Guild Wars 3 details its playable Humans and their role in Orr

ArenaNet has published a deep dive on the Humans of Guild Wars 3, filling in the lore behind one of the species players will be able to choose at launch. MassivelyOP reported that the studio confirmed last week that at least four species will be playable at release, with the infrastructure to add more later — a departure from the way Guild Wars 2 handled its races.

Three of the four are known. Humans and Asura return from earlier games, and the Kodan join them. The fourth has not been announced.

Humanity before its great fall

ArenaNet's Danny Barnes writes that Humans in this period are not the remnants of failed kingdoms familiar from later games but relative newcomers to the world, arriving through the interventions of the gods. Over the preceding 700 years they have spread to Cantha, Elona, Ascalon, the Crystal Sea — confirming that both the Crystal Sea and the Margonites feature — and to Orr itself.

Barnes describes Orr as raw and unfinished, a region still building the history that leads to its collapse more than a thousand years later, and one that sits under the watch of the gods from their high city of Arah.

Playing a Vaelwarden

Playable Humans are Vaelwardens stationed in Orr, an order sworn to protect the magic of the Vael spirits who live there rather than to exploit it. Barnes frames taking that oath as a break from the simplest story a rising people might tell about a frontier — that it is waiting to be tamed — and as a recognition that the world their ancestors crossed the Mists to reach already holds lives, rules and wonders of its own.

MassivelyOP notes the tension running underneath the pitch: series players already know how the story of Orr ends.