NCsoft’s ArenaNet showed off Guild Wars 3, a big new action-adventure massively multiplayer online (MMO) game coming to the PC and PlayStation 5.
The game will feature a vast open world with reduced loading screens, supporting both single-player and multiplayer experiences.
Combat is designed to be more immersive with less user interface clutter, focusing on player coordination and momentum-based abilities. The game aims for a “meaningful MMO” experience, with around 20 players on screen during combat, and unique movement systems like wall running and gliding, controlled by a stamina meter.
The game will also introduce contextual skills and multiplayer combos, aiming to make the genre more approachable and less time-consuming. Development has been ongoing for four years, with a fluid team size of around 350 at ArenaNet, a division of NC in South Korea.
You can wishlist the game here on Steam. The title was announced 14 years after Guild Wars 2 came out in 2012 and 21 years after Guild Wars came out in 2005. Unlike most competitors, the franchise has always been playable with no subscription fee required, welcoming over 29 million players across its history. Guild Wars was relaunched as Guild Wars Reforged in 2025 and expanded to mobile devices in 2026.
The game will release globally on PC, Steam, and PlayStation 5, marking the first time a Guild Wars game will appear on home consoles. The first beta test is scheduled for fall of 2027.
Guild Wars 3 blends rich action-combat, character building, and skill collection. Set in the enchanting frontier of Orr, the world brims with mystery, magic, and wonder. You can play solo or form a band of adventurers, forging impactful and enduring bonds with fellow players, a formative cast of memorable NPCs, and the nature spirits that call Orr home.
In Guild Wars 3, players take up the banner of the Vaelwardens, the protectors of this panoply of majestic spirits and the magical wilds of Orr they inhabit. Years before the gift of magic would be given to the mortal species of Tyria, the Vaelwardens—sanctioned by the human gods in support of their charge—are renowned in this period for their artificing and mastery of signets, small gems containing fixed expressions of magic.
Equipped with this power and sharpened by their close bonds with the spirits of the Vael, the order finds itself teetering over the brink of ruin at Guild Wars 3’s start, struggling to keep a foothold in a world that is rapidly and irrevocably changing.
Glide, ride, leap, and wall-run across Orr with a one-of-a-kind movement system that transfers your momentum between modes of travel, providing a free-form joy of movement through a world alive with adventure.
Master a combat system where depth is achieved through strategic skill use, positioning, and movement – where action RPG combat meets Guild Wars build-making – creating a unique combat experience.
In this mythic era, the Elder Dragons’ slumber is at its deepest point in their long cycle, their endless hunger for the magic flowing through Tyria silent and still. A season of radiance is spreading throughout the world, but nowhere as vividly as Orr, where magic flowed so richly and abundantly that it drew the human gods from the Mists to Tyria. A place where magic itself, unbothered by its great predators and free to do as it willed, bloomed into its freest and grandest expression: a wondrous ecosystem of magical spirits, unique to this period of Tyrian history, known as the Vael.
The Order of the Vael holds a distinction as the first guild ever chartered in Orr. Its origins trace to the earliest days of humanity’s arrival in the region, when catastrophe tore a deep and lasting wound in Orr’s magical ecology—the first great loss suffered by the Vael since its emergence.
A group devoted to the Vael spirits, those who would become the order’s founding members, met with the human gods hoping to stave off further ruin. They found unexpected allies in the goddesses Melandru and Dwayna, who, moved by the Vael’s suffering, offered to sanction the creation of an order that could assure the Vael’s protection in perpetuity. To prove their commitment to this cause, Melandru and Dwayna gifted the fledgling guild with the capacity to create and refine signets, empowering the order with the strength to fulfill its purpose.
And so it was that the use of magic, previously held exclusively by the gods and Tyria’s elder species, passed for the first time into mortal hands. The Vaelwardens were the first to be blessed in this way, but they would not be the last, and as settlement and development of Orr proceeded, more and more came to Orr seeking to make their fortunes and to wield this strange and incredible power for their own benefit.
By the start of Guild Wars 3, the Vaelwardens have been pushed to the margins, seen by ordinary Orrians and many of the guilds as aloof zealots clinging to a cause that died decades ago, obstructing the progress that some claim will uplift humanity and every sentient species of Orr into a grand, glorious, and advanced future. Foremost among those rivals are the Mavenwrights, a guild of industrialists who hold that the magical wilds exist to be exploited—a birthright, as they see it, of all Tyrians.
In a demo, the team showed off a necromancer with a scythe that shoots directly forward. As the attack goes through enemies, it steals life from them. The character can disappear and reappear nearby. There’s a ranger in the game that can shoot an arrow and jump into the air and shoot arrows from the sky as the character drops down.
“Our players expect an awesome main storyline that they can play like a single-player RPG or play with their friends to experience the main story experience, and GW3 will have that. I think people expect a PvP experience in a Guild Wars game, and we will have that,” the spokesperson said. “And I think players expect a high trust, coordinated dungeon-like experience. And Guild Wars 3 will have that as well. All of those areas are going to be things that we come back in the future to share a lot more details on how each of them works, including the open world content systems as well.”
The open world will have fewer loading screens than traditional MMOs do, as you run around the world. That will make it more immersive. In battles, you’ll see hundreds of players fighting against each other in the world. That’s why the ream calls it a “meaningful MMO.”
“Now, 14 years later for GW2, and for Guild Wars 3, we wanted to take all those lessons that we had at Guild Wars 2 and push them one step further. And so, the goal that we set for Guild Wars 3 is not just other players don’t make the game worse,” the spokesperson said. “It’s other players make the game better, and that means not just your friends that you’re playing with, but when you see a random person come running over the hill that you don’t know, and they run into the combat, they have a bunch of abilities they can use that will suddenly make the game even more exciting and unlock things like these multiplayer combos that can now happen because they’re there.”
Guild Wars 3 has been in development for about four years, from the point when the team started using Unreal Engine 5. The studio has 350 people.