author: Zuzanna Domeradzka
Guild Wars 3 in Development. Fans Express Concerns for Guild Wars 2 Future
By coincidence or not, NCsoft announced that Guild Wars 3 is being developed, although an official announcement probably won't come too soon. MMORPG fans are torn by this news.
Guild Wars 2 is among the older MMORPGs available, and it continues to be actively developed by its creators and enthusiastically played by players. The title is nearly 12 years old and it appears that it will have a successor.
Announcement of Guild Wars 3?
This is apparently the information that can be gathered from an investor chat published today on the Korean website Inven, in which Park Byung-moo, one of the executives of NCsoft, the publisher of GW 2, participated. The conversation mainly focused on the company's financial situation, but at one point, a representative of NCsoft announced that Guild Wars 3 is being developed.
ArenaNet has a meaningful IP called Guild Wars, and it went through Guild Wars 2 and is now making Guild Wars 3.
It's worth being cautious about this information, as the translation of the Korean page may not be very precise. We will only have certainty after the official announcement of the game.
Despite everything, this is quite a surprising news - if it's true - considering the fact that the second installment is still supported by the devs. Let's mention that in August last year, Guild Wars 2 received a large, paid expansion Secrets of the Obscure, and the developers regularly release new updates.
Fans' concern
Fans of the Guild Wars series seem to be torn. Some of them fear that maintaining the servers for "two" won't be as profitable as for the first installment, and after the premiere of the continuation, it won't be possible to play GW 2. Some people are concerned that the game, which was first released in 2012, will lose support rapidly. They fear that veteran players may be reluctant to transition to the third installment and start the game from the beginning, especially after investing heavily in the second one.
On the bright side, the fact that GW3 is on the table/greenlit speaks to the success that GW2 is having right now. On the darker side, rumors like this also can potentially do the opposite by killing hype of future expansions since people know a new game is in development, wrote RavennosCycles on Reddit.
So what should ArenaNet studio do? As a good example, fans point to the situation related to the expansion of Eye of the North for the first Guild Wars, which "hyped up" the sequel through the events associated with it, while at the same time encouraging to spend more time with the first installment. However, 5 years passed between the premiere of this DLC and GW 2. We can only speculate on how it will be this time. One thing seems certain, however - if it is actually being developed, the alleged Guild Wars 3 won't be released very soon.
