In one encounter against spiders, a Warrior set his weapon on fire, which in turn lit his allies’ weapons. They sliced through the spiders quickly, and the fire also spread through the webs to clear them out. Players can adjust and customize their builds on the fly in the open world, though some build aspects are restricted until they’re back in main hub locations.
“Customizing your build to defeat different enemies more easily is also an important part of the Guild Wars franchise,” Johanson says. “It’s one of the key pillars of Guild Wars 1, and we’re bringing it back more heavily in the combat system in Guild Wars 3.”
Conditions you place on enemies are multiplayer stackable, so if one player starts freezing an enemy, the cold effect builds, and the enemy’s animation slows down; their attacks are slower. As more people put more cold on the enemy, they’ll move slower and slower until they become a block of ice that blocks their moves for a short period. If the enemy is low on health, a character with a knock ability like a Warrior can slam into the ice block and, if it kills the enemy, shatter them into tiny ice cubes, causing damage to nearby foes.
There’s lots ArenaNet didn’t talk about in this gameplay showcase, like the spirit mounts from the game’s initial teaser—Johanson says there will be more to share in the future. Also, how will PS5 players, who can’t really take advantage of the game’s text-based chat systems on PC, communicate? But he confirmed that there will be a player-versus-player (PvP) mode, along with “high-trust coordinated dungeon-like experiences.” In general, combat will feature a “heck of a lot less” user interface over the screen than a traditional MMO.
ArenaNet says the scale is different compared to Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, with the former sitting at the smaller scale of the MMO market and the latter sitting on the opposite end. “Internally, we call Guild Wars 3 more of a meaningful MMO, where it’s more about each player on-screen really matters and makes a difference,” Johanson says.
That’s because GW3 uses an evolved version of the megaservers from GW2, allowing for fewer loading screens and an open-world cap of roughly 20 players in active combat zones—a number that scales up significantly higher in social hubs, like cities and towns.
“We’ve seen very few new MMOs in the last decade, and the overwhelming majority of us are still playing the same games from 10 to 20 years ago,” Johanson says. “We see MMO fans constantly clamoring for something new and saying this genre desperately needs something new to move it forward right now, and I think that is when ArenaNet is at its best.”
Expect a slow trickle of information over the next year as the beta launch for Guild Wars 3 approaches. Until then, I’m going to dust off Guild Wars 2, which has been seeing its own sudden influx of new players. As the Norn say, “May the spirits guide you.”