"20 players is the sweet spot": Guild Wars 3's action game combat is a first for MMOs, but it doesn't work at traditional raid scale

A more intimate MMO

Arenanet are keeping a lot of Guild Wars 3 hidden away. Throughout the short presentation of their new fantasy MMO, the refrain is 'We're not talking about that yet'. Mounts, professions, dynamic world events, even shops and the economy are all things the developers will talk about in the future.

Though, what they did show more than made up for it.

We load into the verdant green plains of Ancient Orr. This area of rolling grassland and steep cliffs could be mistaken for the South Downs if it weren't for the gleaming white marble city that floats above the world in the far distance. Despite being a sequel, Guild Wars 3 is set in the deep past of the series, with its events taking place more than 1200 years before the first game. It's certainly a very pretty MMO, but it's only when my demoist, combat designer Kevin Stocker starts moving that it becomes evident why I'm looking at something new.

Stocker takes me up to the hilltop outpost, but rather than take a staircase cut into the rock, he sprints up the wall and mantles the lip of the cliff. The path ahead is broken, with a yawning gap preventing Stocker from progressing. That's not a problem, though, as he simply wall runs along the cliff face that shoulders the broken path. In Guild Wars 3, movement and combat is more like something you would find in a Prince of Persia game than an MMO.

The outpost at the top of the hill is populated with Vaelwardens, your faction of high fantasy cops. The art style of the lashed together wooden structures gives off strong How To Train Your Dragon vibes. It's the Vaelwardens' job to keep Orr safe in the face of disgruntled rival states and belligerent gods. Though, as this is one of the first times I'm told that more on all that will be revealed later, I can't tell you much more.

Stocker didn't come up here to talk shop with the Vaelwardens, though. He sprints toward the edge of the cliff he's just climbed and leaps out into space, popping open a glider and floating down to the plains below. To my untrained eye, this looks a lot like a scene out of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. However, studio head Colin Johanson points out that Guild Wars actually did gliders first, adding "I've heard a few people say multiplayer Breath of the Wild and that's an awesome comparison, but it's not the target."

Below Stocker, minding its own business, is a lizard-y creature. Unfortunately, in Gamescom demo sessions, peace isn't an option. So midair, Stocker collapses his glider and drops on the creature, bringing his sword down on its head. The momentum he builds in the fall increases the damage and radius of his attack. He shows this off again by wallrunning up the cliff behind his enemy, backflipping into open space, and again bringing his sword down on their head. Not content with showing off this one kind of combat momentum, Stocker then gives his enemy an almighty kick, hoofing it into the cliff for extra damage.

My dedicated MM)-playing days ended back in 2010, ahead of the release of World of Warcraft Cataclysm. In the 15 years since, I've ducked into EVE Online and played the opening weeks at launch of Elder Scrolls Online, Fallout 76, and Wildstar (RIP), but as someone who keeps their toe in the MMO waters, I've not seen this kind of combat in an MMO before. I'm used to managing ability cooldowns in a taskbar and moving out of range of a telegraphed attack, but this is more akin to the combat in an action game.

"It takes designing and engineering the whole thing from the ground up to support this," Stocker explains. "We've been talking about it for ages and we started this project with that in mind: we wanted to make something that's more like a visceral action game." Johanson adds that he and Stocker started talking about implementing this combination of free movement and combat in an MMO back in 2015, when the team were making Guild Wars 2's Heart of Thorns expansion – "This has been a very long journey to that point."

Stocker jumps into a different part of Orr, leaving behind the bright greenery for a gloomy, fog-filled valley. I could imagine just out of shot we would find Cruella DeVille's gothic manor, Hell Hall. Here we see how the new movement and combat abilities can combine with other players. Ahead of Stocker and Johanson is a bulbous-backed enemy wielding a fantasy flamethrower. Rather than tackle them from the front, Stocker brings up his shield and Johanson jumps on it, only to be launched up into the air so he can leap over the enemy. Now on the other side, he can strike the foe's gasbag, popping it and killing them in only a few hits. Again, this is nothing we've not seen in action games for years, but it brings new life and dynamism to MMO combat that can become mechanical.

Changing the movement and combat like this and allowing players to combine their abilities, has wider implications for Guild Wars 3. The focus in Guild Wars 2 was big scale collaboration and combat. Hundreds of players could play in the same map, working together to take down massive bosses or fighting against each other in world v world combat. This was much different from the original Guild Wars, where while still using MMO systems, the entire world was instanced, so you would only ever see small groups of players together.

Guild Wars 3 lives somewhere between the two. Johanson describes it as "a giant open world game [where] you'll run into other players as you're roaming around the world". It sounds most like Fallout 76, where there may be tens of thousands of players online at once, but everyone is playing in instances of the world and players are dynamically loaded in and out of that instance to keep the population steady.

"You could play by yourself and run into other players, " Johanson says of Guild Wars 3. "You can play with a group, you can play with groups of groups, but the really large scale is really what Guild Wars 2 is about." For this new game, he says "around 20 players is the sweet spot. Anything beyond that and combat just doesn't hold up as well."

I was only shown a glimpse of Guild Wars 3, but it was a fascinating tease. In the past decade, we've seen the rise of live service games and torn away at the edges of what an MMO is. Games like Sea of Thieves, Helldivers 2, and Fortnite can demand just as much time as an MMO and act as a social space just as effectively as World of Warcraft or Everquest. In contrast, Guild Wars 3 looks to be Arenanet's attempt to take lessons and mechanics from the games which have been eating away at the MMO space. "We as MMOs need to move a little closer to the other side to make it more approachable to everybody else and remove some of the archaic things that people associate with MMOs and make them less approachable," Johanson agrees.

Everything I've seen so far makes Guild Wars 3 a very exciting prospect. Even if when it comes out it just means I'll spend my evenings using my shield to launch allies into combat like a human trampoline.

Travel and accommodation to Gamescom was provided by the conference organisers.