Announcing Guild Wars Reforged

Hey 2weeks Fun Club! It has been a while since we've talked; we have some exciting updates.

Guild Wars Reforged

We’re excited to announce our development partnership with ArenaNet: for the last several months, we’ve been helping to build Guild Wars Reforged, releasing December 3rd, an update to the original Guild Wars that enhances the experience on modern PCs, integrates with Steam, and adds controller support, making the game a particularly great experience on Steam Deck.

You can read all about it in the ArenaNet news post and see more about the update at guildwars.com.

Working on Guild Wars has a lot of meaning and nostalgia for our team - Foge and I met while at ArenaNet working on Guild Wars, and formed an instant friendship and creative partnership that has persisted for decades. That’s also where we met Jordan, who we hired straight out of school at ArenaNet, and again many years later as our Principal Engineer at 2weeks.

And, in an era when online games come and go quickly, ArenaNet has done a commendable job maintaining the original Guild Wars, keeping the game up and running smoothly the entire time. ArenaNet has an unmatched level of consistency, dedication, and support for its games.

Guild Wars recently reached its 20th anniversary, which led to a resurgence of interest from new and returning players (and resurfaced some of the challenges playing the game on modern machines). We reached out to ArenaNet around that time, and quickly formed a partnership to help upgrade the experience for returning and new players.

The launch of the Guild Wars Reforged update is an exciting milestone for us, and it’s also a starting point - we’re providing ongoing support, and are about to enter the most exciting development phase for us: getting the game in the hands of players and providing updates based on your feedback.

We hope to see you in Tyria!

2weeks Fun Club

This also marks a shift in our focus at 2weeks - we started life by making experimental web games using custom tech we developed from scratch - charting a path through the modern platform and technology ecosystem.

Along the way, a big thing we learned making games for the web is that you will get players from truly everywhere - people show up from high end gaming PC’s, low-end chromebooks, mobile phones, TV’s, and even smart refrigerators. We learned that even for our experimental prototypes we need to think about supporting all kinds of screens and inputs, and got passionate about designing experiences that are playable by anyone on any device.

That was part of what got us excited about revisiting Guild Wars - adapting a deep online PC RPG that was built for keyboard and mouse to work great on gamepads and Steam Deck is a daunting task, but one we increasingly believed we could pull off. Steam Deck has become our favorite way to play Guild Wars, and we can’t wait to share it with new and returning players.

We think it’s an exciting direction for the studio - not just building new experimental games, but also working with other studios to adapt great games for new players.

This is part of the reason why we’ve been quiet on this newsletter recently - we’ve been working behind the scenes towards this announcement and launch for months. We’ll keep sharing occasional updates via this newsletter when we and our partners have them!

All of our experiments are still up and available at experiments.2weeks.games - Texas Word’em in particular still gets a lot of regular play (and we may sneak in some improvements in the near future).

We’re also moving the newsletter from Ghost to Substack to make it a little easier for us to maintain. If you’re already subscribed, your subscription should automatically transfer. If you’d like to subscribe (or unsubscribe), head to 2weeks.substack.com.

We’re looking forward to sharing more updates soon, both about the projects we’re working on and the exciting technology we’re developing. Thanks for following along!