It can be said that many players are experiencing a sort of “battle pass fatigue” after it’s become the gold standard for many multiplayer games. To many, it can feel like a chore or “mandatory fun” that forces you to reengage with the game through utilizing FOMO-tactics. It’s also frustrating to many that there are additional charges following the purchasing of a game, especially when content isn’t always quality. However, for fans of the Guild Wars games, this is something they won’t have to worry about with the recently announced Guild Wars 3, according to an IGN interview with ArenaNet studio head Colin Johanson, who said, “We’ve challenged ourselves to ask the same question: can we make a game like this that doesn’t have a subscription fee and doesn’t have a battle pass fee buried in it as well? Because we think players are sick of those, too (…) So this will be a game, you can buy it. You can play it as much or as little as you want. We will respect our players’ time”. According to Johanson, many subscriptions and battlepasses through the FOMO-logic they operate on make playing games which make playing feel like “a second job”, sapping the joy out of the game itself.
In other parts of the interview, Johanson mentions how players feel that the MMO genre has “stagnated” and that people have been “playing the same games for the most part for over a decade”. According to Johanson, ArenaNet genuinely want to create a unique and refreshing experience, part of which they aim to achieve by setting the game 1,200 years before the first Guild Wars game, a period of which there is little lore about, meaning there are plenty of new things to experience for both new players unfamiliar with the series and veteran players who have been sticking to the games for a while. Guild Wars 3 is set to launch a beta in Fall of 2027, so fans of the series will have to wait some time before getting a chance to play, but given ArenaNet has also announced they plan to continue support for both Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, there should be plenty of content to keep them busy in that time.