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At today's Summer Game Fest, one reveal in particular had me leaning forward with great interest: a follow-up to Guild Wars 2, a game I have well over a thousand hours in.
It's where I experienced one of my most treasured MMO thrills ever: completing the mapwide boss encounter Dragon's Stand for the first time. It's also where I sat through an equally unforgettable disappointment: the conclusion to the Icebrood Saga, which sped through a lore event that had been hyped up for years beforehand only to deliver a notoriously flat anticlimax.
Being a Guild Wars 2 player has always meant putting up with inconsistency only occasionally matched by the MMO's contemporaries. This is best embodied by its update and expansion schedule, which has seen overhaul after overhaul from year to year.
Developer ArenaNet switched focus frequently between seasonal "living world" updates, big expansions like Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire, and most recently, an annual schedule for smaller, more focused expansions. Even the endgame setup never quite sat still: the game originally did away with traditional raid instances entirely, until they showed up anyway, and then those got replaced with smaller-scale "strikes," until the two merged and became the same thing.
At any given moment, it was hard to know what to expect for the future—even the reveal of a new game arguably continues this trend of constantly switching gears. Compare that to a game like World of Warcraft, which has such a predictable patch cadence that it went and announced three expansions in advance just a few years ago.
PC Gamer Editor-in-Chief Phil Savage wrote at length last year about how ArenaNet struggled to deliver satisfying conclusions with its current annual expansion strategy, saying that both Secrets of the Obscure and Janthir Wilds "[limped] towards their finish." While I have fuzzy memories of the game's biggest expansions from back in the day, that model had its problems too: long waits between updates, and living world follow-ups that varied in quality.
I don't think MMOs, or any live service games for that matter, bear the responsibility to go on forever. It's okay for games to wind down or move on to sequels. But Guild Wars 2, despite its casual-friendly flat progression and lack of subscription fee, encouraged the player to invest countless hours into Tyria. It's easier to feel like that's worth the time with a surefire future ahead, especially if you're in it for the game's story—which, as is typical for MMOs, moved from beat to beat at a glacial pace.
Guild Wars 3 is a fresh start for the aging fantasy series, and while we don't know all the ways it will be different from the games that came before it just yet, I hope I can rope in my friends using the same ease with which I'm able to recommend MMOs like Final Fantasy 14, WoW, and even Final Fantasy 11.
The PC Gaming Show returns Sunday, June 7 at 12 pm PDT! Visit the show's Steam page to wishlist your most anticipated games and get more information on how to tune in for the big reveals.
