“The Game Can Render At Over 400 FPS”: 20 Years On, Guild Wars Is Better Than Ever

20 years after its initial release, Guild Wars is about to receive a new edition. The shiny new offering compounds all the content from the original Guild Wars into a single package, as well as adding Steam Deck control compatibility and some other surprises for players.

Ahead of the launch, I had a chat with Stephen Clarke-Wilson, one of the developers who has been working at ArenaNet for almost its entire history - although he’s keen to let me know that there are others who have been there longer than him. Since April 2024, Clarke-Wilson has been working “almost full-time” on Guild Wars Anniversary, although he has been responsible for keeping the game ticking for much longer than that.

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A Long Road

While this is a celebration of the game’s longevity, it wouldn’t have ever reached this point without the work of Clarke-Wilson and the wider ArenaNet team keeping this part of MMORPG history alive. “I have the same excitement about the engineering quality of the game that I had when I first joined. Of course, we have some technical debt … but not that much for a 20-year-old game,” Clarke-Wilson tells me.

Even years on, there’s still an active Guild Wars community that regularly partakes in PvP - one of the highlights of Guild Wars, although the last time I played I was only 11 and things are a little foggy. I used to watch my dad play Guild Wars on the family PC, and I’m already thinking about grabbing the new edition to revisit some of these distant memories. It’s quite incredible that there’s still an active community, but it’s made possible by developers like Clarke-Wilson and others at ArenaNet making sure the lights stay on.

Much like my hairline, a lot has changed since the game was first released back in 2005. “When I first worked on the original Guild Wars, I connected from home over a 56K modem - which worked!” Clarke-Wilson says. “Over the next few years my connection went up to 100 mbits which was sweet! At that bandwidth (shoot, even at 1 mbit) several people in the same home could play together online. And away from homes the world wide internet was growing. Guild Wars was designed so you could play anywhere in the world.” There’s a reason why many refer to the era of the original Guild Wars as the golden-era of MMORPGs: it was one of the first to run without a monthly fee, and was able to utilize new technology like CD-Roms and the internet to bring deeper storytelling and RPG elements to online gaming.

“Guild Wars was designed so you could play anywhere in the world.”

But the journey hasn’t always been straightforward for the team keeping Guild Wars alive. Clarke-Wilson explains some of the biggest problems they’ve encountered while tinkering with the original Guild Wars code. “Most of the tech debt we run into is a result of the world changing around us rather than problems in the code. There were some knotty latency bugs we’ve fixed but, to be fair to the original programmers, these were quite tricky to find, and we’ve had the luxury of time on our side in terms of our ability to add code to analyse performance. One of the problems we have now is that the game can render at well over 400 fps on modern graphics cards! This turns out to be starving some of the network code. This is the kind of problem nobody was planning for in 2005.”

Despite these challenges, Guild Wars continues to draw in players - both new and old alike. “It seems that when players return they sometimes bring their friends along with them as new players,” Clarke-Wilson says. Much of this is because of the ongoing work on the game, but also because of the nature of MMOs themselves. “Players are ‘sticky’ - players like playing the game they know,” the developer tells me when I ask about the state of modern MMOs in comparison to a game like the original Guild Wars. “The large number of already ‘sticky’ games in the market makes releasing a new entry difficult.”

This is a good explanation as to why some consider the modern era to be a bit of a drought of modern, successful MMOs, while everyone seems to be returning to the old classics like World Of Warcraft, and, it appears, the original Guild Wars. But, best of all for Clarke-Wilson and the team, supporting a game for 20 years buys you some real good kudos with the players. I’ll be revisiting Ascalon in the next few weeks, and I hope to see you there.

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