If not for the grass I've spent hours gazing at in Guild Wars 2, I might not have recognized Guild Wars 3. With an emphasis on weighty third-person combat and an all-new momentum system, the upcoming MMO has more in common with ARPGs (think Elden Ring, Crimson Desert) than many of its peers. That's by design: going into Guild Wars 3, developer ArenaNet "audited the genre" and found combat and movement were the biggest areas for innovation.
This all culminates in the early alpha build I'm shown at Gamescom 2026. Following a warrior in the first human kingdom of Orr – set 1000 years before the first Guild Wars – my eye is drawn not to the gilded city of gods on the horizon, but the small warrior running circles in front of me. With freeform movement, he's able to run along walls, mantle over ledges, and slide dramatically down slopes when the need arises.
The same fluidity extends to combat. Thanks to a new momentum system, the weight of your movement is carried from one action to the next. Taking a running leap from a cliff, for example, will give you more gusto when you (hopefully) pull out your glider; while in combat the warrior has an aerial attack that scales with your momentum. Though not quite as dramatic as Baldur's Gate 3's owlcat-turned-hydrogen bomb, I've never seen this sort of physicality from an MMO before. Knocking enemies into walls stuns them – and as Chief Goblin Thrower in Baldur's Gate 3 and Dragon's Dogma 2, I'm thrilled to see that knocking enemies off ledges is a viable tactic for one-shotting baddies.
In a group Q&A with studio head Colin Johanson and lead gameplay designer Anthony Ordon, I ask the pair to start from the beginning: how is this combat possible in an MMO?
"It was very challenging – this is something that Colin and I have been talking about since 2015," says Ordon. "To get it working technically, we really had to start from the ground-up and build everything around a more visceral action experience on a server with allies. That's really gotten us to a great place in terms of gameplay."
"We tried all sorts of different unique ideas until we found what sticks, then we wrapped our arms around those. Those became the center of our game, and [we] built out from there," Johanson agrees. "If we hadn't been making MMOs for 26 years I don't think we could have built this system."
Orr-struck
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In terms of multiplayer scope, I'm told Guild Wars 3 sits "right in the middle" of the first and second game.
"It is a giant open-world game and you constantly run into other players as you're running around in the world, but the scale doesn't go up to, like, hundreds of players," says Johanson. It's a departure from Guild Wars 2, which could see hundreds of players teaming up to fend off gigantic world bosses. "It stays at smaller numbers out in the open world to support this fidelity of combat and really let that shine. So for big encounters, probably about 20 players will be the most that you have in combat. If you go to a city or a town, you'll see significantly more than that roaming around."
During the demo, Johanson and Ordon briefly demonstrate PvE combat, with Johanson jumping on as a necromancer to back up Ordon's warrior. Though momentum adds new dimensions to combat, with the warrior's allies able to use his shield as a springboard to attack from above, positioning is crucial. A flamethrower-wielding enemy is resistant to damage until you circle around to hit his weak spot – a very flammable tank – and by juggling aggro, Ordon and Johanson draw enemies towards ledges for instant-kill pushes. Fighting giant spiders, the pair are bogged down in webs which require fire to burn away – demonstrating how Guild Wars 3 will ask players to pay more attention and be more reactive with their builds in the overworld, says Johanson, who sees the first Guild Wars as a touchstone in that regard.
With Guild Wars 3 set to launch on PS5 as well as PC, designing the MMO to be played on controller was a challenge that led to broader improvements.
"Our first goal was 'how do we get the broad combat of an RPG onto the controller without losing the depth', and losing what people love about the options they have to make a build and all that," says Ordon. "We think it actually turned out a lot better, because instead of having 10 number keys across the keyboard, we're doing more interesting things. There are attacks [chained] out of the dash. There's an attack out of the wallrun. So there's a lot more contextual ways to trigger skills, where we end up with as many options – in some cases even more – that end up feeling better."
When I ask if there are plans to bring Guild Wars 3 to more consoles including the Nintendo Switch 2, pointing to Final Fantasy 14's recent port, Johanson says ArenaNet's "focus for launch" is PS5. "It's our first console game, and adding console to the mix is enough of a challenge," he explains. "As it is, we really wanted to just focus on doing one platform to start and getting it right, and then we'll evaluate other consoles in the future as it makes sense to do."
Guild Wars 2 is one of my most-played MMOs, but in recent years I've found it hard to jump back in. The front-loaded information and intricate endgame combos make my favorite characters too overwhelming to pick back up after a break – a problem I have with many MMO endgames. That's a selfish way of getting into another of Guild Wars 3's guiding lights: keeping the door open for players new and old to jump in.
"We want to have that next generation come play MMOs, and honestly one of the biggest challenges the MMO industry faces right now as a whole is when we tell people 'come play our game'. The first answer they give is, 'I don't have time for that. It's like a second job; I can't engage with it!'"
The same can also be said for returning players trying to re-learn the game, according to Johanson. "You come back like, 'what is all of this stuff? I have to answer all of these questions before I start playing', and then you go 'maybe not', turn the game off, and play something else. We have to have a solution for that. We need to have one for the gameplay side, the progression side, [and] the content side. The social side is an interesting place to consider as well – how do we think about the relationships you had when you stopped playing nine months ago?
"I'm not going to tell you today how we answered [these questions], but we're very much thinking about each as part-and-parcel of the same core question. Because we want people to be able to walk away and come back the next time an expansion comes out, and we need to have you feel like you can jump back in and not be completely overwhelmed."
That's not all we saw at Gamescom 2026 - check out our previews for Total War: Warhammer 40,000, Silent Hill Townfall, and Afterworld
