#in which case we're willing to bet that account progress will be transferable

[dualumina]

After having taken 2 years of game design, it is GUARANTEED that IF a GW3 game would be another MMO, it'll be years and YEARS of time before it reaches public hands. Go check out a dozen YouTube videos about failed games by small studios and you'll see why these things take boatloads of time and so much money to get off the ground.

Game series' like pokemon have given off the impression that game development is a fast process. IT. IS. NOT. It is only fast if you are reusing previous assets (which pokemon has done) and even that isn't so simple as dragging a file into unity and calling it a day.

GW2 has a lot of assets that can be reused. This is true. But a lot of the more up to date assets had to be structured to work with old code. It is not a simple process to update something for modern code. Half the process of coding a video game is figuring out why your code isn't working. It's like following a recipe for cake and you end up with burnt flour, and it turns out there was an extra semicolon that screwed the whole thing up.

Think of all the times mild bugs have happened while using any kind of program. Now consider the fact that GW2 is running 24/7, for thousands or more players. Have you ever had to restart your computer because it was acting weird? Yeah you can't do that so easily if there's like 30 thousand people playing your game, and they're also the ones paying for your salary, and all the equipment used to run a program that's used by hundreds of people at a single time.

Now imagine the shear risk it would take to make something like that completely new. It would take hundreds of hours and so much money just to make it usable, and if people decide that this new game isn't cutting it? All that money is gone. Remember what happened to No Man's Sky? It was a disappointment to so many at first, but with time it got updated and people started actually liking it. Each update cost time and money, and it could have ended with the developers declaring bankruptcy if that gamble to make further updates didn't pay off.

You think most companies are going to risk doing something like that? Toss more money into a sinking ship and hope it floats?

No, not unless they have so much money to burn and know they have a good enough game to fall back on if things go horribly. Or someone in the higher ups is in over their heads.

If anything, GW3 could be a single player campaign, or structured similar to other games like Monster Hunter where you can form a party and take down a big monster in a private instance. This is much, much safer than recreating GW2 but with prettier graphics. And given the fact that GW1 is STILL running to this day, it's very clear Anet values preceding games, and better yet they want your progress in previous games to be carried over to newer games.

GW2 isn't getting abandoned anytime soon.

the gw3 concept hasnt even been greenlit yet calm your horses