Last night, ArenaNet officially confirmed what an NCsoft executive first revealed to shareholders last year: Guild Wars 3 is happening. In fact, not only is it happening, but we got an early trailer, some prequel setting details (it’s Orr a thousand years before GW1), promise of PC and PS5 functionality, and some teases about races (bearkin), mounts, strategic combat, and the character customization the franchise is known for. Plus, a beta is set to begin in the fall of 2027.
But for current Guild Wars 2 and Guild Wars Reforged fans, the trailer raised a panicky question: What’s happening to the earlier games? Well, ArenaNet vows last night that it’s “not done” with either game. “[W]e’re committing to actively developing all three games at the same time,” the studio wrote. To explain all that, ArenaNet promised a blog post and video today – as well as stream next Tuesday – to talk about the future of the franchise.
In the video, Colin Johanson repeats that the time is committed to the two OG games for the long term. “We are not replacing your favorite games,” he says. “We’ll be supporting them.” To explain that, he treks back to a time veteran MMORPG players will remember vividly: the time when ArenaNet basically left Guild Wars 1 in maintenance mode in favor of Guild Wars 2, which was certainly better than closing it, but it also meant the team couldn’t easily pick up the threads to serve both fanbases.
ArenaNet won’t be making that mistake twice. “If we did,” he says, “we would have stopped development on Guild Wars 2 more than a year ago.” Obviously, it didn’t; we’ve had an expansion every year, Guild Wars Reforged is booming, and the franchise is making gobs of money for NCsoft.
“So, here’s our new commitment: Guild Wars Reforged, Guild Wars 2, and Guild Wars 3 when it launches – all three games share the world of Tyria. They are intentionally very different in design, in experience, and where they sit on the timeline. Whichever one is your home – and you’re welcome to pick more than one – we’re going to continue developing it for years to come.”
Game director for classic Guild Wars Dr. Stephen Clarke-Willson then joins to recap everything done for Reforged since its relaunch at the end of last year. Later this month, of course, we’ll see the mobile launch of the game. There isn’t much other information beyond that, other than the tease that the team is building on the success of its recently added new dungeons to “begin work on an entirely new type of content.”
Guild Wars 2 game director Josh Davis does begin by saying the game is not getting a new expansion in the next 18 months. Instead, he lays out four initiatives that we can expect in place of the stock expansion format. They are:
- Devs working on a new Hall of Monuments system to connect to Guild Wars 3. They’re calling it HOM 2.0. It’s coming out at some point after September, which is when we’re getting the last leg of Visions of Eternity (“late summer”). It’ll roll out in stages as the content and cheevos come to each expansion region. More info coming later in 2026.
- They’re undertaking a modernization and polish project to bring older content up to spec. Again, this will involve the team making major “meaningful improvements” to each past expansion and chunk of the world. That also includes event rebalancing, bug fixing, and the early game experience, plus under-the-hood improvements, client and server performance, and the dev content pipeline.
- We’re getting a new WvW Borderlands map, developed with community input, plus WvW restructuring and scoring revamps continue.
- And for content, we’re getting a new open-world map set in Orr that connects the games. Davis calls it a “core game addition” that’ll be F2P, so you won’t need to buy anything to play it.
Davis says that after GW3 ships, the team “will return to shipping annual major content updates for Guild Wars 2.” Note he does not use the word expansion here. [Update: Apparently, Davis corrected himself, but it’s buried in Discord, of course. Takeaway, it sounds as if there will be full-size annual expansions again and this is just a pause.]
At the end of Davis’ spiel, he specifically mentions setting the game up so the team can support it “for the next 15 years and beyond.”
