Guild Wars 2 Closes Its Castora Saga as ArenaNet Turns to Guild Wars 3

For fourteen years, Guild Wars 2 has been ArenaNet's whole world. That is about to change.

On 15 September 2026, ArenaNet released Code of Creation, the final content update for Visions of Eternity, Guild Wars 2's sixth expansion. The studio has said it is the last major story update "for now," because the team is putting its full focus on Guild Wars 3, which was announced on 5 June 2026 for PC (Steam) and PlayStation 5 with a first beta planned for autumn 2027.

How Visions of Eternity ended

Visions of Eternity launched on 28 October 2025 and sent players somewhere new: Castora, a magic-soaked island that shelters castaways and the Inquest's experiments. Game director Josh Davis called it "the first time Guild Wars 2 is going to a location in Tyria that's truly brand new to all players." The expansion added new elite specializations for all nine professions, the Skimmer mastery line, a shipwreck homestead and 10-player raids that arrived in later updates.

Code of Creation closes that story over six chapters. It opens the Leyline Sink region with a new meta event, and adds a fractal, a raid and a convergence. There is a new mastery, Rift Enhancement, a new legendary sword, Wages of Stars, and updates to the Wizard's Vault rewards track.

What Guild Wars 2 still gets

ArenaNet has been clear that Guild Wars 2 is not being abandoned, even if the "new zone, new story" rhythm is paused. Announced plans for the coming months include:

• An update to the Hall of Monuments that links Guild Wars 2 accounts to Guild Wars 3.
• A new World vs. World map.
• A new area in Orr, the region where Guild Wars 3 is set.
• Polish for older content.

The studio has also said it is "committing to actively developing all three games at the same time": Guild Wars 2, Guild Wars 3 and Guild Wars Reforged, the 2025 relaunch of the original game, which reached mobile devices in 2026.

Guild Wars 3: what we know

Guild Wars 3 is ArenaNet's first brand-new game announcement in almost two decades and the first Guild Wars game on home consoles. Here is what the studio has confirmed:

• Setting: more than a thousand years before the original Guild Wars, in Orr, then a wild frontier full of magic.
• Your role: players are Vaelwarden, a guild sworn to protect Orr's nature spirits, called Vael spirits, as other guilds argue over whether to protect or exploit the land.
• Your companion: every player gets a Seeker, a spirit that links them to the land and doubles as a mount.
• Combat: built to work equally well on controller and keyboard, rewarding positioning and movement, with speed that converts into damage.
• Business model: sold directly through GuildWars3.com, with wishlists on Steam and the PlayStation Store. Pricing has not been announced.

Studio head and game director Colin Johanson called it "a new era not just for ArenaNet and Guild Wars, but also for MMORPGs as a whole."

The Korean connection

ArenaNet is a wholly owned subsidiary of NC (NCSOFT), the Korean company behind Lineage and AION 2. That makes Guild Wars 3 one of the biggest Western-made MMOs a Korean publisher has in development, and a test of whether NC's global strategy can work beyond its own Korean franchises.

Why it matters

Western MMO development has been shrinking fast. Amazon has stepped back from MMO publishing (our report), New World is heading offline (our report) and Ashes of Creation's studio collapsed (our report). A big, funded sequel from a studio with a proven live game is exactly what the genre needs.

The risk is the gap. With story content on hold and a beta still a year away, Guild Wars 2 players face a long quiet stretch. How well ArenaNet fills it with the WvW map, the Orr zone and the Hall of Monuments will shape how many of them are still around when Guild Wars 3 opens its doors.

What to play now: Guild Wars 2 is free to start on Steam and the official site, and there has rarely been a better time to catch up on the full Castora story before the series moves on.