This year’s Summer Game Fest was packed full of plenty of great reveals, but for my money, Guild Wars 3 was one of the biggest bombshells. There had been whisperings of its existence, a few stray job postings here and there, but to actually see it on the big stage was a huge deal to all lovers of MMOs.

But, why? What’s the big deal? For an idea of why Guild Wars 3 should be on your radar, you must look into why Guild Wars 2 remains a genre mainstay, almost 15 years after its initial release. Why has this game survived the test of time, while so many others have fallen out of fashion?

“I think the most important thing to understand is that its longevity isn’t the result of one major pivot or feature or even expansion release,” Guild Wars 2 game director Joshua Davis told me. “I really think it is a cumulative effect of early design decisions that have aged exceptionally well and were super relevant both in 2012 and today.

Davis points to a philosophy around respecting a player’s time, manifested through horizontal progression rather than a constant push to keep up with new, more powerful content. “If you play any other MMO out there, you spend a considerable amount of time getting into it, and then you decide to go play a different game for a little while. There’s like this psychological barrier to going back to the game, right? Especially when new content is released. It’s like, ‘oh man, everything I did is obsolete. I’m gonna have to go and do a bunch of work to basically get back to doing the fun again’.”

ArenaNet studio lead Colin Johanson, speaking at IGN Live following Guild Wars 3’s Summer Game Fest debut, echoed such sentiments when discussing the sequel and a desire to not hold players “hostage”. Guild Wars 2, for all its merits, is a game you can put down and return to without tackling a sense of FOMO. My legendary rifle – The Predator – that I crafted 10 years ago will still be there, and will still be great, even now. Davis said that Guild Wars 2 was designed to be “everyone’s favorite second game to play”, and it’s remained a pillar of the genre ever since.

What you get when you boot up a Guild Wars game is stellar art direction, across the board. Guild Wars 2, especially, hits you upfront with brushstroke art pieces, vibrant regions spread across a vast world. It’s been over a decade and still, even now, Timberline Falls or Verdant Brink still impress. Now, we’ve not seen a lot of Guild Wars 3, and what in-engine footage we have seen has been received with some criticism. Still, some cautious optimism I feel is owed, due to an approach to visual aesthetic over tech-chasing present throughout Guild Wars 2.

“There are some early philosophies that went into our approach that I think have really stood the test of time and helped us kind of create that identity,” said Guild Wars 2 lead character artist Aaron Coberly.

He continues: “One of the things our original art director, Daniel Dociu, wanted to instill was that we’re never chasing technology. This isn’t like a technology experiment, right? We’re not just looking at what’s happening right now and just throwing that in the game, then saying ‘OK, well, maybe it doesn’t look perfect. But you know. It’s the latest and greatest.’ It always was about what appears on screen has to work. It has to be visually cohesive, you know, It has to have the composition, it has to have colour harmony. It has to have all of those elements. It has to tell the story. It has to create the mood. And when you aren’t chasing technology, when you’re making those early decisions about where you want to put your stake in the ground. You can look at the game early on, and yeah, there’s no question it does look a little dated, but it also still looks beautiful.”

The game retains this “artisanal quality”, according to Coberly. A lack of uniformity spread throughout the game makes each town feel distinct, each vista feel worth reaching for the sake of a good view rather than just completing the map. As Coverly puts it: “It needs to work as a whole. You can’t have things that are just thrown in there for the sake of throwing them in there.”

I wanted to ask straight up why Guild Wars 2 has lasted so long while other MMOs have fallen by the wayside (Throne & Liberty, Blue Protocol, and Wildstar, to name just a few To this, Davis said: “I would say it’s really tough to make games right now, for sure. There’s so much going on in the industry – developer-side especially, right? With the amount of layoffs that have happened in recent years, I think that we’re seeing more and more that it’s really hard to move players from their main game, right? And so if you are a fan of ‘X’ game, another game comes along, there’s a really high likelihood you’re gonna rubber-band back to the game that you came from because it’s kind of your comfort place.

“I feel like there’s still a lot of opportunity in this space, though. I don’t think the industry generally is done innovating in the MMO genre and I think there’s certainly things that exist in every current game – even Guild Wars 2 is an example that could be improved upon. I think we just haven’t seen a ton of games come in that really move the needle for fans. I think there’s been a lot of retreads, or games that kind of do things we’ve seen before, but just in slightly different ways. I think that fans are looking for a bit more of a bigger paradigm shift.”

So, there’s good reason to be excited about Guild Wars 3, given the approach to development established in ArenaNet’s ongoing massive MMO. In fact, if you do find yourself excited, you can always try out Guild Wars 2 during this haunting year-plus wait. With the developers pledging to maintain its repertoire of MMOs even with Guild Wars 3 in deep development, it feels like a grand time to do so.