Guild Wars 2 is one of the biggest MMOs going, but it’s a sequel to a game that’s just barely an MMO—the original Guild Wars is more of a mission-based ARPG with shared town hubs that feels like an MMO due to its huge roster of character classes and /dance emotes. When a game like Guild Wars 3 gets announced, an obvious question follows: will it be an MMO or not?
According to a blog post from ArenaNet studio head Colin Johanson that went up earlier this week, the answer is yes, but with an asterisk. In the post, he lays out the studio’s taxonomy for the first two games. The first Guild Wars game, Johanson reckons, was a “cooperative online RPG,” but when everyone started calling it an MMO, ArenaNet followed suit. The second is a true-blue MMO that was always intended to toy with the genre’s conventions.
As for the third? It “lands near the middle of the MMO spectrum … While it fits the definition of an MMORPG significantly more than Guild Wars Reforged does, it doesn’t try to replicate the large-scale gameplay pillars that so uniquely define Guild Wars 2.” By large-scale pillars, it’s referring to map-wide events, boss battles, and server-based PvP—the sort of stuff only MMOs can serve up.
“This ensures that all three of our games can coexist as different experiences on different timelines, telling different stories about the world of Tyria,” the post explains.
Johanson concedes that this declaration is “broad and vague,” and it’s true that we only have the roughest idea of what Guild Wars 3 might look like at this point. That said, social media is ablaze with prospective players trying to guess at exactly what sort of game GW3 will be—speculation has ranged from a New World-like to a GW1 successor to a singleplayer game—which I suppose is what happens when the only two games in your series hardly play like one another.
If nothing else, we know it’s an MMORPG of a sort, or at least an MMO-like, which somehow feels like a relief. It’s like stumbling onto an oasis at a time when, as PC Gamer’s Harvey Randall put it, “loving MMOs … is an exercise in frustration, grief, and moving on.”
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