Guild Wars 2025

Similar in vein to Doom (2016) being a relaunch of the Doom franchise which started in 1993 with "Doom" and ended in 2004 with "Doom 3".

Relaunch the Guild Wars franchise as "Guild Wars" (2025).

Now this might sound insane, but hear me out -- it can be done and it can have a huge positive effect on the franchise, maybe even the most positive of anything since the original Guild Wars.

I've been a long term fan of the GW franchise, I really liked the skill hunting and build manufacturing process of the original Guild Wars, and for a lot of friends that was the original gameplay that got them hooked as well. So it was to my great distress in GW2 when that gameplay was removed. It felt more like a fundamental step away from Guild Wars than a continuation of it.

I feel GW2 had a lot of good ideas and has some interesting gameplay in being able to combo abilities, rip boons from enemies, mounts that actually interact with the environment, cool vertical maps with jumping puzzles, etc... but in many ways the current game feels sort of like an amorphous thought cloud that never really totally came together. Examples of this include general lack of "traditional" small group content past the vanilla game (I for one was always very put off by the lack of traditional dungeons), the weird excessive trash loot and scrapping system, the inclusion of loot boxes (ugh), the multitudes of different currencies (a few currencies is fine, but currency creep is a thing, think valor points from WoW cataclysm -- those were fine).

The combat -- while it has gotten better since vanilla -- I still feel is not "impactful" enough, and by this I mean when I go up to an enemy and swing a sword at it, if it connects I want a big, chunky sound effect and animation that changes depending on the material that's hit. So if I swing into someone's shield it should "ding" off the shield with a bit of recoil animation (that doesn't affect my swing timer or slow me down thanks). If I swing into leather armor I should get a different sound but nonetheless one that gives me a sense that I've landed a hit with a satisfying thud or what have you. The combat needs to "feel" very satisfying in almost an ASMR kind of way in that it needs to be psychologically satisfying to land every blow. Similar thing can be done with spells, just give them big "meaty" and "impactful" landing sounds and animations please. It doesn't feel great to play a caster firing some generic bolts into an enemy hundreds of times with little to no satisfying feedback (ugh scepters).

The combat also I feel never really lived up to its full combo potential because many skills had long CDs with short effects. Long cooldowns with short effects are the antithesis in my opinion of encouraging players to find cool ways to combo abilities, or encouraging them to combo abilities at all. By the time another player realizes they can shoot an arrow through a fire field for example, the fire field is gone. Just make things like the fields last longer and balance numbers around it. In my opinion if a player actually executes the above interaction it should do significantly more damage because if you make the field ability duration last for as long or longer than the ability cooldown it gives players plenty of time to figure out what to do with it, so if they do something with it -- it should be a big reward (and it can be balanced around from an encounter perspective). I know this isn't going to be a problem in super organized groups to begin with but let's be honest with ourselves -- this game could use some mass market appeal and making it easier on the pick up groups is a recipe for success in this regard. Raid content and "hard" dungeon content can always be created that specifically caters to the higher skill crowd even if you make the entire combat system more satisfying to play for low skill players.

The leveling required for GW2 without a level boost also goes against GW1 design. In GW1 every expansion had you level from 1-20 which in my mind felt brilliant, and I know it was great for my friends too. It totally solves the issue of MMOs not aging well because they keep tacking on content, and ultimately this requires level boosting for new players. In GW2 80 levels of content felt extremely overblown for a new title. The game in my opinion simply launched in a state where the map was where it wanted to be years from launch, but it launched that way, which resulted in a ton of content which in my mind felt half baked. The solution here is just to return to the GW1 model: new "expansion" (or campaign) = new character on a new server(s) dedicated to that expansion (or campaign), pretty similar to how it felt in GW1. Just give the option to import character appearances from the previous title, and we go back to having 20 levels per campaign character just like in GW1.

So in conclusion, in my opinion as a veteran MMO player and Guild Wars franchise fan, the best way forward would be to relaunch the franchise as "Guild Wars" (not GW3, just Guild Wars) and tack the (2025) or whatever year it releases in on to the title to differentiate it from the original Guild Wars. You could even pull a WoW classic and just call the original Guild Wars "Guild Wars Classic" if you wanted .. or maybe "Old School" Guild Wars (hehe).

This might seem insane at first, but it seems less insane if you can wrap your head around the idea that a new MMO title basically only needs to have the amount of content at launch that any other MMO expansion has at launch, but the content drops that come after that (both new expansions/campaigns and minor patch content) need to be released consistently, and sized for it. Grinding Gear Games did a great talk at GDC about this, where they said that they basically discovered the Holy Grail of live service development is just to be extremely consistent with content drop dates so players know when to come back.

A relaunched Guild Wars could have the amount of content that Path of Fire had at launch for example. Over the years as I've watched new MMOs arrive on scene and try to compete I've noticed one constant: they all seem to be EXTREMELY ambitious and this ambition ultimately leads to a product akin to excessively thinned paint in that there is a LOT of content initially dropped but the systems are a little buggier and less well thought out than they should be, and the content that's there feels a little unfinished. For example: lots of random mobs on maps that don't really do much except wander about waiting to be killed, events that feel too bullet spongy or deal too much damage for small groups to complete, and a main scenario or campaign quest line that starts off with a lot of detail but becomes markedly less detailed after a certain point, which is usually an indication that the developers were more ambitious than they should have been and were rushing to meet a release date.

A relaunched Guild Wars should take more of an Apple approach: release a product that has less features but those features need to be VERY well designed and thought out. The combat system needs to be very psychologically satisfying and it needs to cater to low skill and high skill players at the same time (achievable through content tuning instead of skillset tuning), the maps while fewer in number should focus on detail and creating a good balance of casual feeling areas and elite areas full of danger (something I feel GW2 already does well), the PvE content should be a solid mix of cosmetic/mount farming, GW2 style jumping puzzles, traditional small group dungeons (both low challenge and high challenge ones: content tuning), raids, and yes those big outdoor multi-phase events (worked pretty well in GW2 but tuning was bad in many cases). Maybe while we're on the topic of PvE, a relaunched guild wars leans a little less heavy on dynamic events and the dynamic events are more special when they occur in a zone. The original experiment of making dynamic events the bread and butter of leveling has I think kind of not worked very well -- I think most people prefer traditional MMO questing for the leveling experience -- think FFXIV's Main Scenario quest line where you have a special quest indicator for main scenario quest. In the case of a relaunched guild wars, perhaps the main scenario or personal story quest line or campaign or whatever has this more traditional quest style, with zone events acting as sort of side quest content.

And speaking of difficulties -- while I think that WoW for example has gone way overboard with difficulty levels in raiding, having two difficulty levels for each dungeon and raid seems fine, and the prime way to make these difficulty levels in my opinion is not through raw numbers tuning but instead through what I like to call "reaction time tuning". Reaction time tuning is exactly what it sounds like, you tune the reaction time required for mechanics instead of eliminating mechanics. As long as ALL the mechanics are clearly telegraphed and tooltipped (including buff/debuff gameplay), most players don't have a problem understanding mechanics, they have a problem with having too many mechanics thrown at them at once. So for example the easy mode boss of a dungeon or raid would do one long cast time mechanic at a time as a sort of tutorial mode. It's fine to make an five or an eight second long cast of a gigantic sword swing or a cataclysmic fireball kill someone, as long as they had PLENTY of time to see it coming. The hard mode version can just throw everything at you at a GW2 raiding kind of speed. The core mantra of my MMO difficulty design is: to make things easier you don't need to make them less interesting, you just need to slow things down -- maybe MUCH slower than you think as a game designer. :)

Anyway that's it. I think it can be done: relaunch the franchise with expansion sized campaigns from the getgo, make the content that exists while smaller much more well thought out, bring back the skill hunting system, bring back some traditional MMO elements such as small group dungeons and traditional questing and blend them with the good ideas from GW2. It could be an amazing product and it could take just a few years to produce the first box, especially with ArenaNet's rich asset library that must exist by now because of GW1 and GW2.