The Future of Guild Wars: Our Commitment to Tyria

Hey everyone, this weekend is massive for Arenaet and most importantly for all of you in the Guild Wars community. Yesterday we announced Guild Wars 3, the first major new game in the Guild Wars franchise in over a decade. We're going to tell new stories in a different era of Tyrion. And when it's ready, you can join us. We wouldn't have got to this moment without the millions of players who've enjoyed Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. And the entire team at Arenaet is proud to share this moment with all of you. We'll have much more to share about Guild Wars 3 in the months ahead, but today we're here to talk about the games you're already playing. I want you all to know our studio is committed to actively developing Guild Wars Reforged and Guild Wars 2 for many years to come. We are not replacing your favorite games. We'll be supporting them. We know this is not the norm, but it's something our studio has been preparing for, and to explain why, it's worth looking back. When Guild Wars 1 was our only live game, we faced a similar moment concerning the future of the franchise. And as we shifted our focus to Guild Wars 2, we moved most of the studio to work on it. New content in Guild Wars 1 slowly went away year-over-year before stopping entirely as we approached the release of Guild Wars 2. Guild Wars is a very different game than its sequel, and by making the decision we did, we lost the ability to explore that space. We are not repeating the same approach as we did all those years ago. If we did, we would have stopped development on Guild Wars I more than a year ago. Instead, we've continued live development on Guild Wars 2, launched the game on Steam and Epic Games Store, and we've released three expansions in 3 years. We've seen Guild Wars 2 thrive, all while ramping up development for Guild Wars 3 simultaneously in the background. At the same time, we tested something new with Guild Wars 1 by reinvesting in the game and creating Guild Wars Reforged to see what would happen. And what we learned was clear. When we support these worlds, players show up, both returning veterans and entirely new fans of the Guild Wars franchise. Those experiences shaped how we're handling this moment. So, here's our new commitment. Guild Wars Reforged, Guild Wars 2, and Guild Wars II when it launches. All three games share the world of Tyrion. They are intentionally very different in design, in experience, and where they sit on the timeline. whichever one is your home, and you're welcome to pick more than one. We're going to continue developing it for years to come. So, next, Steven Clark Wilson, our game director for Guild Wars, is going to walk you through what this means for our original game. And then Josh Davis, game director for Guild Wars 2, will talk about what's next for Guild Wars 2. The original Guild Wars, now rebranded as Guild Wars Reforged, has been making up for lost time. Partnering with co-developer Two Weeks Games, we fully integrated the game with Steam, including Steam Deck support. In the first month, about half of Steam players tried it on Steam Deck. We also simplified access. Anyone who has ever purchased a single campaign can now play all the campaigns at no additional cost. Next, we're applying what we learned about Steam Deck controls and UI to bring Guild Wars Reforge to mobile devices. The relatively small screen on the Steam Deck forced us to reconsider what the user experience should look like. We also learned a lot going the opposite direction, making sure the game looks right and plays right on a 4K monitor. A typical phone these days has a very high resolution display, and we needed to adapt the UI to these highresolution displays, but they're in a small form factor. Mobile players will join the same live servers as PC players, and existing PC players will be able to access the game on mobile instantly and free of charge. We can't wait for longtime players to carry around Guild Wars in their pockets and also join all the new players. We also recently shipped two new dungeons. Their success has given us the confidence to begin work on an entirely new type of content which is just now getting underway. Stay tuned. Hey everyone, like Colin said, we plan to support Guild Wars 2 for years to come. My priority is to make sure this community remains a place that you're excited to call home. That said, the road ahead looks a little bit different than what's come before. The next 18 months are an opportunity for us to take on some exciting projects that we've wanted to work on, the kind of projects that don't really fit in expansions. So, we have four major initiatives to share today and one very important caveat. Let's go through the headlines first, then each in more detail. First off, we're building a new hollow monument system that will connect Guild Wars 2 with Guild Wars 3. This will let you carry your accomplishments forward over to three. Next up, we're going to modernize and polish Guild Wars 2. We want to bring our older content up to more current design standards, address player concerns, and improve developer workflows. The third is for our World vs World players. We're actively developing a brand new Borderlands map, the first in over a decade. And the fourth announcement is a new open world map set in ore bridging the tyr that you know and the tyr that you're about to discover in Guild Wars 3. Now, as mentioned, this all comes with a trade-off, and we want to be upfront about it. Visions of Eternity, our current expansion, wraps up this September. After that, we're taking a break from expansion development to deliver Hollow Monuments 2.0 and the other projects that I just mentioned. After Guild Wars 3 releases, we'll return to shipping annual major content updates for Guild Wars I. Let's start with talking about Hollow Monuments in a little bit more detail. If you've played the original Guild Wars, you're probably already familiar with this concept. Hollow Monuments 2.0 arrives later this year and will let you earn rewards in Guild Wars 2 and Guild Wars 3 by completing new and existing achievements across the entirety of Guild Wars 2. One major difference from the original Hall of Monuments is that this time it will roll out in phases. The first two releases will focus on the core game, and then we'll hit each of our expansions in chronological order over the course of a year. We'll have a lot more information to share on the system and the associated rewards after the final release for Visions of Eternity later this year. So, building hollow monuments this way gives us a rare opportunity to revisit the foundations of Guild Wars 2, which brings us to our second major initiative. After our team finishes work on Visions of Eternity in late September, we're going to spend nearly a full year going back through each era of the game and making meaningful improvements. The work splits into two halves. The stuff you'll see and experience as a player and the work under the hood. Let's start with what you'll see. Everything is on the table here to borrow a phrase from Colin. For example, bringing older content up to our current design standards, rebalancing events and encounters, addressing long-standing bugs, continued support for pillars of the game like World vs. World, polishing the early game experience. These are just high level categories, but one specific example that we are updating is the Zitan fight in the personal story. This is a rare opportunity for us to take a pass on the entire game and hit some of the biggest pain points that you experience on a day-to-day basis. Now, the other half, the work that goes on under the hood, the kind of improvements that allow us to continue supporting Guild Wars 2 for years to come. We're investing in client and server performance, making sure that Guild Wars 2 runs well on your rigs, especially as we push the art direction in ways that our technology wasn't originally built for. We're also modernizing parts of our development pipeline. For example, we're upgrading our engine to use physics-based rendering or PBR. The game wasn't originally built with PBR in mind, but adding it will let our team make new content better and faster. Now, there's a lot of work that can be done here, and a year is simply not enough time to do it all. So, we want to stay focused on the things that matter most to you. Starting today, we're opening a new section on the official forums dedicated to this work. There's a space for the core game and a space for each expansion. Go to the forums and let us know what you think. The third announcement is for our World vs. World players. We're building a brand new Borderlands map, the first in over a decade. We're going to develop the map alongside the community, similar to how we approached the development of the new PvP push game mode. We'll release an early Greybox prototype on live, gather your feedback, and iterate until we feel good about the direction. We think this approach gives us the best shot at avoiding the missteps that came with Desert Borderlands. Our goal is to host a beta test later this year, as soon as the map hits first playable. Outside of the new map, work on Walters's World restructuring and our core Wolves' world systems continues. Right now, the focus is on making winning matter, which requires some fundamental changes to scoring. Once the system is properly encouraging active competitive play, we'll look at adding some more incentives for winning as well. Last, but not least, we're going back to Ore. You've probably heard by now that Guild Wars 3 takes place in Ore. It's one of the most iconic locations in the entire franchise. It's lore rich and it's tied to some of our most important storytelling. We're genuinely excited that Guild Wars 3 takes us back there and that you're going to see or in a way that you've never been able to see it before. We'll have more to share down the road, but what I can say is that this will be a core game edition, free for all to play. If you or a friend are coming back to Guild Wars 2 to chase all the monuments rewards, you won't need to own an expansion to check it out. So, this has been a lot, I know. uh a new hollow monuments, a year of polish, a new Borderlands map, a new map in ore. And of course, you can still look forward to our festivals, bonus events, skills, balance updates, wizard vault updates, and more. Uh it's a pretty ambitious plan. Most games don't get a chance to put this level of attention towards improving the foundation so long after initial release. We get this opportunity because of you, and I think that we're set to put our best foot forward for Guild Wars 2 for the next 15 years and beyond. So, as you can see, this is an exciting moment for Arenaet and for Guild Wars fans around the world. We're expanding into the future with Guild Wars 3. We're going back through Guild Wars 2 to improve what we've built and launching the first release of the new Hall of Monuments by the end of this year. We're investing in Guild Wars Reforged, the game that started it all with new platforms and new content. And before any of that, we've got the third quarterly release of Visions of Eternity landing in late summer with new story, a new map, and more. We're so grateful for this community. Every time we've had a moment to welcome new fans to the Guild Wars franchise, our players have shown up with open arms, reinforcing our reputation as one of the friendliest communities in online gaming. We're expecting newcomers and returning players to visit Guild Wars 2 and Guild Wars Reforged in droves as a result of the excitement and the commitment we're making to this franchise. Hall of Monuments will encourage millions of people who experience Guild Wars for the first time with Guild Wars 3 to want to go play Guild Wars 2 as well. We know many of these new players will fall in love with the games interior just as many of you already have. And as a member of this welcoming community, each of you plays a huge part in that. Thank you. This is the first of a few conversations we'll be having with you over the coming weeks and months. Next up, our team will be back with more information about the setting of Guild Wars 3, sharing more details about the where and the when this game takes place. Then, next Tuesday, Josh and I will sit down for a live stream on Twitch and YouTube to talk more about the franchise and to answer some of your questions. Please join us if you can. We're so glad to have you with us on this journey. Thank you all to the community. We'll see you in Tyia.