NCSoft Confirms Guild Wars 3 Is In Development

Guild Wars 2 characters prepare for battle.

It’s been over a decade since ArenaNet’s fantasy MMO Guild Wars 2 launched. In the years since its 2021 PC debut, the team has released several expansions and updates for it, with the latest being 2023’s Secrets of the Obscure. With two more expansions still in the works set to launch this year and in 2025, respectively, Guild Wars 2 players aren’t hurting for new content. That’s why the news that ArenaNet is working on a proper third game in the series came as such a shock.

News of this comes from an NCSoft shareholder meeting (as reported by Korean outlet Inven and translated by Reddit user Sydius), in which the publisher’s co-CEO Park Byung-moo casually name-dropped Guild Wars 3 while discussing the franchise. He confirmed the game is in development, but didn’t offer any other information beyond that. The immediate response from the community has been mixed. A new game is typically an exciting prospect, but in the era of live service games that receive periodic updates, a sequel can sometimes mean the loss of years of investment as the community moves on to the next big thing.

Fans on Reddit that they’re worried about how long Guild Wars 2 will remain active if if ArenaNet moves on to Guild Wars 3. Will the two continue to get periodic updates or will the studio eventually shift over to Guild Wars 3 full-time? These are the uncertainties of live service games, and also living in a digital era in which the games people invest time and money into can just vanish because companies don’t consider them worth the upkeep. Guild Wars 2 has lasted this long and is still getting expansions because it has a dedicated community, so it’s understandable some might view the mere suggestion of a new game as a sign that one chapter is closing. But whatever the case may be, the release of Guild Wars 3 seems far off.

Whispers of a Guild Wars 3 have been circulating for a few years now, with Kotaku reporting that ArenaNet was in the early stages of working on a sequel back in 2019. However, it wasn’t greenlit at the time, so something has clearly changed in the years since.

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