ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 3 was one of the most jaw-dropping reveals of this year’s Summer Games Fest celebration. Announced alongside games such as Stellar Blade: Blood Rain and Resident Evil: Veronica, the upcoming MMO kicks off a bold new era for the series.
Just like prior ArenaNet MMOs, Guild Wars 3 will not feature any subscription to play the game. Instead, you buy the game, and play it. What a concept.
While the new MMORPG is expected to have the same microtransactions as the current Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet have no plans to introduce annoying modern features such as Battle Passes. Speaking to IGN, studio head Colin Johanson explained that the Battle Pass is a modern subscription, and they ruin the time value players have with their games.
“I think there’s become a modern version of the subscription that we’ve seen evolve over the last few years in battle passes, and paid battle passes, where—it’s basically a subscription kind of hidden and wrapped with other stuff around it,” the studio head told the outlet.
Johanson explained that battle passes are often a detriment to a game experience. While players were excited by their addition years ago, they do serve as an annoying barrier for some. (I mean, has anyone tried doing Diablo 4 battle passes every month? It’s a drain on my life.”
“We’ve challenged ourselves to ask the same question: Can we make a game like this that doesn’t have a subscription fee? And doesn’t have a battle pass fee buried in it as well, because we think players are sick of those, too,” he continued.
Johanson explained that battle passes only serve to hold players hostage, which isn’t what the Guild Wars 3 team wants to do. “This’ll be a game where you can buy it, you can play it as much or as little as you want, we will respect our player’s times, and if they love it, they’ll have other stuff they can buy from us in the future. But we’re not gonna hold their time hostage, and we want them to be able to go play other games,” he said.
MMOs are, by their nature, already quite the time sink. Gear farming and grinding are core to the experience, and adding battle passes and other guff on top only serves to exacerbate the worst parts of the genre instead of focusing on new content for players to enjoy. Hell, sometimes I love a battle pass, but when every game has one, they all start to feel like a big waste of time.
Guild Wars 3 will start closed beta tests this Autumn. The game will be available on PlayStation 5 as well as PC. No Xbox version has been announced.
