Guild Wars 3's devs think they've found an answer to one of MMOs' biggest problems, but can ArenaNet pull it off? - Eurogamer.net

One foot in front of the other.

Close your eyes and imagine a standard MMORPG. The way it moves, the way it plays. Save for a few finer intricacies, they've largely played the same for over two decades. A big action bar, the same sorts of quests, the same sort of progression. Guild Wars 3 is aiming to fix that.

In a hands-off demo shown to me at Gamescom, studio lead Colin Johanson and combat lead Kevin Stocker showed me a slice of the game's alpha. It's early days, but a core change to the norm was on full display. Described as a "full open-world MMO", Guild Wars 3 is a game which seems to play more like modern action games than the classic MMOs of the past. The core of this bold swing? Momentum. Guild Wars 3 is all about dynamic movement, be it traversal through the open world or its action RPG combat.

The demo starts off with the player character sprinting across walls and mantling over ledges. Climbing up to the top of a rocky outcropping surrounded by a massive, open grassland was short work as these movement techniques chained into each other seamlessly. The character then leaped off it, gliding down to the ground in a fashion that looks somewhat similar to the glider in Guild Wars 2. At a glance, the game had more in common with Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild than World of Warcraft.

"It's funny, we didn't start with momentum," said Johanson when asked why ArenaNet chose to lean so heavily into this movement mechanic. "When we first started developing this game we started with a natural evolution of Guild Wars 2. Post-launch in that game we added the glider and various mounts that expanded movement experiences. We've seen players grow to resonate with these systems, and express it as being something they want more from the Guild Wars franchise.

"The biggest thing we wanted to tackle was MMO worlds usually being laid out like canyons. They're very much 2D linear environments you progress through, and we really wanted to break out of that. We wanted to design a world where you could use the full 3D space and experience movement skills that allow you to do that."

Johanson described a period of experimentation where the team discovered that it wasn't movement itself that made navigation compelling, but the "connective tissue" between movement mechanics. That led to momentum. Prior to that, movement and combat were separate, but with momentum they blended together.

Atop this structure was a Vaelwarden camp, which according to Johanson, is a miniature player hub out in the open world where players can meet up and socialise. There, you can organise parties and customise your build before heading out into the wider world. The giant spirit mount seen in the reveal trailer is also present, but is not interacted with in this demo. We do get a name though: it's a Root Runner.

There are no hot keys, and the UI in this stage of the game looks drastically scaled back compared to Guild Wars 2. In the right corner, some abilities can be seen tied to controller triggers and bumpers. The lower centre shows a health and stamina tracker. Building an MMO for a controller obviously comes with its own limitations, though Stocker says the experience hasn't been "watered down" to accommodate. Many attacks and skills are contextual depending on what action your character is doing, so options in combat should be plentiful despite the lack of keys.

Johanson describes glider movement, and movement in general, as being "expanded" in Guild Wars 3 with the introduction of that new movement mechanic, momentum. Johanson explains: "If you think about movement in a traditional MMO you are riding on your mount, you get off your mount and you immediately stop moving. When you get off your glider, you immediately stop moving. You go into combat, use a combat ability, then you stop.

"There are no natural transitions. Everything is stop-start. We have built the first MMO that has a full transitional movement system that leverages the character's momentum."

What this means in practice is your momentum after, say, leaping off that giant stone outcropping mentioned earlier, is maintained when you pull out your glider, which adds a new twist to traversal that appears totally uninterrupted. This plays a major role in combat, too. In Guild Wars 3, ArenaNet has pushed the focus on motion of its predecessor to its natural extreme.

I'm shown the player character - in this case a warrior, taking on a pack of raptors nearby. He has a unique ability tied to his profession, allowing him to do more damage when striking from above based on how far his aerial slam travels. Standing stationary and doing a jumping slam does a little bit of damage, but leaping off a wall and slamming results in significantly more, in a wider radius.

"It ended up being a really natural kind of development," said Stocker. "We had this really awesome feeling with the motion systems that made combat more visceral. We started building transitional attacks, like the wall run slam attack and attacks out of gliding, and found those were some of the most interesting parts of combat."

This, according to Johanson, makes the location you're fighting in important as well. You can knock enemies into walls to stun them using your momentum, while larger enemies can do the same to you if you're not careful. The greater your momentum, the further you can push, and larger enemies can only be moved by cashing in a significant amount of momentum.

Elite Skills from prior Guild Wars games make a return. In the demo I saw, the Rampage skill charged up during combat. It provided more attack speed and damage, while also boosting his jump height and push distance.

One of Guild Wars 2's biggest departures from the norm was a move away from typical MMO roles. The tank, healer, dps trinity was removed in favour of weapon-based skillsets. With momentum playing a major role in how each profession plays, I asked how it affected the design process for the various playable professions.

"We are trying in this game to lean more into defined roles," Johanson said. "We will have more defined abilities to let you play as a tank, DPS, or healer. You can see that a bit with the Warrior having a shield and blocking. How the professions can do that can be different: A Warrior can tank in a very different way than a Necromancer who can use their minions to tank for example, but we want more defined roles."

Stocker chipped in here, and spoke about how each profession interacts with momentum differently. "We took a unique approach to designing all of them. Warriors in this demo are all about getting above and slamming down using momentum, and it's all about staying close. For the Ranger, he has more suspended attacks from the air and some Legolas-style moves. So we still have all of those same transitions, it's just the way they use them is different." Johanson and Stocker also emphasised that, depending on the build you use, momentum may have a lesser role in how you play. For example, a Warrior focused on being a solid wall and tanking enemies may make use of momentum less than one keen on jumping and slamming often.

I was then taken to a destroyed temple of the fallen god Dhuum, where some co-operative play between players was shown. Here, the player summons a spirit to help them; a small sprite that acts as a floating lantern. It's also in this temple that we see another big twist with Guild Wars 3. The action-combat allows for "multiplayer combos", allowing for different professions to interact with each other to create varying opportunities during battles. The Warrior, shield in hand, crouches down and acts as a springboard, allowing a second character (playing a Necromancer with scythe in hand) to enter a fight from the air.

"You really don't see a lot of action combat in multiplayer games," says Stocker. "All the skill design, weapon design, and profession design is built around how you do things with allies. It's all solo-friendly as well, but we're designing abilities to support collaboration."

After kicking a few enemies into pits, the demo takes us to a Mavenburner. This is a chunky guy wielding a flamethrower powered by spirits - with a weak point on his back. Destroying the fuel tank on a flamethrower enemy in games may be a common occurrence, but for an MMO it's quite the rarity. Hitting his backpack enough results in an instant kill, and an explosion.

One final quirk with the combat in Guild Wars 3 harkens back to the origins of the series. The demo ends in a clash against giant spiders, who can shoot out webs that slow the player and limit momentum. By making use of fire skills, these webs can be burnt, and the spiders quickly dispatched.

Johanson compares this directly to the original Guild Wars' skill system, where players had to track down and unlock a vast selection of skills. The available skill slots you had were limited, so players had to pick and choose the best options before heading out for certain tasks.

"We're bringing back more heavily in Guild Wars 3, where enemies have counter play against them if you can find the right build to use," says Johanson. "This will be especially important in hard parts of the game like dungeons, where you really need to customise your builds with you and your friends to defeat the hardest challenges."

This latter part of the demo showed a glimpse at how encounter design changes with this new movement system. Johanson describes three pillars that big fights are built around in Guild Wars 3: positioning and terrain, varying weak points that players must use momentum to reach, and the Guild Wars 1 emphasis on skills and enemy weaknesses. He explains: "Some of the smaller enemies will only leverage one of those. Larger enemies, bosses, and dungeons may leverage a mix of those blended together. I think already we're seeing a lot more than just "stand here" or "don't stand here"."

With all this talk of enhanced movement in mind, Guild Wars fans will surely have one question in particular that lingers. Guild Wars 2 is perhaps infamous for the inclusion of some truly evil jumping puzzles. Can fans expect to suffer in this sequel?

When asked, Johanson laughed and said: "You can hear the maniacal laughter coming from Seattle Washington from our environmental artists right now. I remember when the first Halloween event went live in Guild Wars 2 - the Mad King's Clock Tower - and we did a review of that. Me and the other project leads were sitting in the lab playing it. The environment artist Josh who made that was just sitting in the corner with the biggest grin on his face while we were all just swearing for an hour. I think that made his year. Those folks are still around, making those puzzles. They're very excited to see where that can go."

Even with this peek at Guild Wars 3, there are still many questions left unanswered. Johanson said that questions surrounding player progression, build making, spirits, and more will be elaborated on at a later time as we approach that fall 2027 beta release.

As far as early impressions go, I'm enticed by this new approach. MMOs remain popular thanks to the genre's unrivaled social capabilities, for their winding stories and vast explorable worlds. The only thing in my mind that dates the genre is how they play, so a game willing to take a crack at changing that has my attention.