Guild Wars 3 is a lot smaller scale than Guild Wars 2 because of the new approach to combat and movement: 'You would probably see about 20 players in a large combat scenario'

At Gamescom, I got to see a hands-off demo of Guild Wars 3 and chatted to the developers about what they have in store for us when the MMO hits beta next year. You can read about the significant changes to movement and combat in my Guild Wars 3 preview, but we also discussed how different the upcoming MMO's scale will be when compared to its predecessors.

Guild Wars 3 sits between OG Guild Wars, which was very small scale, and Guild Wars 2, where you could fight a boss with a hundred other players. It still has that multiplayer focus, but compared to Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet has significantly reduced how many people you'll be playing with at once.

"At most, out in the open world, you would probably see about 20 players in a large combat scenario," says game director Colin Johanson. "Our movement systems and our combat systems, in particular, are really high fidelity. They're designed to lend themselves to being able to see e...