Valve’s Steam Deck has been a huge boon for the release of Guild Wars Reforged, a remastered version of ArenaNet’s 2005 MMORPG. While the game isn’t setting sales charts alight, the MMO’s resurging popularity has been assisted by its Steam Deck Verified status with devs revealing many of its new players are on Valve’s handheld.
Prior to launch, ArenaNet heavily pushed the game’s Steam Deck compatibility prior to launch with some fans joking about the fact that the remaster of the first Guild Wars now has controller support before its more popular, still-very-active sequel.
Guild Wars Reforged game director Stephen Clarke-Wilson explained in an interview with Forbes that they have “people here in the office who play on Steam Deck or similar handhelds a lot”, adding that it made sense to focus on the handheld after seeing how much work a controller-focused UI was going to take anyway.
As for actually getting Steam Deck Verified, Clarke-Wilson explained that the ordeal “was pretty significant”. Alongside using the studio’s internal playtest lab and alpha testers, the game director revealed that his son “on his own initiative, had built out a Steam Deck control configuration using just the tools provided by Steam”.
“His prototype, which came out with the 20th anniversary, showed that controller support was possible,” he continued. “Once we started talking to 2weeks about a serious rework of the UI we expanded the thinking to, ‘What could we do if the controller interface was context sensitive and knew what you were doing in the game?’”
While the game does play very well on the Steam Deck right now, Chief Creative Officer at porting studio 2weeks, Richard Foge, explained that there’s still work to be done to make the experience more seamless. “We’re still improving the controller experience,” they said, “but folks are having a good time with it so far. We’ve been heartened by the number of people who have said it’s now their preferred way to play”.
With the remaster, controller support, and Steam Deck Verification, Clarke-Wilson revealed that Guild Wars Reforged is doing significantly better than expected. While the team never releases specific numbers, the game director explained that they predicted the remaster’s launch would require double the space of the game’s 20th anniversary period, which would be 4 times the usual amount.
“But we blew way past that,” they said. “Compared to the weeks leading up to Reforged’s launch, we saw an over 16,000% increase in overall unit sales and a 5x increase in concurrent players”. For a 20-year-old MMORPG with a very active sequel, that’s not too bad. Maybe it’s because we can play it on the sofa while binge watching the entirety of House M.D. now.
