MMOs are, in many ways, the cradle of live service games—the place where the model we all know and loathe got its start. They have, in turn, tried to adopt some of the live service models that have proven to be the most popular, such as seasonal structures and, in some cases, battle passes.
Sometimes it works out well! For instance, WoW has a battle pass-esque system in the Trading Post, but it’s completely free, encouraging players to do a bunch of activities in-game to earn some bonus cosmetics. In others, not so much.
Guild Wars has always tried to buck popular MMO trends, though—escaping the relentless gear grind with horizontal progression in Guild Wars 2, for instance. And with Guild Wars 3, deliberately taking a stance against a battle-pass esque model of gameplay.
That’s per studio head Colin Johanson, who spoke with IGN during the Summer Game Fest where Guild Wars 3 was announced.
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“I think there’s become a modern version of the subscription that we’ve seen evolve over the last few years in battle passes, and paid battle passes, where—it’s basically a subscription kind of hidden and wrapped with other stuff around it.
“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.”
The antidote? Similar to prior Guild Wars games, Guild Wars 3 will be very ‘buy and play’, with no subscription fees, seasonal loot treadmills, or mandatory grinds:
“This’ll be a game where you can buy it, you can play it as much or as little as you want, we will respect our player’s times, and if they love it, they’ll have other stuff they can buy from us in the future. But we’re not gonna hold their time hostage, and we want them to be able to go play other games.”
I’m not feeling cynical about ArenaNet’s chances of pulling that off, mind—because it’s absolutely done so already with Guild Wars 2—but I do think it’s a steeper challenge than simply “respecting player’s time”, which is an admirable goal, but also a phrase that’s been repeated so often in the MMO space it’s starting to lose meaning.
The issue with these seasonal battle pass structures is that they tend to work, giving players easy hopping-on points with manageable grinds and decently-paced rewards. If they become overbearing, sure, I tend to tune out, but I’ve seen the other end of the spectrum—where a game has so little in the way of rewards or regular incentives it actually sabotages its own offerings—and that’s not great, either.
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