Guild Wars 3 is the MMORPG I won't have time to love

MMORPGs¹ and I are a great love story. These past few years, though, the relationship status has read "it's complicated," because a four-year-old leaves very little room for guild nights that end at 2 a.m. I'm coping through denial. I keep telling myself it's only a break, while knowing full well it'll probably last years. And now ArenaNet has gone and relit the whole thing by announcing Guild Wars 3 at Summer Game Fest². The veteran I thought had retired caught himself drawing up battle plans before the trailer was even over.

Twenty-five years of parallel lives

It all started about twenty-five years ago with Ragnarok Online, its adorable little characters, and its too-short nights. Then World of Warcraft launched in France and swallowed me whole on day one, to the point where my studies spent a while on the bench³. I played at a very high level in a competitive guild that ran in the European progression race for a while, roughly from Vanilla through Burning Crusade. Back then, "raid at eight" was the sentence my whole calendar was built around.

My guild and I got older together, trying everything that came out. We tore through Star Wars The Old Republic, whose class stories are still some of the best writing the genre has ever had. Then AION and its wings, then ArcheAge. That one I loved for its trade runs where you haul the goods yourself, its player housing, and its piracy, because every convoy naturally attracts a pirate. We finally settled into Guild Wars 2. Funny choice, given that I'd hated the original Guild Wars and its instanced zones⁴, and I swear by open worlds where you run into actual strangers.

World vs. World, nostalgia with siege weapons

That's where I discovered World vs. World. Three servers spend a week fighting to capture and hold fortresses with siege weapons⁵. Since European servers were mostly national, you were defending your server's honor and your country's too, and it felt like a World Cup that never ended. France held its own very well. I still remember our fights with the Spanish and Russian servers, fierce opponents we'd run into week after week like old rivals from the next neighborhood over.

Building a trebuchet at four in the morning to retake an understaffed keep serves absolutely no purpose in life. That's probably why I only remember the good parts.

What we know about Guild Wars 3

ArenaNet isn't saying much yet, but what's on the menu looks good. Guild Wars 3 is set in Orr, about a thousand years before the first game⁶. A green, very much alive Orr, whereas Guild Wars 2 veterans mostly knew it as a sunken kingdom crawling with undead. You'll play a Vaelwarden, a guardian of the land, in an action MMORPG that promises momentum, gliding, riding, and wall-running, solo or in co-op². It's coming to PC and, a first for the series, to PlayStation 5, with a beta announced for fall 2027.

Best of all, the studio confirmed there will be no subscription and no battle pass⁷. Studio head Colin Johanson promises to stick with the series' model, where you buy the game once and expansions and a cosmetic shop pay for the rest⁸. He says he wants to avoid mechanics that trap players, and honestly, good, because it finally fits my life. With my playtime shrunk to almost nothing, a subscription is rent on an apartment I never sleep in. A skin nobody will ever look at, on the other hand, I'll happily pay for, to support the developers and treat myself, in that order on my better days.

So, see you in fall 2027 for the beta, where I fully intend to start an adventure I'll never have time to finish. But a guy can dream. My daughter will be six by then, and word is the good guilds recruit early.

Notes

1. Massively multiplayer online role-playing games, where thousands of players share the same world at the same time. The acronym is unpronounceable, which has never stopped anyone from losing their nights to one. ↩

2. The announcement and first details come from the official site and the press release published for Summer Game Fest 2026. ↩ ↩²

3. If I could travel back in time, I'd tell my younger self to be a little more reasonable. He wouldn't listen. He has a raid at eight. ↩

4. The original Guild Wars (2005) instanced every exploration zone, not just the dungeons. Each group got its own copy of the map, so you never ran into anyone outside the cities. Its fans called that comfort. I called it a ghost world. ↩

5. World vs. World on the official Guild Wars 2 wiki. The French server Vizunah Square built a Europe-wide reputation in the game's first months. ↩

6. PC Gamer, "ArenaNet announces Guild Wars 3" and MMORPG.com, "Guild Wars 3 officially announced, set 1,000 years before original GW", June 2026. ↩

7. A battle pass is a list of rewards you unlock by playing through a season, provided you paid for the pass and show up often enough. Basically, homework you pay for the privilege of doing. ↩

8. Massively Overpowered, "Guild Wars 3 won't feature a subscription or battle passes, Colin Johanson reassures fans", June 8, 2026. ↩