More than 20 years after its original release, Guild Wars Reforged represents a rare moment in the MMO space in that it’s a legacy online game not being sunset, rebooted, or remade, but deliberately re-engineered to live on.
Rather than chasing nostalgia through a full remaster or sequel, ArenaNet has chosen a quieter, more sustainable approach by modernizing infrastructure, improving accessibility, and expanding platform support while preserving the core systems that defined the original experience.
In the following Q&A, developers from ArenaNet and 2weeks discuss how Guild Wars Reforged came together, where they drew the line between modernization and preservation, what surprised them most about the game’s reception, and how they’re thinking about the future of a 20-year-old MMO in a modern market.
Guild Wars Reforged Developer Q&A Interview
Where did the idea and inspiration for Guild Wars Reforged come from? Obviously, the anniversary is great timing, but why this specific way of celebrating the game’s legacy?
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Stephen Clarke-Willson, Guild Wars Reforged Game Director: I’ve been “care-taking” OG Guild Wars since 2017 when I first moved all the servers into AWS. Over the ensuing years as I interacted with the community on Reddit I was struck by the passion of players and the level of investment they had put into the game and I wanted to support that. In September 2023 I wrote an internal position paper where I proposed slowly but surely putting more effort into OG Guild Wars. I started fixing up some of the older systems, like fixing some latency bugs, improving the logging system so we could see what players were actually doing in-game, fighting bots, and that sort of thing. Another programmer, Bill Freist, spent some of his off-time fixing some other bugs and adding some QOL features. The management team at ArenaNet was very supportive of me spending significant time on OG Guild Wars. And for the 20th Anniversary our ace gameplay programmer, Joe Kimmes, pulled another rabbit out of the hat as he had done for the 10th and 15th anniversaries with some very clever gameplay updates.
In this context, 2weeks contacted us with a proposal to add features to OG Guild Wars! “Coincidental” doesn’t even begin to cover how surprised I was to hear from these former ArenaNet programmers and designers and hear their ideas.
What has reception been like generally, and specifically, are you able to share any stats or numbers about how many people are playing or how many copies of Reforged were sold to new users or redeemed by existing users?
Clarke-Willson: We don’t generally release specific numbers; I can tell you that we needed twice as many servers for the 20th Anniversary and my guess for Reforged was we would need 2x that (so 4x normal) but we blew way past that. Compared to the weeks leading up to Reforged’s launch, we saw an over 16000% increase in overall unit sales and a 5x increase in concurrent players.
What about the number of players on mouse & keyboard versus Steam Deck versus gamepad?
Clarke-Willson: It’s not just Steam Deck but controller and big-screen TV support that came out at the same time, but I don’t have any specific numbers handy. I know we have some people here in the office who play on Steam Deck or similar handhelds a lot.
Mike Zadorojny, Guild Wars Reforged Producer: The work done to bring the game to Steam Deck naturally unlocked couch play similar to traditional consoles. With addition of controller and 4K support we saw not only were players now playing GW on their Steam Decks while watching shows with their friends or family, but also freed people to move away from their normal PC setups to play more comfortably on larger TVs from their couches.
In a lot of ways, this feels almost like a full remaster, but you’ve been clear that it isn’t really that. Where is that line, to you?
Clarke-Willson: Remaster is a loaded word that means a lot of different things to different people, so we’re trying to stay away from using that terminology. To me it implies we re-did all of the graphics in Unreal and we certainly didn’t do that! We did however change a lot of internal plumbing in terms of the user interface that we expect will allow us to iterate on gameplay and QOL features more quickly going forward.
Which classic Guild Wars values were “non-negotiables,” that you protected during the modernization process (such as combat feel, instancing model, buildcraft, etc.)?
Brandon Dillon, Co-founder 2weeks: The core Guild Wars experience has really stood the test of time, it has deep and interesting skill mechanics, works well solo and in multiplayer, and still looks beautiful today.
Our modernization efforts were less about changing the experience and more about removing inhibitors from appreciating it in a modern context. Even our graphical improvements were designed to preserve the original artistic intent. For example, the classic bloom effect didn’t scale for HD resolutions, so the new one we implemented is designed to recreate the original visual effect across a lot more pixels.
We also added software emulation for long-defunct hardware-accelerated audio simulation. Our goal was to recreate the experience of playing the game in the early 00’s in a modern context.
Clarke-Willson: We’re not going to change the basic gameplay. Guild Wars is unique in the way it mixes skills and skill-building. But we want to expand the audience in two directions: one is more challenge for long term players while simultaneously making the game more accessible for new players.
On a related note, why not add a jump button? That might be a personal request, though! Haha.
Dillon: ArenaNet already made a whole second game for that!
Clarke-Willson: You can type “/jump” anytime!
Zadorojny: The game wasn’t designed with the ability to jump in mind, so adding the feature in decades later is no small task. Players would expect to be able to leap between different vertical areas that would have unintended consequences to the gameplay that would need to be considered, from creature pathing to skill movement between multiple planes. Anything that would fundamentally change the core gameplay experience was passed on in favor of efforts to focus on ways to modernize the game through making the game more approachable for new players or providing a richer experience for existing players.
How did the relationship come about with 2weeks, and what is their role exactly?
Dillon: We specialize in building games that work across a variety of form factors and input methods, so Guild Wars was an ideal target for us: modernizing a classic PC online RPG and adapting it for controllers and Steam Deck is a daunting task, but we felt like the ideal team to tackle it.
Our team is about half ArenaNet alumni, including our founders, me, Brandon Dillon, plus Richard Foge. Guild Wars remains near and dear to our heart. We’re very thankful that ArenaNet was open to us partnering with them on it. It also helped a ton that we knew and loved working with the folks at ArenaNet, it’s been a really smooth, high-trust collaboration.
Clarke-Willson: This is the most “co-development” relationship I’ve ever been involved with. We have so many people here at ArenaNet who worked on OG Guild Wars and who understand the lore and the gameplay and we lean on them for consistency and feedback. Both companies do programming; for the most part myself and some other programmers at ArenaNet are focusing on enhancing our infrastructure and 2weeks is focusing on gameplay and UI. But the fact is we shift responsibilities back and forth depending on need. Brandon and I even did some “remote pair programming” on the login system.
Adding controller support and Steam Deck verification is a big deal. What were some of the challenges with getting those features right?
Richard Foge, Chief Creative Officer at 2weeks: Guild Wars is a huge game with a long history on PC. We knew that getting 100% of the controls directly mapped to a gamepad wasn’t going to be the right play, so we focused on getting the functionality required by the core gameplay loops—interactions and combat—to a really good spot for launch.
Targeting was/is a huge challenge. We went through several models and months of iteration and playtesting feedback before landing on a solid solution.
There are also a ton of interfaces that are so mouse and keyboard dependent that we needed to build a controller cursor solution in order to make sure folks could access functionality we couldn’t directly map to controller inputs. Thankfully, one of our engineers was able to put together an excellent controller cursor that helped cover the interfaces that really need a cursor.
We’re still working on improving the controller experience, but folks are having a good time with it so far. We’ve been heartened by the number of people who have said it’s now their preferred way to play.
Clarke-Willson: This is an interesting experience where the early vision for controller support remained intact but the iteration on details was pretty significant. We have a playtest lab here at ArenaNet and we made use of it to get feedback from staff here as well as from our alpha testers. My son Sam, on his own initiative, had built out a Steam Deck control configuration using just the tools provided by Steam. His prototype, which came out with the 20th anniversary, showed that controller support was possible. Once we started talking to 2weeks about a serious rework of the UI we expanded the thinking to, “What could we do if the controller interface was context sensitive and knew what you were doing in the game?”
Similarly, what were some of the difficulties with making Reforged in general? Did anything surprising present a roadblock?
Dillon: ArenaNet has done a commendable job keeping Guild Wars running well over the last two decades. Many of the things we anticipated being challenges, like getting the code compiling with modern tools, were non-issues because folks at ArenaNet have been quietly maintaining and updating compatibility over time. The one area where we faced challenges was with the tools for making content.
No new content has been made for the game for a long time, and the tools for making things like 3D models or introducing new items or spawns had accumulated compatibility issues over time. We’re still actively recovering a lot of those tools and getting them working again. For a big online RPG like Guild Wars, that’s a mountain of work, but it’s also rewarding “archeology,” each new tool we recover opens up additional possibilities for future features and content.
Clarke-Willson: Guild Wars 2 had already paved the way for logging in via two systems (three now, including Epic Games). But, well, as these things go, we decided to use yet another login path for maximum flexibility going forward, which uses web APIs. It turns out this system, which was in use, had never been used in this context, so there was a lot of excitement around ironing out that flow. We were supported by our internal Platform team for the login flow and for getting a list of purchase entitlements from Steam.
$20 for so much content is a pretty great value proposition. Why not sell them separately like before?
Clarke-Willson: I can tell you that you can get thousands of hours of gameplay for $40 and I would be telling the truth because we have a history of players doing that. But in this economy with so many choices and so many great games available on Steam, $40 feels like too big a risk for many people. So we not only lowered the price to $20 but we also gave free upgrades to anyone who had bought any of the campaigns so they automatically had all three now! And part of this was to solve the player problem: “Where do I start?” I think you should start in Prophecies but you don’t have to finish it before (say) you jump into Nightfall and start getting Heroes, if that’s what you want to do. And further this means that the community is not segmented anymore; build-crafting and play style discussions can assume everyone has all three campaigns. It’s just more fun besides being a terrific value.
Zadorjny: One of the goals for Reforged was to simplify the onboarding experience for new players and reducing the number of potential different starting products to purchase was important to us. At the same time, we wanted to reward existing, loyal players who may not have had all the campaigns by unlocking them for free as part of the migration from Prophecies, Factions, and Nightfall to just Reforged. This also made it easier for players to freely join their friends in the core content from other campaigns once they unlock the ability to travel there with their existing characters without needing to purchase another campaign.
What kind of future updates are on the table down the line? Maybe some more QoL enhancements?
Foge: Guild Wars has been around for 20+ years at this point and there are a few legacy behaviors that folks have been working around that we’d love to improve. We’d love to keep coming up with interesting ways for folks to re-engage with the game from a new perspective like the Dhuum’s Covenant mode, which recognizes players who haven’t died a single time.
We’re also on the lookout for ways to make the experience more inviting for new players. Guild Wars is a complex game with a steep learning curve, but is extremely rewarding once you’ve started to develop some mastery with its systems. We want to make it easier for new players to get to that point.
One of the biggest benefits of shipping Guild Wars Reforged is that it has reinvigorated the community for the game, so the experience is alive with other players in a way it hasn’t been for some time. We want to help continue to grow that community.
How will you decide what to tackle next—community surveys, telemetry, support tickets, Steam reviews, or something else?
Foge: It’s a bit of everything. We definitely spend time on various channels seeing how folks are engaging with the game and listening to pain/high points. We also have testers come in that have a range of experience with the game and ArenaNet has an excellent community voice team that helps us consolidate and prioritize feedback from all of these sources.
We’re also fans of the game and have our own ideas about the ways we’d love to see it grow. We love finding ways of surprising new and long-time fans.
Clarke-Willson: Since 2018, Reddit has been our main communication path with players. For Reforged, we significantly ramped up our social media outreach. We’re expanding our creator partners program to support OG Guild Wars and we hope soon to be working with some of our passionate fan sites and fan groups.
Finally, any teasers about Guild Wars 3? How is that coming along?
ArenaNet Representative: The studio is currently focused on developing the remainder of the content for Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity as well as working on regular updates for Guild Wars Reforged. If there is ever a new project from the studio to announce, we will be happy to share it with you when the time is right.
