn’t try to replicate the large-scale gameplay pillars that define what Guild Wars 2 is today. Although this is very vague still, it’s clear that they are trying to ensure all three of their games can coexist as different experiences in different timelines, all telling different stories about the world of Tyria.
Stay tuned for more information regarding the development and release of Guild Wars 3. To learn more about these four core elements, check out their official blog post here.