Guild Wars 3 is 'significantly more' of an MMO than the first game, but that doesn't mean it's like GW2: 'All three of our games can coexist as different experiences'

Guild Wars 2 is one of the biggest MMOs going, but it's a sequel to a game that's just barely an MMO—the original Guild Wars is more of a mission-based ARPG with shared town hubs that feels like an MMO due to its huge roster of character classes and /dance emotes. When a game like Guild Wars 3 gets announced, an obvious question follows: will it be an MMO or not?

According to a blog post from ArenaNet studio head Colin Johanson that went up earlier this week, the answer is yes, but with an asterisk. In the post, he lays out the studio's taxonomy for the first two games. The first Guild Wars game, Johanson reckons, was a "cooperative online RPG," but when everyone started calling it an MMO, ArenaNet followed suit. The second is a true-blue MMO that was always intended to toy with the genre's conventions.

As for the third? It "lands near the middle of the MMO spectrum … While it fits the definition of an MMORPG significantly more than Guild Wars Reforged does, it doesn't try to replicate the large-scale gameplay pillars that so uniquel...