In a video blog published today, ArenaNet said that Guild Wars 3 won't mean the end of development for Guild Wars 2. It and even GW1 will be getting new updates "for the foreseeable future."
"We are not replacing your favorite games. We'll be supporting them," said ArenaNet head Colin Johanson in the video. "We know this is not the norm, but it's something our studio has been preparing for."
Johanson pointed back to Guild Wars 2's release, when the final Guild Wars expansion, Eye of the North, set up the sequel's events and the game was essentially replaced, at least in terms of active support in the form of new patches.
He explained that if the studio were going that route a second time, "we would have stopped development on Guild Wars 2 over a year ago." Not only is the current expansion not quite wrapped up yet, but the original Guild Wars has started to get new dungeons after years of relative silence, so it's clear this approach has been in motion for some time now.
In the short-term, this will mean that Guild Wars 2 will slow down for a bit. The video notes that a few smaller things are on the way while GW3 prepares for release—an optimization pass, a reprise of the Hall of Monuments system where players can earn GW3 rewards in GW2, and an updated version of the Zhaitan fight in base GW2—though GW2 will continue to get more expansions once GW3 is out.
It will be interesting to see if these plans change if GW3 turns out to be a runaway success, or the opposite. There are some parallels to be drawn with Final Fantasy, which has two active MMOs in 11 and 14, RuneScape, which has Old School and modern versions, and World of Warcraft, which is split between all sorts of different era-locked servers.
