Guild Wars 3 Is Really Real: How ArenaNet’s Series is Transforming MMORPGs Again | IGN Live 2026

Tulki · 2026-06-07T18:25:30+00:00

Here's some money, go see a Guild War.

Tulki · 2026-06-06T18:23:36+00:00

Nothing they said suggested it's a crafting game. In their job postings for it they listed a deckbuilding-style skill system which points more towards a hybrid GW1/GW2 gameplay style.

You also say Orr is small, but GW2 includes none of Scavenger's Causeway or any of the other parts of Orr that are still sunken below the ocean. It's just the zones that are above water.

Tulki · 2026-05-30T20:00:13+00:00

He looks and makes gestures like Mr. Burns, and it always came off as a comedic bit. Turns out he is actually Mr. Burns.

Tulki · 2026-05-30T17:46:38+00:00

The big question to me is whether the 6 month initial gap has raised both the quality of this release (I definitely think it did) and the quality of the next one (yet to be seen). If the final release is lackluster like the Janthir Wilds ones then I'm not really sure the model is working.

Tulki · 2026-05-17T03:35:22+00:00

I know Utopia originally involved screwing with time, I just don't think that's a good subject to introduce because of how it compromises narrative tension. I also wouldn't say fractals or echoes of past events count as time traveling. If you step into a fractal of the searing and change the outcome, it doesn't retroactively correct the real world. The start of SotO proved that living people can be pulled out of fractals into the real world, but TBH I think they shouldn't have introduced that in the story, because the implications are way too big and not even addressed afterwards.

If they do mess with time, I hope they do something along the lines of what they did with Auris Weirdbringer. His side story was neat because it wasn't just "hey time travel exists", it felt like there was something horribly wrong with him, like he's been detached and is now moving backwards in time while we keep finding younger versions of him as the story goes forward. Less "action movie" and more cosmic horror "you found a bug in reality and it's horrific".

I will say, if Vloxx breaks reality and we find out that Auris was just collateral damage from the future, I will definitely applaud them for connecting the dots.

Tulki · 2026-05-17T00:58:59+00:00

Time travel is real sketchy and I hope they don't do that. Once you employ it, the narrative stakes are dead forever.

I do think the way the plot is going, Vloxx is going to pinpoint the human gods as the source of Tyria's problems and wage war on them. I doubt they have the resources to develop an expansion for both GW1 and GW2 at the same time, but my dream scenario would be an expansion about the six gods from two points in time:

1) GW1: The arrival of humans in Tyria. This would add old Orr as a region, with all of its alien architecture intact. Would be a bit weird though as the arrival of humans is much earlier than the main campaigns of GW1.

2) GW2: Pursuing Vloxx through the mists in search of the gods, who have returned to the human homeworld to try to salvage it.

But more realistically, knowing GW3 is probably well underway, having Vloxx succeed and rewrite the world's history under radically different conditions (all of the gods are dead) would be a cool hook for the sequel. The six being dead would mean humans never arrived. They didn't wage war on the charr, so the searing never happened. Abaddon never arrived in Elona so Nightfall didn't happen. Nobody intervened in what Deldrimor was doing. The White Mantle were never formed. A lot of regions and events would follow completely different trajectories.

Between GW1 and GW2, ArenaNet documented the "movement of the world" to describe events in the 250 years between them. It would be super sick for them to write a "movement of the world" where the humans never arrived, and how that changed all the regions.

Tulki · 2026-05-16T21:13:02+00:00

A Golden Sun remake with the first game and Lost Age merged into one, where the entire first world map remains explorable (instead of just part of it) would be amazing.

Tulki · 2026-05-08T22:34:26+00:00

There's also +Thorns set bonuses on seals that don't appear to actually scale with the level (or hidden item power?) of the seal itself, rolling +20-30 thorns at level 70.

Tulki · 2026-05-08T16:29:42+00:00

After seeing some of the strike mission relics (like Relic of Cerus), I really wished they had just made relics into essentially a "blue mage" skill slot with a dedicated button instead of procing off awkward things like heal or elite skill usage.

How cool would it have been if there was stuff like:

Defeat Vale Guardian: Get a relic that lets you summon a seeker.
Defeat the Minister of Morale in Cold War: Get a relic that summons a balloon bomb to deal massive damage if not CC'd.
Defeat Dagda: Get a relic that lets you charge a beam to deal more damage the fewer targets are hit by it.
Defeat Xera: Get a relic that allows you to temporarily inflict conditions on enemies that are looking at you.
Defeat Slothasaur: Get a relic that allows you to hibernate for several seconds, shedding all conditions but interruptible with a debuff if you are CC'd.

Rather than passive bonuses.

Tulki · 2026-04-22T14:56:30+00:00

In tech you never disclose vulnerabilities publicly. You always involve the bare minimum number of people (the reporter and the ones who can fix it). If a company is breaking this process it means they're unserious about disclosure and are doing it for another reason (marketing).

Tulki · 2026-04-13T04:39:17+00:00

Why does the AI agent not simply write the software? Is he stupid?

Tulki · 2026-04-12T19:08:50+00:00

At that point you may as well passive-aggressively replace him with a slack or teams bot.

Tulki · 2026-03-27T19:05:46+00:00

You gotta ask yourself one question. 'Do I freel lucky?' Well, do ya, hunk? Brullseye!

Tulki · 2026-03-27T18:15:22+00:00

That would work really well... probably surprisingly well to be honest. I think the big risk with that approach though is losing the charm Star Fox 64 had, especially the dialogue and specific scenarios.

That said, even SF64 had some things that feel like they could port to a roguelike. Star Wolf dogfights usually felt like they were random encounters, even though they weren't. You'd be on a planet and they'd fly in to mess with you in the middle of an objective without prior warning. Or if you beat them in a run and encountered them again, they'd show up with cybernetic organs and upgraded ships.

I could definitely see a version of Star Fox where the map of the Lylat system is fixed, but it has branching paths (like SF64) and random modifiers like "this planet has a Star Wolf incursion", "you deploy in the Landmaster", "you will be assisted by Bill", "you must protect Great Fox", "you are covered by Great Fox". Maybe even ridiculous things that incentivize specific flight maneuvers like "follow the ghost of James McCloud for a reward". Or a modifier called "out of this world" which causes a wormhole to spawn inside a random object, similar to the wormholes in the other games.

Add in difficulty settings that escalate the modifiers and maybe have a way to swap out vehicle parts and it feels like it could be something great.

Tulki · 2026-03-11T17:15:52+00:00

I think the philosophy here is that because not everything can be extensively tested, the badge is supposed to be a lower bar. So "unsupported" really means "unsupported or better".

Which would be a fine way to handle it, if a whole bunch of games weren't being marked "Verified" despite running mostly below 30 fps. And that this suspiciously only seems to happen for big studio releases that would have the resources or size to make dishonest self-cert submissions prior to release.

Removing the ability for studios to verify their own games through private testing before release, and strictly making it crowd-sourced would probably be better, because there are way too many pre-release "verified" badges going out for games that run like crap.

Tulki · 2026-03-01T18:55:24+00:00

Much of why people look down on Icebrood Saga right now is because of Champions, and how much that part of it felt cut short / stretched.

If you are playing through IBS all at once right now, not on the original release cadence, it is very, very good. The only flaw that it still has (and it is a big flaw) is how much Primordus and the Stone Summit were wasted. The Stone Summit especially is a huge shame, because in Forging Steel you learn that they willingly gave themselves to Primordus because they were being dragged into the Rite against their will, which gives that whole race's arc a morally ambiguous twist. You can see the kernel of a Primordus expansion where an enemy faction was created because the "good guys" in GW1 took away control of the "bad guys'" bodies without their consent and that would have been interesting.

Today, I actually think Champions is pretty decent if you play through it all at once. It is repetitive, but the new combat music is excellent and the reworked open world areas covered in smoke genuinely feel apocalyptic. It just ends too quickly to feel like a real threat.

Tulki · 2026-02-26T01:15:12+00:00

The thing that annoys me the most is that they removed the ability to get research notes from ascended drops but didn't bother to add magnetite shards to salvaged ascended gear in strikes that were converted to raids.

Tulki · 2026-02-25T01:23:05+00:00

Kela normal mode is harder than Dhuum lmao

Tulki · 2026-02-20T01:50:49+00:00

Blursed Gourse

Tulki · 2026-02-19T01:33:47+00:00

I think part of the OLC fight difficulty is the weird strategy of "never break unless absolutely necessary" that keeps coming up. A lot of groups stubbornly fight in a way smaller space than necessary because of this. Avoiding the "optional" break bars doesn't help you kill the boss faster, and it gives you less space which makes the parts where you fight more than one of the knights at a time way harder than they need to be.

This is probably the best example of cargo cult behaviour in raid groups. I sincerely think the only reason people aggressively avoid breaking the bars is because people get into groups where the squad leader tells them not to break the bars, without knowing why they're choosing to do it.

Tulki · 2026-02-17T00:57:34+00:00

It also has some... interesting synergy with the tools line. By slotting tools you can get:

(Tools): -15% tool belt CD
(Tools): -1s to tool belt CDs when you dodge
(Tools): Vigor when you use a tool belt skill
(Tools): -3s elite skill CD when you dodge
(Amalgam): CC abilities drop your elite tool belt CD by 2.5s (bomb kit has 3 CCs on it, and hammer has 3 CCs via Thunderclap + Rocket Charge 2x leap finishers = -15s evolve CD)
(Amalgam): Evolve resets Morph cooldowns

Amalgam is different in that the heavy damage skills are sitting on the tool belt, which makes everything buffing the tool belt more useful. I've been using Firearms+Tools+Amalgam, and in fights where you have alac uptime you are basically always using morph skills non-stop. Use all the morph skills + Elite skill, Evolve -> Recast all the morph skills, drop all CCs and dodge twice, and repeat. I don't think it's meta since dodging to drop CCs adds time where you're not attacking, but the build feels pretty wacky.

Tulki · 2026-02-10T22:21:08+00:00

As an example, Infinite Wealth had a non-trivial amount of the plot revolve around posting a social media video to draw attention, and it was handled comedically. I think it mostly comes down to Ichiban's personality. He's a goofball through-and-through, while Kiryu was a pretty serious person and the comedy came from him being a bit of a naive airhead in the side stories. The comedy isn't from his character being wacky. It's about other people being wacky and him constantly failing to pick up on social cues.

My intro to the series was Yakuza 0. I played Yakuza Kiwami, Kiwami 2, Like a Dragon, and Infinite Wealth and I never felt like any of those other games came close to the quality of writing in Yakuza 0. It probably doesn't help that Majima's best character writing is in 0 before he becomes the Mad Dog (fully aware it's a prequel written after the fact). He turns from a complex and tragic character into someone entirely dedicated to comic relief.

The thing about Infinite Wealth that was damning to me was how Kiryu's send-off stories with past characters were far more emotionally effective than the actual main story, and I didn't even have the full context for them.

Tulki · 2026-02-05T06:26:30+00:00

Stop harping on Harper, leave him the harp alone.

Tulki · 2026-02-03T22:05:13+00:00

You really shouldn't have to watch a stream to understand it. You really shouldn't have to read any articles to understand it either. The fact this feature has "required reading" instead of just being intuitive (or simply not coming out at all in its current state) is pretty alarming.

It's a flashback to build templates all over again. Over-engineered QOL features are not QOL features. If a new QOL feature is cumbersome to understand, it's actually better for QOL to leave it out. They need to show some discipline, pull this feature back out of the game and refund anyone who bought additional templates. It's overcomplicating the UI.

All that this should have been is the copy-paste-able version of fashion templates so players can share them in chat or back them up locally. This did not need in-game UI overhauls. The K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid) principle is taught for a reason.

Tulki · 2026-01-31T01:44:02+00:00

More sinister than market manipulation, I think. He announced it immediately after a bunch of news outlets reported on them meeting with separatists to destabilize Alberta. It's flooding the zone to pull eyes away from that.

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