Hello, Tyrians!
What an incredibly exciting last couple of weeks it has been! Our team has been so excited to finally reveal the existence of Guild Wars 3™ to the world in our teaser announcement and to talk about the future of the Guild Wars® franchise. Now that we've made it past the big reveal, we get to start telling you about all the exciting details of the game we've been working on for several years behind closed doors.
This is the first in a series of blogs that will cover an array of topics from now through the launch of Guild Wars 3, giving us a chance to share details about the game, explain the decisions we are making, and provide other insights into what we believe will make this an entirely new and special adventure for MMO players who have been to Tyria before or are joining us for the very first time.
If we're going to start at the beginning, it's only fitting that we start with the setting and timeline of our game, which is very much an origin story unto itself.
The When and Where of Guild Wars 3
Guild Wars 3 begins on the continent of Orr, over a thousand years before the events of Guild Wars® Reforged in a period of time before the human gods left this world. The former God of Death has been recently usurped. It's a time before the First Guild War, when hostilities between rival guilds are rising and the Order of the Vael is on the back foot.
We believe it's both exciting for existing Guild Wars players and ideal to invite an entire new group of fans to explore.
To our existing Guild Wars community:
This is a moment in time absolutely loaded with mystery and untold stories that sit at the very heart of the Guild Wars universe. The lands of Orr have tendrils that run deep across the franchise, from the charr invasion and the mysterious vizier in Guild Wars Reforged, to visiting the formerly sunken ruins of the once-great nation raised from the bottom of the ocean floor by the Elder Dragon Zhaitan in Guild Wars 2®.
Orr is connected to the disappearance of the human gods from our world, the origins of the Guild Wars themselves, and the name behind the entire franchise. It's also related to the rise of Grenth and the fall of Dhuum, as well as Abaddon's entire story arc first explored in Guild Wars: Nightfall™.
So many mysteries, untold stories, and questions across twenty-one years of tales from Tyria all arise from Orr before the Exodus of the Gods. Though there are massive mysteries and stories to explore, in total we've released very little public lore about this timeline and location, generally asking more questions than we've answered over the years.
We know that for our existing Guild Wars fans, the opportunity to explore the origins of Tyria, to speculate and theorycraft together, and to unravel the mysteries long hidden in Tyria's past will be incredibly compelling. But it's not just a chance to experience some of the big stories lost to history; it's also the opportunity to unveil countless stories we haven't teased before and characters you've never met that bring the golden age of Orr and our timeline to life.
For our new fans:
We're expanding our reach with Guild Wars 3 and inviting an entirely new generation of gamers to join us for the launch of a new Guild Wars game for the first time. We're also inviting players to join us at launch on a broader set of platforms from day one, not just our own ArenaNet® platform. Players on PlayStation 5, Steam, and our standalone client will be able to join those playing on their ArenaNet accounts from the very beginning, making this by far the largest day-one launch in Guild Wars franchise history.
This timeline is one that's new for everyone and doesn't require you to have played any previous Guild Wars game to understand what's going on. Very little recorded history about this era exists in Guild Wars canon today, and very little of it in total has been explored in Guild Wars Reforged or Guild Wars 2.
As a brand-new player, there is no better time to start playing Guild Wars for the first time.
Our Commitment to Tyria
Another major reason we picked this timeline is because it fits our mission to support all of our Guild Wars games into the future. Last week, ArenaNet's leadership team updated the community about our plans to support all three Guild Wars games for years to come. In case you missed it:
Guild Wars 2 will continue onward with new content, storylines, characters, and locations beyond the release of Guild Wars 3. Making a game set after the timeline of Guild Wars 2 would ultimately conflict with that goal.
It's important to leave room for the setting and characters of Guild Wars 2. With an open runway, we refrain from limiting or constraining the countless stories we want to tell in Tyria in our current Guild Wars 2 timeline and allow Guild Wars 2 to continue to expand and grow as far into the future as we have Guild Wars fans who want to play it.
Orr, but Before
The timeline we chose for Guild Wars 3 is incredibly exciting for us to build. A storyline and setting that focuses on just one region of the world is a big shift from the previous Guild Wars games at launch and a very intentional decision for us.
In the past, we've told a lot of stories where the stakes kept getting bigger and bigger, often centered around threats that spanned the entire world. Those stories have been an important part of Guild Wars, but as we started thinking about the future, we found ourselves more interested in a different kind of experience.
Guild Wars 3 begins from a much more grounded place. It's a story about Orr, about the people who live there, and about a guild trying to find its place in a world that's full of opportunity, tension, and change.
That doesn't mean the stakes are less compelling. It means they're closer and more personal. Instead of threats being distant or abstract, the things you do have a more immediate impact on the world around you. You'll see the results of conflicts play out in the places you spend time in, and, over time, your relationship with those places—and most importantly, the people who live there—will start to evolve.
Focusing on Orr as our starting point also lets us approach the world in a different way than we have in the past. Rather than spreading across multiple regions right away, we've been able to spend time going deeper—building a version of Orr that's more layered, more detailed, and more interconnected than anything we've done before. You'll find a more seamless world, with fewer loading screens than previous Guild Wars games, it's a much more contiguous space. And, as you'd expect, it's a world that we can continue to build on and evolve in meaningful ways as the game grows.
The game systems and content are designed to deliver gameplay depth. The world is designed to reward curiosity, exploration, and most of all, return visits where you can find entirely new experiences in places your character has previously adventured.
Orr is where we're beginning this journey, not where it ends. As we look to the future, we're excited about the opportunity to expand our horizons and explore more of Tyria in this era—both the places you already know and others we've only ever hinted at before.