The Race To Launch
ArenaNet revealed Guild Wars 3 with an atmospheric, embroidered-tapestry trailer — coming to PC & PS5. It fired the starting gun on a new MMO arms race.
The MMO Wars Have Begun Again
For a decade the big-budget themepark MMO felt like a settled genre — World of Warcraft up top, Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2 holding the rest of the room, and not much new daring to step into the ring. That quiet just ended. In the span of a week we got a brand-new Guild Wars sequel announced on the world's biggest summer stage, fresh confirmation that Riot's Runeterra MMO is far enough along to be playtested internally, and renewed noise about Blizzard finally giving the old guard a "Classic+" of their own.
Three of the most recognizable names in the genre are suddenly moving at the same time. That hasn't happened since the mid-2010s. Below we break down what's actually confirmed for each project, what's still rumor, and — the part everyone really wants — when you might realistically get your hands on them.
It kicked off at Summer Game Fest on June 5, where Guild Wars 3 was one of the night's headline reveals.
Guild Wars 3 Is Real, and It Leads With Atmosphere
ArenaNet dropped the Guild Wars 3 announcement trailer during Summer Game Fest on June 5, 2026. No gameplay walkthrough, no release date — just a mood piece. And what a mood piece: the whole thing is rendered as gold thread embroidered onto a rippling red tapestry, with a narrator inviting you to become a guardian of the land of Orr. It racked up north of 850,000 views in its first days.
The trailer never shows a single frame of the actual game — it sells pedigree and tone instead. Here's how it plays out shot to shot:
What the Steam page actually tells us
The trailer is deliberately vague, but the Steam listing fills in the concrete details. Guild Wars 3 is pitched as an "action-adventure MMORPG and a modern evolution of the genre," coming to PC and PlayStation 5. You play a Vaelwarden, a guardian of Orr, protecting its people and the nature spirits that live there.
Two pillars get top billing on the page. The first is combat: "action RPG combat meets Guild Wars build-making," where depth comes from skill use, positioning and movement rather than the old tab-target rotations. The second is traversal — a momentum-based movement system that lets you glide, leap, sprint and ride, carrying your speed between modes of travel. If you've played Guild Wars 2's later expansions, that "free-form joy of movement" line reads like ArenaNet doubling down on what mounts and gliders already made the series known for.
The spec sheet is modest, which is a good sign for a wide launch rather than a niche one:
| OS | Windows 10 64-bit |
|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i5-8400 or AMD Ryzen 5 2600 |
| Memory | 16 GB RAM |
| GPU | RTX 2060 / Radeon RX 5700 / Intel Arc A580 |
| Storage | 65 GB available space |
Full localization (interface, audio and subtitles) is listed for English, French, German, Spanish and Korean, with Simplified Chinese subtitles. The release date is the one thing nobody will commit to: it's flatly listed as "To be announced." For now the only action available is wishlisting on Steam and PlayStation.
Riot's Runeterra MMO Has a Playtest — and a WoW Veteran Steering Combat
Riot's MMO has been the genre's most-watched ghost for years: announced, rebooted, stripped back to the studs after a public direction reset, and otherwise kept behind a very thick curtain. This week that curtain slipped — twice.
First, the hire. Riot has brought on Brian Holinka, a longtime World of Warcraft combat and PvP designer, to help lead combat on the Runeterra MMO. Pulling a name that senior off Blizzard's flagship is exactly the kind of signal that tells you a project is past the whiteboard stage and into the part where someone has to make swinging a sword feel good thousands of times an hour. We covered the move in depth here:
Riot's League of Legends MMO Hires WoW Combat Lead Brian Holinka — and Confirms a Playtest Exists
The full breakdown of the hire, Holinka's WoW pedigree, and why an internal playtest changes the timeline. Read on RuneGrove →
Then came the part Riot almost certainly didn't plan to make public. Shortly after starting, Holinka posted — and quickly deleted — a tweet that let the playtest cat out of the bag:
"Wow, people are REALLY excited about this game! I feel so fortunate to be on it. I promise to do my best to help the team. They are incredibly talented and passionate about bringing Runeterra to life. I watched a playtest last night and it looked like a blast!" — Brian Holinka (@holinka), June 2, 2026 — since deleted
The deletion is the tell. A studio that's comfortable with "we're hiring great people" is a very different thing from a studio comfortable with "we have a build people are playing." That a leadership-level hire watched a playtest "last night" — and that the post got scrubbed — strongly implies there's a real, hands-on internal build of the Runeterra MMO running right now, and that Riot wants to control exactly when the world hears about it. You don't pull a tweet about something that doesn't exist.
Why this matters for the timeline: an internal playtest is the single biggest tea-leaf for an unannounced game. It means there's a vertical slice — combat, traversal, some piece of the world — that's coherent enough to put a controller on. That's still a long way from a trailer, but it moves Riot's MMO out of "concept" and into "in development, and we can prove it." We've factored that directly into our estimates below.
The Third Front: WoW Classic+
You can't talk about an MMO war without the incumbent, and Blizzard isn't standing still either. The long-running community demand for a "Classic+" — a version of vintage World of Warcraft that keeps the old-school design but adds genuinely new content rather than just re-running the original expansions — has been building for years, and the drumbeat has gotten noticeably louder lately.
To be clear about where this one sits: unlike Guild Wars 3 (announced) and Riot's MMO (confirmed in development with a playtest), Classic+ is the most speculative of the three. Blizzard has spent the Classic era carefully testing appetite with things like seasonal and "Season of Discovery"-style experiments, all of which read as groundwork for a more permanent Classic+ offering. Treat it as the heavily-rumored, widely-expected third combatant rather than a sure thing — but if and when it lands, it reshapes the whole board, because it pulls the genre's biggest existing audience back to the table.
The strategic picture writes itself: ArenaNet is courting the lapsed and the curious with a fresh sequel, Riot is building for the League audience that has never had a way to live in Runeterra, and Blizzard is defending its enormous nostalgia base. Everyone is fishing in overlapping ponds.
So When Do We Actually Play Them?
Here's the honest version: none of these three has a release date, and anyone who gives you a firm one is guessing. What we can do is read the development stage each project is at and translate that into a realistic window. MMOs are notoriously long-tail — Guild Wars 2 ran roughly two years from reveal to launch, and Riot's MMO has already been in some form of development for years. Below is our read, clearly labeled as estimates.
When does each get a trailer and an official announcement?
- Guild Wars 3 already has its announcement trailer. The next beat is a gameplay reveal — expect that within roughly a year, with a fuller showing and beta sign-ups likely through 2027 before any 2028 launch.
- Riot's MMO is the inverse: it has a build but no public face. Because it's already at the playtest stage, a first proper reveal (probably a cinematic plus a sliver of combat) feels plausible in 2027, with Riot historically preferring to show things only once they're genuinely close. Don't expect a playable beta before 2028–2029, or a launch before the back half of the decade.
- WoW Classic+ is the wildcard. If Blizzard formalizes it, expect the announcement at one of their big yearly moments and a comparatively fast turnaround — Classic content reuses an enormous existing foundation, so it could ship within a year of being confirmed.
The takeaway: the next 18 months are about reveals, not releases. Guild Wars 3 will flesh out, Riot will likely break its silence on the back of that playtest, and Blizzard will decide whether to make Classic+ official. The actual launches stack up later — GW3 first, then a likely multi-year wait for Riot's Runeterra MMO. Classic+, if it happens, could leapfrog them both to market precisely because it's building on what already exists.
Tracking Runeterra's Road to an MMO
If you're here because you care most about Riot's corner of this — the chance to finally walk Runeterra rather than just play on top of it — the lore groundwork is already laid across years of champion releases, regions and events. A playtest existing means the world you've been reading about is being turned into a place you can stand in.
Follow the Runeterra Timeline
We keep a living timeline of Runeterra's canon — every major event, region and era, updated regularly as Riot expands the world. It's the best place to ground yourself in the lore the MMO will draw from, including how recent developments (like this week's playtest reveal) fit into the bigger picture.
Explore the Universe Timeline →Sources: ArenaNet / Guild Wars 3 announcement trailer and Steam listing; Brian Holinka's (since-deleted) post on X, June 2, 2026; and RuneGrove's reporting on the Holinka hire. Release windows are RuneGrove estimates, not official dates.
