ArenaNet's recent nostalgia post for Guild Wars 3 reveals the studio's 2005 attempt to brand the original game as a 'CORPG'—cooperative online RPG—precisely because it rejected the open-world grind and persistent player density that defined early MMOs. Players instead got instanced missions, henchmen and hero NPCs to fill parties, and social hubs as the only places other adventurers reliably appeared.

Those 'flaws' the devs highlighted—limited spontaneous encounters, heavy emphasis on small-team instanced content, and optional grouping—now read like a checklist for what FF14, modern WoW, and countless live-service titles have normalized two decades later. The branding failed anyway; the game swept MMO-of-the-year awards and the label stuck.

Today ArenaNet leans into the irony while positioning Guild Wars 3 somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, proving the 2005 vision wasn't ahead of its time so much as the genre eventually caught up to it.