June 9th Livesteam TL;DR
If you missed the Guild Wars Franchise Livestream, where ArenaNet Studio Head Colin Johanson, alongside Josh Davis, Guild Wars 2 Game Director, addressed questions about the future coming in from the community, here is your TL;DR.
Everyone is understandably excited about Guild Wars 3, and has taken more than one opportunity to assure us that “[ArenaNet’s] entire team is committed to actively developing Guild Wars Reforged and Guild Wars 2 for many years to come. We are not replacing your favorite games; we will be supporting them.” Not only in the livestream, but also in the video released Friday.
It is important to note that theGuild Wars Reforged, Guild Wars 2, and Guild Wars 3 development teams are all separate, allowing each team to focus specifically on their product during the interim.
GW2’s team will be taking a break from expansion development until GW3 release and instead focus on GW2 upgrades. Annual expansions have proven to be the best for the game over the years of different launch experiments. They were explicit about the continuation of expansions after the improvements.
They are not overly concerned with taking a break from new content for 18 months hurting Guild Wars 2 and its player base. The new Hall of Monuments, they hope, will bridge that gap. HoM 2.0 will kick off before the end of this year. They plan to put it out in phases, along with the planned improvements and fixes.
Unfortunately, right now, Guild Wars Reforged Hall of Monuments will not carry over into GW3. They expect existing achievements and new achievements to go into Hall of Monuments.
They hope for a similar effect from Hall of Monuments 2.0 as “Return to” (Season of the Dragon) had before End of Dragons release, keeping players drawn to Guild Wars 2 content. The mega servers allow for a world full of multiple players, expanding and contracting in number of maps based on activity, making maps feel full.
The game has already grown with the announcement of Guild Wars 3, increasing daily active users 40% since the announcement. Saturday (6/6/2026), also saw the largest number of new player sign-ups since the Steam launch. Visions of Eternity also saw record numbers of returning players. Saturday also doubled that record of returning players.
Improvements in Guild Wars 2 will enhance the long-term experience of the game and make the game even more attractive to new players. The team will be starting with the core game in two parts. The first part focuses on systems and the second on story and achievement content. They will continue this strategy chronologically.
Guild Wars 2 runs on its own in-house game engine, evolved from Guild Wars 1 code. Bringing it up to modern standards is a huge undertaking. Some have been happening along the way, but they look forward to be able to make it feel modern and more easily adaptable over time. The biggest priority is client & server performance, but also looking at improving the fidelity of the game.
There will still be some new things happening in Guild Wars 2. New Orr map and new WvW Borderlands map, but we did not get any specifics on these. If teams were split between expansion development and modernization/QoL the results would likely not meet expectations.
The new Borderlands map for WvW will be built by learning from past mistakes and starting with the player experience. They want to make sure the experience can be a good experience for both smaller groups and the massive squads. They plan to have a “graybox” playtest before finalizing production, to get feedback before finishing development
The commitment to all 3 games is a strategic one. The 3 games all evolved through solving MMO genre problems in the era of that game's development. Each game attracts a different play style preference than the other. Yet another reason for them to continue to develop the games.
Guild Wars Reforged going mobile is a strategy to get more players into the franchise and is the only one planned for mobile. GW3 will be the only one going to console, as it is benign designed with that at its foundation. Sorry, no GW2 on console, they have revisited it over the years and decided the changes would need to be made to the game would change it too much, compromising the experience we currently have.
The vision for the next 5-10 years of Guild Wars 2 is to continue making a game that players want to return to as home. They plan to keep up with yearly expansions after the renovation period and continue to modernize. Ultimately, they want to continue giving us more of what we love.
Have specific improvement ideas? ArenaNet has created a new forum for driving their focus towards community concerns in their mission to improve Guild Wars 2 during the modernization period.
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