ArenaNet creates online role-playing games and persistent worlds, with Guild Wars 2 as its flagship title. The game is sold as a complete copy and complemented by in-game purchases, allowing players to join a global MMO community and explore ongoing, dynamic content in a living world. What distinguishes ArenaNet from competitors is a focus on hand-crafted world design, deep attention to player experience, and continuous live-service updates that evolve the game rather than relying on a one-time release. The company aims to deliver high-quality online worlds that meet strong player expectations while attracting top talent to push further development.
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2000
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How ArenaNet juiced up the original Guild Wars 20 years later | interview. * by Rachel Kaser * November 3, 2026 * 2 min Hollywood & Games returns to Los Angeles on December 10, bringing together 250+ executives, founders, investors and decision-makers at the Grammy Museum's Clive Davis Theater. Explore the business of entertainment's biggest partnership through independent, journalist-led conversations on IP, investment, storytelling and new opportunities across gaming and Hollywood. Space is limited. Secure your seat today. ArenaNet today announced the release date for the first new premium DLC for Guild Wars in almost two decades. This DLC, called Afterlife, launches on January 13, 2027 for PC via Steam, iOS and Android. It introduces the land of Xotecha, with the intention to challenge Guild Wars players who may have gotten complacent in the last twenty years. Carol Reed, Shahar Sorek & Bryce Showalter: Proving the ROI of Games | Full GB Insider Conversation This Video Cannot Be Played Afterlife features the following: * A new storyline: Players can assist the Order of the Moonless Night to fight Nightmares while a new cult threatens a dungeon called the Unformed * A new dungeon: The Unformed features jungles, floating ruins and cenotes that change constantly * New rewards: Players collect rewards for each dungeon run that impact their future runs, along with rewards that apply to their gameplay outside of the DLC According to ArenaNet, it created Afterlife in partnership with co-dev studio 2weeks (which, GamesBeat is given to understand, is staffed by several ArenaNet alumni), all while supporting Guild Wars 2 and working on Guild Wars 3. It also continues the work that the studio did to revamp the original game through Guild Wars Reforged. Why ArenaNet is still giving Guild Wars new content. I caught up with Colin Johanson, studio head at ArenaNet, at GamesBeat Next to ask him some questions about the new expansion, and how it came about. According to him, the idea for an expansion to the original game came about while they were working on ways to tie Guild Wars 2 to the third game. "Quietly, in the background, while we were working on Reforged, we also decided to take a chance and see what would happen if we took a chance on something bigger... It takes place in a different location, with new characters and themes, but there are some story pieces that tie back to the stories of 2005-2007 that our Guild Wars fans are going to be really excited about." Johanson also told me the that some of the ideas for Afterlife are from Utopia, an expansion for Guild Wars that was planned and then never made after the team turned its attention to the Eyes of the North expansion. "Utopia sat quietly in the background all these years. Some of the elements and inspirations for Utopia made their way into Guild Wars 2, but many of them didn't, and have been laying in the company's hidden folders." Afterlife is not a one-to-one translation of Utopia, Johanson said. "Afterlife takes inspiration from and draws from some of the things that we wanted to do way back in the day with Utopia, which is an expansion players have been begging for twenty years to find out more about. They're going to experience a little taste of that." I asked Johanson if there was a common language or philosophy tying Afterlife and Guild Wars 3 together, and he said they are both part of ArenaNet's franchise strategy. "We want players to know we're going to continue to support these gams for as long as they want to play them. If you play Guild Wars 3, you're not just getting a commitment for the short term. You can look at the fact that we're still shipping updates to Guild Wars, 21 years later. That's the type of experience you're going to get from ArenaNet."
Composer and designer Lena Raine explains how Pigstep altered Minecraft's approach to music: 'The prompt I keep hearing is "Oh, Pigstep was such a banger that they want more bangers"' Published 6 hours ago The composer for Celeste and Minecraft guides PC Gamer through the games on her PC. Disk Cleanup Welcome to Disk Cleanup, its regular weekend feature delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like "How tidy is your desktop?" and "What game will you never uninstall?" Lena Raine's formative gaming experience was playing Myst on a Mac Quadra 610, exploring Cyan Worlds' enigmatic island in parallel with her father: "We each had our own playthrough, so we were sending each other notes in the little journal that it came with," she says. "I still have the little book that we wrote in." Raine always aspired to be a composer for video games, but she initially joined the industry as a games tester for Nintendo America, working several other testing jobs before being hired by ArenaNet as a game designer. While working on Guild Wars 2, Raine designed a bell-choir minigame for the MMO's Winter's Day Christmas update, including writing the music for it. "It was a bizarre first-step into game music," she says. "But that eventually led to at last some visibility for the other music I was writing." After leaving ArenaNet, Raine wrote the soundtrack for 2018's Celeste, and spent several years composing music for Minecraft, including several of its most popular 'Disc' tracks like Pigstep, Creator, and Otherside. Raine is currently writing music for the early access volleyball RPG Beastieball, while also returning to game design with her own project ANOTHEREAL, an RPG with schmup-style combat. "I have been working on [it] basically since the pandemic," she says. "I'm trying to aim to have something released within the decade." Latest Videos FromPC Gamer Epic CEO Tim Sweeney- 'Valve has held gaming back for years' Raine took a break from her various projects to show me around the digital concert hall of her steam library. PC Gamer discussed Deadlock, sorted her schmup collection, and took a trip down MMO memory lane. What game are you currently playing? The current game that I'm playing is Deadlock. I've been playing it for a while now, basically since it was pretty early in that beta, alpha, whatever phase. I play with my wife and some other friends that PC Gamer has got. I've been having a lot of fun with it. I've never been a MOBA person and I've never been a competitive shooter person either. Usually, I get tremendously frustrated with online competitive shooters because I'm not very good. I'm not great at those sorts of games. But I love the style and the world that Valve has made for Deadlock. I love spooky occult stuff. I just love that entire vibe. A lot of my personal online characters are like demon girl aesthetics, and so I'm just like "This is a game for me". The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Guild Wars 2 sets November 10 beta for new WvW map. ArenaNet announced that the first beta for Guild Wars 2's new World vs. World borderlands map will begin on November 10, with a gray-box version replacing Alpine Borderlands during the test. ArenaNet announced that the first beta test for Guild Wars 2's new World vs. World borderlands map begins on November 10. The test marks the first new WvW borderlands map in over a decade, following the team's initial announcement that the map was in development in June. Gray-box testing for early player feedback. During the first beta, the map will be in a gray-box state, meaning the art and assets will not be final. ArenaNet said this approach makes it easier to make changes. The team noted that with the earlier Desert Borderlands map, it did not show the map to the community until it was mostly final, which limited its flexibility to respond to feedback. This time, the map is being built alongside the players who play WvW, and ArenaNet is involving them much earlier, similar to how it handled the Push PvP game mode. For the first beta there will be no new map mechanics, unlike the Desert Borderlands, which added controllable elemental shrines for special bonuses and an energy cannon event in the oasis. Instead, the first beta will focus on gathering feedback on map and objective layout: how it feels to navigate, where battles occur, and how long it takes to get from place to place. The team can alter map layout and objective placement, which affects travel time and combat flow. Alpine Borderlands replacement and Ascalon setting. During the beta, all Alpine Borderlands will be replaced with the new gray-box map to maximize play time on it. Eventually the new map will permanently replace the current Green Alpine Borderlands, so each borderlands map has a distinct theme. The new map is set during the Searing in Ascalon, one of the most iconic areas of Tyria, and will cover pre-Searing and post-Searing areas with ties to both humans and the charr. The WvW beta arrives as part of ArenaNet's broader Guild Wars plans. After the first beta there will be more beta tests before the map releases to the live game, with changes based on player feedback and potentially new map and objective mechanics. ArenaNet will open a feedback thread on the official forums closer to the beta.
Guild Wars 3 replaces static combos with a new rule: move faster, hit harder. ArenaNet is redesigning traditional online RPG mechanics for Guild Wars 3, tying physical character velocity directly to combat power to create a more dynamic action experience. In an interview with PC Gamer, Guild Wars 3 Game Director Colin Johansen explained that the studio wants to eliminate the rigid "stop-start" movement typical of the MMORPG genre. Track Tech Trends Discover more Solve Word Puzzles Explore Web Games Solve Brainteaser Puzzles "We really wanted to make [movement] front and center from the beginning," Johansen said. "Current MMO systems feel very clunky from that end, like it's very binary - yes, no - and it doesn't feel the way that a natural action game does." To replace those traditional mechanics, ArenaNet developed a core "Momentum System" that allows players to fluidly link traversal skills like wall-running, mantling, dashing, and gliding. Rather than functioning strictly as a travel mechanic, momentum directly alters combat effectiveness. "Everything you're doing in movement, whether it's dashing or wall running or gliding, kind of seamlessly goes into your combat skills and actually pays off," Johansen noted. Under this design, character velocity changes how skills function. For instance, a player who builds up speed by sprinting, wall-running, or diving from a high altitude can unleash a downward melee attack that hits significantly harder and covers a wider area of effect than the same strike delivered from a stationary position. Environmental physics and player synergy also factor into combat encounters. Players can knock opponents off cliffs or kick them into solid walls to inflict extra impact damage. Teammates can also coordinate maneuvers, such as launching off a Warrior's raised shield to vault over an enemy's guard and strike an exposed weak point. To maintain visual clarity for these fast-paced mechanics, ArenaNet is scaling back the size of open-world encounters. Guild Wars 3 will limit large open-world combat scenarios to approximately 20 players to prevent the screen from being overwhelmed by chaotic spell effects. "We're thinking of this as a meaningfully multiplayer game as an MMO," Johansen said. "At large scales, you start to lose a lot of the visual nature of what's happening, and it kind of becomes more spectacle than it is understandable and readable." Download Video Games Discover more Audit Site SEO Download Video Games Play PC Games While high-capacity social spaces like cities will remain intact, capping combat instances ensures players can clearly read enemy actions and execute precisely timed momentum-based strikes.
Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity update 'code of Creation' launches tuesday sept 15. September 10, 2026 New map "Leyspring Hollows" Brings story finale, new Raid, legendary rewards, and more. BELLEVUE, WA - September 8, 2026 - Today ArenaNet announced 'Code of Creation,' the final major update for Guild Wars 2(R): Visions of Eternity(TM), the latest expansion to the critically-acclaimed MMORPG Guild Wars 2. This release serves as the shocking climaxof Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity while also featuring new group challenges, legendary rewards, and more. A new trailer showcasing the new content can be viewed below. 'Code of Creation' completes the story that began at the launch of Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity with players investigating Inquest activity on the mysterious, magic-infused island of Castora. Ancient secrets were unearthed. The island's seneschals were subdued. 'The Only Way' brought players deeper into the island in pursuit of Vloxx, who is exploiting Castora, its magic, and even the Inquest for his own purposes. In 'Code of Creation,' players and allies must stop Vloxx from making an irreversible decision with consequences for all of Tyria, while at the same time keeping the Inquest at bay. The story finale brings players to the new explorable zone of Leyspring Hollows. Within Leyspring Hollows, players will train the Rift Amplification Mastery and earn new rewards, including the new Tenebral Ward armor and Shining Ward weapon set, while attempting to bring the Inquest to heel. Players can also unlock new relics to augment their build. A new season in the Wizard's Vault brings new objectives for players to complete, with a new chair, armor, and weapon skins to obtain. Those seeking legendary rewards can earn the mysterious new Wages of Stars legendary sword and a new Volatile Ascension infusion. 'Code of Creation' also brings a buffet of instanced group content for players to conquer: Nexus of Eternity, a new 10-player Raid Encounter with Challenge and Legendary Modes to be released in the weeks after launch; the new Solitary Throne fractal for up to five players, also with a Challenge Mode in the weeks following; and a new Convergence, Nexus of Eternity, meant for up to 50 players to race against the Clock to save Tyria. Visions of Eternity is available on Steam and through the official Guild Wars 2 site for $24.99. Expansion customers will immediately receive access to the entirety of the expansion includingnext week's release when it goes live. About Guild Wars 2 Guild Wars 2 is a visually stunning online game that offers players the epic grandeur of a massive role-playing environment combined with action combat, large-scale dynamic events that players tackle together, plus both team-based and World vs. World competitive battles. Available on Windows PC, Epic Game Store, and Steam, the game is updated frequently with expansion and free content that chronicles the ongoing story of Tyria and introduces new environments and activities to explore. Yet with all these updates, the game continues the no-subscription-fee business model that made the original Guild Wars so popular. For more details, please visit www.guildwars2.com About ArenaNet ArenaNet is the developer of the groundbreaking Guild Wars 2 and best-selling Guild Wars online role-playing games. The studio's mission is to create innovative online worlds, cultivate a vibrant and engaged global community of players, and to incorporate handcrafted artistry into every aspect of their games. ArenaNet formed in 2000 and it has attracted over 25 million players worldwide, with press and fans consistently calling Guild Wars 2 one of the best MMOs and RPGs of all time. Play Hard Or Don't Play At All!
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Industries
Company Size
201-500
Company Stage
Acquired
Total Funding
N/A
Headquarters
Bellevue, WA
Founded
2000
Find jobs on Simplify and start your career today
We update ArenaNet's jobs every few hours, so check again soon!Browse all jobs