Guild Wars 3 Rumors Reignite After ArenaNet Job Ad Calls Out MMORPG Experience and Unreal Engine Skills
Guild Wars players have been living in rumor territory for years, but a newly surfaced ArenaNet job posting is adding fresh fuel to the Guild Wars 3 conversation by explicitly listing MMORPG development experience and Unreal Engine as desired qualifications for an unannounced project. The posting is for a Contract Senior Writer and Narrative Designer role based in Bellevue, Washington, and while it does not name the game, the combination of role scope, MMO focus, and engine mention has the community connecting dots once again.
ArenaNet’s listing positions the role inside its Narrative Team and describes responsibilities that go beyond small content drops, spanning IP development, story and character arcs, and narrative implementation across interactive systems such as environmental storytelling, systemic dialogue, and in engine delivery. That scope matters because it aligns with the needs of a next generation online RPG project rather than a typical expansion pipeline update.
The Unreal Engine requirement is the most telling detail, at least from a technology and production strategy angle. ArenaNet has historically relied on proprietary tooling, but this posting openly calls for Unreal Engine experience while also noting the candidate must be able to learn and use proprietary content creation tools. That combination suggests a hybrid approach where the studio may be evolving its toolchain and production framework for a new title, while still retaining internal systems where it makes sense.
The listing is for an unannounced project and is structured as a senior level contract role reporting directly to the Director of Narrative Design. It also reinforces ArenaNet’s scale and community footprint, noting the studio has shared its online worlds with over 21 million players worldwide, which frames why any next step for the franchise would likely be positioned as a major long runway initiative.
ArenaNet also provides concrete employment details that indicate this is an active near term hire, not a speculative talent pool post:
The role is a 6 month contract position.
Applications are accepted until January 30, 2026, by 10:00am PT.
The hourly pay range is listed as 49.05$ to 73.57$.
The qualifications section strongly reinforces the MMO shaped speculation. ArenaNet asks for 5 years of professional writing or copyediting experience, including 2 years developing MMORPGs and open world games, plus experience shipping 1 or more AAA quality products. It also highlights serialized story structure, nonlinear narrative systems, and in engine storytelling approaches, which tend to be critical pillars for modern persistent online worlds. The posting explicitly lists Unreal Engine experience as well.
This does not confirm Guild Wars 3 outright, but it does raise the probability that ArenaNet’s unannounced online project is substantial, and that the studio could be modernizing its production stack to compete in a Western MMORPG market that has seen very few new big budget entrants in recent years. If ArenaNet is building the next Guild Wars on a widely adopted engine with a larger hiring pipeline, that could be a meaningful competitiveness unlock, especially for visuals, tooling scalability, and cross discipline iteration speed.
What would you want Guild Wars 3 to prioritize first, a true next gen world and visuals, deeper MMO systems, or a modernized storytelling and quest structure that still feels distinctly Guild Wars?
