• 10 Dec, 2025 *

Less than a year after its 20th anniversary celebration update – which brought new weapon skins, customization options, and new rare item rewards – Guild Wars has received a second update that is less of a content update and more of a promise of things to come. The new Reforged update repackages the game into a more digestible, lower cost, purchase and lowers microtransaction costs, adds Steam Deck and controller support, and makes improvements to postprocessing, audio, and UX. More importantly, it’s the beginning of a commitment Arenanet is making to Guild Wars players to not only maintain the game, but do proactive upkeep to help bring in new players and tend to Guild Wars’ current dedicated community.

Reviewing this initial update is strange, more of a discussion of the potentialities than a review of existing new content as with Oldschool’s Sailing update. Indeed, what’s actually included in the update is a bit of a mixed bag. The new launcher is much faster to get in game, and minor features like interface scaling for high DPI displays and the new on-screen quest tracker are great. Controller input proved a bit of a mixed bag. The game regularly toggled its mouse-emulation mode (used for navigating menus unsuited to controller) and refused to toggle back out in the middle of combat, preventing me from turning my camera or character. Despite those tribulations I successfully cleared a daily dungeon bounty on hard mode without much difficulty. I’d like to see customizable controller prompts for non-Xbox controllers, and further customization of controller binds (which has been promised). The new FXAA setting comes with a disproportionate performance cost in some areas, while new OpenAL audio support has proven to be a massive upgrade with no downside. By and large, it’s a solid TLC update with some issues that are being gradually ironed out.

The promise of further support has invited a lot more community buzz. Guild Wars’ original development trajectory was somewhat strange: the Factions and Nightfall campaigns were published only a year after Guild Wars’ original launch, with the Eye of the North expansion coming a year later. A cancelled Utopia campaign had been repurposed in to Eye of the North in order to align with Anet’s move to Guild Wars 2 as their primary development focus. This means that in only two years Guild Wars released all of its major content, followed only by smaller content updates like the Bonus Mission Pack, and balance/quality-of-life updates in the five-year period between Eye of the North and Guild Wars 2. The promise of further development seems both highly practical (given Guild Wars spent most of its lifespan being the proverbial second fiddle to Guild Wars 2 internally), and potentially dramatic given that Guild Wars’ open ended skill system has historically lead to dramatic metagame shifts off the back of fairly minor balance changes.

Perhaps the most requested new content update would be the continuation of what Arenanet called Guild Wars Beyond – a series of new end game quests that were meant to bridge the gaps between Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 narratively. The existing Beyond questlines, which follow up on the Prophecies and Factions campaigns, are some of the highest quality experiences the game has to offer and a similar expansion to Nightfall (which is widely considered the best campaign) is something existing players have hoped for since the early 2010s. This would be a killer new update, no caveats.

Beyond wasn’t the only work that was cut off prematurely. Arenanet had been working on major profession reworks during the period immediately before Guild Wars 2. The beneficiaries of these reworks, most notably the Dervish and Mesmer, are some of the most powerful classes in the game and enjoy immense build diversity. Unfortunately, other professions still carry the burden of 2005 skill design and are boxed out of fun build concepts that their fantasy promises by raw numerical disadvantage. The Smiting Monk can only reasonably be built one way for general purposes. Ranger’s Nature Ritual and Preparation skills see play only in less effective builds, in extreme niches, and in PvP. Necromancer Blood Magic promises the fantasy of slowly sucking the life out of your foes, but in practice mostly involves serving as an energy battery for your allies. Juicing up some of these skill types and attributes would greatly improve the build diversity and fun of their respective classes.

Whether we see any of these updates remains to be seen. In interviews, Stephen Clarke-Wilson, Guild Wars game director, and their new Guild Wars development partner 2weeks, a studio made of Guild Wars development vets, has been vague about their plans for the future, but it seems like there are options on the table that promise to revitalize one of the best MMOs of the MMO golden age. Reforged has outperformed expectations already and excitement for the future has filled Guild Wars’ public districts to bursting and new players have been popping up all over. It’s a great time for the game, and I’d encourage anyone interested to try it out.

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