We don’t know much about Guild Wars 3 yet, aside from a few high-profile concepts and ideas, but what we do know – or at least what ArenaNet has claimed – is that it will seek to drive innovation in the MMORPG space and address persistent issues that have frustrated fans of the genre for years.

This is pretty much the exact same basic plan that was laid out for Guild Wars 2 when it was first in the planning stages almost 20 years ago. As ArenaNet spokespeople said, the MMO landscape has changed dramatically since then, and player expectations for what a new game could or should be are extremely high.

Everyone has their own opinion about what GW3 should offer, and I present some items on my wish list here. Are they realistic? Perhaps. Are these hopes and dreams that may never come true? Possibly! If someone at ArenaNet sees my ideas, will they think they are ridiculously naive and impossible to implement? Almost certainly.

But this is the time of dreams, when virtually nothing is known about an MMORPG and we can all imagine it in its perfectly realized state before learning any of those nasty details that inevitably shatter our narrow world view of the ideal game.

Complicated decisions

Let’s start with probably the biggest dream that MMOs have never really been able to fulfill after almost three decades on the market. This description came to my attention for Guild Wars 3 in one of the blogs about the game:

“Instead of threats being distant or abstract, the things you do have a more immediate impact on the world around you. You will see how the consequences of conflict play out in the places where you spend time, and over time, your relationships with those places – and especially with the people who live there – will evolve.”

The cynics among us (me? Never!) might interpret this as little more than a reputational conflict, or something akin to having your voice change here or there based on your actions. Or perhaps it’s something like Sun’s Refuge in Guild Wars 2, which becomes populated with familiar characters as you delve into content related to that area, giving it a more “lived-in” feel as you progress.

However, the real Golden Ticket would be something bigger, some kind of real impact on the world and what it looks like, not just for you personally, but for everyone in the world. MMORPGs are notorious for portraying you as the “chosen one” – alongside the other 10 million chosen ones in the world – and not making any real changes to the world no matter how many times you kill the big bads, because that would change other players’ perspectives and their hero’s journey.

There are obvious reasons for this. Guild Wars 2 flirted with the idea early in its life cycle, showcasing the one-off Battle of the Karka Queen when Southsun Cove first opened, as well as Season 1’s limited-time Living World content. That was cool for the people who were there, but not so much for the people who missed it. And even a veteran like me who was there wished he could visit old Lion’s Arch (the feat for that is too much for me) or even Kessex Hills before the Tower of Nightmares showed up.

15 years later, ArenaNet may have found a way to balance the desire to have a real impact on the world with the need to ensure players don’t miss out on content or feel like they’re insignificant to the world. I vaguely remember similar ideas being discussed during the development phase of EverQuest Next. I liked the promise they made, so I’m confident that ArenaNet can “find the fun” that Daybreak Game Company couldn’t find.

Better big boss fights

Love it or hate it, Guild Wars 2 combat was different. It mixed a little bit of tab targeting and a little bit of action combat, peppered with a mix of its own micro-innovations that just felt good – at least to me. (I can’t tell you how many times I play another MMO and want to move while channeling an ability.) The huge mega events weren’t exactly new – Rift had the nod there – but GW2 settled on them as its main form of content and refined the concept over the years.

However, a paradox of these types of events is that for the sake of coolness you want to defeat a huge monster like a dragon or a giant, but the simple size of the beast compared to your character makes such a fight difficult to portray. Either zoom in and pick at the ankles, or zoom out so far that your group looks like a swarm of ants.

Let’s go to the GW3 announcement post For a read that might give some hope:

“This is a game designed to bring the magic of Tyria to life, where you master a combat system that emphasizes the use of strategic skills, positioning and movement, and where action-RPG combat meets Guild Wars build-making – creating a unique combat experience.”

Yes, I know, these are all the typical buzzwords you’d expect to hear about an MMO’s combat system. Strategy! Positioning! Action! The same could have been said about the combat in Guild Wars 2 (and essentially it was).

But this post contains an image that also makes me think:

Again, this could just be an idealized view of fancy combat that has little to do with how the game will actually play out. Maybe we’ll still be picking at each other’s ankles most of the time.

But then Colin Johanson said this about the picture during his interview with IGN:

“This is really an inspiration piece that goes back to, ‘What are we trying to do with combat in this game?’ goes back. I’ve already mentioned it [that] One of our goals is to take elements that are more traditionally found in action games and figure out which of them can find their way into an MMO experience… This piece of concept art is really ambitious for us. That’s the kind of experience we strive for. Can we do more action combat like never seen before in an MMO?”

Some of Colin’s words are presented as saying that he wanted to create a game that could be played just as easily by mouse and keyboard players on a PC or controller players on consoles, and that he tried to design combat in a way that felt good for both groups. And maybe he’s just describing the piece in general terms, basically saying, “Doesn’t it look cool that one guy has a magic bow and another guy uses a lightning sword?” Sure, that’s true, but we’ve seen this before.

But when I dream big, wanting to make GW3, especially a battle like this, more like a “console” game gives me strong Monster Hunter vibes. Instead of each one knocking down a huge pile of hit points, will large monsters have individual parts, like the arm in this case, that they should target? Some of GW2’s battles experimented with players taking on different roles in combat or attacking different targets, but there’s a lot of room to expand on this concept and make it different than anything we’ve seen in MMOs.

Currency consolidation

You knew we wouldn’t get through all of this without me talking about inventory management, right?

When I first interviewed ArenaNet about Guild Wars 2 around 2011, I was told that there were three main currencies in the game: experience points, coins, and karma. To say we have more now is one light Understatement, and this is hardly a problem limited to this game, as this Reddit post shows.

I know why games do this: it’s that you don’t always use the easiest currency to get to buy everything, but that you actually have to create new content and get the currency you find there instead of always using the old stuff. However, over time this leads to a bloated inventory system, even if the currencies are only stored in one wallet like now in GW2. (Old school fans remember the time when they weren’t and the pain that brought.)

GW2 has improved on this over the course of the game, but the foundation on which the game is built probably doesn’t allow for radical changes. With a fresh start, Guild Wars 3 can better integrate (i.e. cap) its currencies, similar to what some other games (think Final Fantasy XIV’s Tomestones) and even GW2 itself did via the Wizard’s Vault.

Now, if I’m really dreaming big about inventory (again), I’d like to see gear also stored in a sort of “purse” where I can easily choose what I want to carry, rather than having to carry around entire piles of armor and weapons that I have to keep in my bags and swap out when I want a different build. Yes, templates help, but in this nebulous void the legends of GW2 already exist and I can draw from them at any time. Let me do the same thing with my other gear, okay? I promise you’ll still get us to buy inventory tabs somehow.