Guild Wars 3 will have 'significantly less' UI on the HUD, ArenaNet says

Johanson showed an early build of the game and its HUD at Gamescom. He said the HUD is subject to change throughout development and that the team intends to have significantly less UI overall. In other MMOs such as World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy 14, the main HUD is typically filled with quest lists, buffs and debuffs, action bars and other elements players choose to add. For Guild Wars 3, ArenaNet will tone down those elements for a cleaner HUD, which Johanson said will better showcase combat and the game's open world. He also noted that console users would not be able to hover over UI features.

"I think one of the things that you traditionally see in MMOs is there's a huge number of icons all over the screen that are used to communicate combat status and things that are going on," Johanson said. "And we very intentionally designed this, one, because it's also on console and it's a lean-back experience where you can't hover over icons to read everything, to provide an experience that doesn't require having a massive amount of information in the UI. But two, we also think that's just a better combat experience if we can show more of the things happening in the world."

Johanson added that during battle, conditions traditionally communicated through the UI, such as cold attacks, will not appear as stacked debuffs on the HUD. Players will see the effect instead. He described a multiplayer combo system in which most professions can have cold in their builds. If players stack cold on an enemy, the enemy's animations slowly start to slow down and cold starts to spread across them. If enough cold is stacked, depending on the enemy's size, it will freeze into a solid block of ice. Johanson said all of this happens in the world rather than through a small UI icon at the bottom of the screen that says frozen or not.

He said testing has shown people's eyes watching the actual combat on screen instead of staring at the UI the whole time, which he called a much better experience. Johanson also said the constraint of the controller encouraged ArenaNet to create a version of combat that is still a better experience on mouse and keyboard as well. He said a lot of things will not be on the UI because they do not need to be used.

Guild Wars 3 is in active development, with a beta period scheduled for Fall 2027.