Guild Wars’ devs tried to escape the MMO branding in 2005, citing all the things that would become genre staples 20 years later

Guild Wars 3‘s on the horizon—and as part of that release, developer ArenaNet got a little nostalgic in a news post last week. It shared a healthy handful of details on its incoming MMO, including an aim to fix something that shook PCG’s own Lauren Morton off the second game.

It also shared an interesting tidbit about the first Guild Wars game. Namely—try as they might, ArenaNet couldn’t shake off the MMO tag: “Guild Wars Reforged is, at its core, a game about a small team: a player and their assembled team of henchmen or hero NPCs or other players they want to bring along with them, overcoming challenges in a predominantly instanced game.

“Unless you invited them along, you never saw other players except in the game’s social hubs. When we released the original Guild Wars, we branded the game as a CORPG (cooperative online RPG); however, the branding never stuck, and everyone informed us we’d released an MMORPG.”

I suppose I’m guilty of doing the same—though it makes sense, given I’m a Final Fantasy 14 fan, and that also happens to be a set of basically single-player RPGs that just so happens to share an online world. Granted, there’s plenty you can team up for, but the same goes for Guild Wars 1.

It’s particularly interesting because the things that ArenaNet determined as setting it apart from other MMOs are actually more popular in modern MMOs than they’ve ever been. FF14 and World of Warcraft both have systems where you can fill out your party members with NPCs, and a higher emphasis on soloable content as the years have gone on.

It was a point of contention for Raph Koster (who worked on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies) when I spoke to him earlier this month for our MMO column—observing that open-world sandbox MMOs, the type Guild Wars 1 sought to set itself apart from, fell out of favour in exchange for instanced theme parks with social hubs.

In other words, when you describe a game where you rarely interact with players outside of social hubs, you can describe a ton of modern MMOs depending on how strict you’re being—sure, I’ll see players occasionally divebomb a mob in my periphery in WoW or join a mob of particle-effect flinging adventurers for a public event, but I’m not exactly talking to anybody.

Anyway, ArenaNet eventually leant in: “We even won multiple MMO-of-the-year awards! We gave up on the CORPG angle since it didn’t stick with players, and we simply embraced what everyone told us: we’d shipped a unique kind of MMORPG.”

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