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."
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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.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.gamesradar.com/games/mmo/guild-wars-3-preview-combat-movement-interview-arenanet
