After the Reforged remake on Steam has enabled a strong comeback for Guild Wars, the developers at ArenaNet are now following up with a heartwarming documentary.
What kind of documentary is this? It is called “The Making of Guild Wars: Celebrating 25 Years of ArenaNet” and just went live on YouTube a few hours ago. Together with the teams from Second Wind and Lost & Found Media, the developers look back at the creation and evolution of the popular MMORPG.
The responsible parties emphasize in a pinned comment under the video that you should not expect any announcements or teasers for future projects in this documentary. It’s about ArenaNet, Guild Wars, and Guild Wars 2.
Here you can see the launch trailer for Guild Wars Reforged:
“It gives me goosebumps”
What does the documentary deliver in detail? A nostalgic yet interesting look back at the creation of the beloved MMORPG series. Fans of Guild Wars will relive some heartwarming moments.
If you are interested in how the games were developed and why the devs made certain decisions, you will find it here as well. There are also many pictures from the early years of ArenaNet. For example, developers can be seen setting up their office in a colleague’s living room to work on Guild Wars.
Right at the beginning, the developers explain that since the founding of ArenaNet, they have had a certain approach when it comes to developing a new game: What frustrates players about the current status quo of the genre? How can we eliminate these problems and build a game that can captivate them for a long time?
You can find the documentary about Guild Wars on YouTube or below:
One of the frustrating factors they identified before Guild Wars was: Why do you always have to pay a monthly fee for MMORPGs? At the time, many people were fundamentally refusing to spend money on online services. There simply wasn’t Netflix, no Spotify, no Game Pass, and so on.
Therefore, the goal for ArenaNet’s first game was to build an online role-playing game that could also succeed without a monthly fee from the very beginning. To achieve this, they had to find innovative solutions or tricks with the technical infrastructure to make the operation of the MMORPG more efficient and cost-effective than that of the competition at the time.
But these were just first teasers from the first minutes of the documentary. The 55 minutes contain so much exciting information that you should definitely check it out yourself.
How is the community reacting to the documentary? Although the documentary is only a few hours old, there are already more than 300 comments and over 2,360 thumbs up.
- MuklukYoutube writes under the video: “It was really fun to watch. Congratulations on the 25th anniversary! Here’s to many more years!”
- wyldlibrarian3549 also celebrates the documentary: “This story gives me goosebumps. What an amazing insight into the game and the developers/inventors/artists/writers/promoters who were all involved. Creative geniuses. Thank you all.”
- angelwriter0428 has a lot of personal connections with the game: “I met my husband in GW2. I found lifelong friends that I would never have had without GW2. This game will always hold a special place in my heart.”
Why is Guild Wars a topic right now? The new Reforged version offers a comprehensive, slightly modernized version of the 20-year-old MMORPG classic Guild Wars. You should not expect an elaborate remake. In the package are:
- Verification for the Steam Deck
- all three campaigns of Guild Wars, thus Prophecies, Factions, and Nightfall
- revised user interface, controller support, additional settings (e.g. for text size) and support for modern monitors
- graphical updates for dynamic bloom effects in the sky, improved lighting, or optimized textures
- increased user-friendliness through a new quest tracking system and a control guide
The Reforged version currently has 89 percent positive reviews on Steam. Thousands of players have been concurrently active on the servers every day since launch (source: steamcharts.com).
Then as now, the MMORPG shines with its diverse game world, catchy soundtrack, motivating class system, and the titular guild wars. Will the next installment of the series bring back these old strengths? ArenaNet is looking for support for “unannounced project” – What about Guild Wars 3?
