Guild Wars 3 Steals the Night, but Scars Fans Keep One Eye on NDA Testi… — June 5, 2026

Some days in MMO chat, everybody is waiting for one game and ends up talking about five. That was the mood here: a room full of Scars of Honor players asking the eternal question — when’s the next playtest? — only to get sideswiped by a shiny Guild Wars 3 reveal and a fresh round of genre-wide yearning.

That mix of impatience and opportunism says a lot about where MMO players are in 2026. People want Scars of Honor to move, they want the next test to matter, and they absolutely want open-world PvP to mean something again. But they’re also keeping backup plans, side flings, and old war stories ready at all times, because nobody in this genre has learned to trust a roadmap on vibes alone.

The Next Scars Test Is a Mystery, and That’s Becoming the Story

The most repeated question in chat was also the simplest: when is the next playtest or launch date? The answer, frustratingly, hasn’t changed. Nobody had a date, and the only concrete point players could lean on was the idea floated during the last dev stream that future testing may become closed and subject to NDA.

That possibility split the room in a pretty familiar way. One side sees NDA testing as the sensible next step. If the game has already shown it can pull strong public interest, then tighter, more focused testing sounds like grown-up development: less noise, more iteration, fewer half-finished systems getting torn apart in public before they’ve had a chance to settle.

The pushback was immediate, though, and it wasn’t hard to understand. One player argued that some of the game’s more hardcore communities could drift off if Scars of Honor disappears behind closed doors while another MMO offers a more continuous public test or simply launches first. That’s the modern MMO trap in one sentence: private testing may be better for the game, but public visibility is what keeps a community warm.

There was even a joking suggestion that the server should just standardize a canned answer for all the playtest-date questions — something along the lines of “30th February.” It’s funny because it’s cruel, and it’s cruel because everyone in MMO spaces has lived through this exact loop before.

Underneath the jokes, though, there’s a real tension. Players don’t just want access; they want momentum. An NDA can protect a game from premature judgment, but it can also make a project feel like it’s standing still, especially in a genre where “still cooking” has become a decade-long lifestyle.

PvP Players Are Still Chasing a Home

If there was one recurring desire tying the whole conversation together, it was open-world PvP. Multiple players made it plain: there still isn’t much to play in that space right now, and that scarcity is shaping how they look at Scars of Honor.

More than one person said outright that they’re hoping for PvP servers in Scars of Honor, with a couple of stopgap games mentioned as temporary distractions rather than true destinations. That’s an important distinction. These aren’t players who found their next forever game and are just casually checking in on Scars. They’re waiting in the lobby, killing time, and hoping Scars eventually opens the right door.

That also explains why the chat kept circling back to what kind of PvP actually matters. Not instanced, opt-in, neatly packaged conflict — world conflict. Messy, persistent, inconvenient, social. The kind that creates grudges, local legends, and server identity.

You could see that nostalgia flare up later in the WoW talk, but it was already present here. For this crowd, PvP isn’t just a feature bullet. It’s a filter. If an MMO doesn’t support that style of play, some players are already halfway out the door.

Camelot Unchained Sounds Like a Warning Label

The longest side discussion of the night belonged to Camelot Unchained, and it was less a recommendation than a field report from the trenches. The broad consensus was that the game has some enjoyable fighting and maybe even decent bones for Realm-vs-Realm combat, but it still feels painfully unfinished in the ways that matter.

One player’s summary was brutal and effective: it doesn’t yet resemble a game with real loops. The complaint wasn’t just about polish. It was about purpose. Why do the RvR if there’s no meaningful reward structure behind it? Why invest in conflict if the game doesn’t yet give that conflict weight?

That criticism kept branching into specifics. Combat was described as rough, with some players saying you get one-shot, two-shot, or effectively disabled for entire fights. Others were a little more charitable, saying that while the game is far from balanced, its fights at least look like they have the beginnings of something enjoyable, even for players on the losing end.

Crafting and progression took hits too. One player complained that making a level 11 cloth shirt required an absurd amount of materials — thousands of candleberries, gathered two at a time from sparse low-tier nodes. That’s the kind of detail that tells you somebody didn’t just bounce off the game philosophically; they suffered through its economy personally.

There was also the usual MMO postmortem math. A modest budget spread over 13 years. Engine changes. Resets. The sense that development time has been burned without enough visible payoff. Even the more sympathetic voices sounded tired. Yes, maybe the movement and gathering feel better than in some other struggling projects. Yes, maybe there’s still a path forward. But nobody in this chat was mistaking that for a success story.

And that’s why the Camelot Unchained talk mattered in a Scars of Honor channel. It wasn’t random doomposting. It was comparison by cautionary tale. Players are looking at every delayed MMO now through the same lens: is this slow because it’s being careful, or slow because it’s lost?

A Pretty New Game Isn’t Enough Anymore

Another brief detour landed on Seekers of the Ancient, which got some attention for its visuals. Players thought it looked vivid, polished, and in at least one case, close enough in style to invite comparisons with Scars of Honor.

But the compliments came with a fast reality check. The room didn’t really buy it as an MMO. The read was more co-op RPG, maybe with multiplayer and PvP elements, but not something that scratches the same itch. One player called the MMO tag marketing more than identity, and nobody really rushed in to defend it.

That little exchange captured a bigger mood in the genre. MMO players are so starved for new blood that almost anything with a shared world and a login screen gets shoved under the same label. But this crowd, at least, isn’t falling for that automatically. Nice graphics are nice. A “beefier” look helps. But if the game doesn’t offer the scale, persistence, and social friction people actually want, then it’s just another attractive almost-fit.

There was even a wistful note in there: someone said they’d love to see visual quality like that in Scars of Honor. Fair enough. But the immediate follow-up was basically, we’re here for MMOs, not co-op games anyway. That’s the line. Pretty can get your attention; it can’t fake the genre.

Then Guild Wars 3 Walked In and Changed the Temperature

For a while, the chat was half-distracted by a game show stream and speculation about what ArenaNet might reveal. There were jokes, wild guesses, and the usual event-stream chaos, complete with massive viewer counts and chat spam for everything from Destiny 3 to GTA 7. Then the reveal landed: Guild Wars 3.

That instantly became the room’s gravitational center.

The reaction wasn’t just “oh neat, another MMO.” It was bigger than that. Players framed it as one of the genre’s heavy hitters making a real move again — the kind of announcement that matters because Guild Wars is an established name with actual trust behind it. One player went as far as saying it’s on the level of FFXIV announcing a brand-new MMO, which is maybe a little dramatic, but not by much. The point stands: this wasn’t some Kickstarter dream with a logo and a mood board. This was one of the old guard stepping back onto the field.

Naturally, the rollout immediately did MMO reveal things. The website didn’t cooperate, people hit a 403 error, and the room got a laugh out of the classic showcase promise of “it’s live right now” colliding with reality. One player called out that false-hype routine directly, while another shrugged that the site had probably just crashed under the traffic. Hype does that, as someone noted, tying it back to Scars of Honor and its own wishlist surge.

There was some skepticism mixed in with the excitement. One person dismissed the whole thing as nostalgia baiting. Another looked at the movement system and saw shades of Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis. Someone else immediately clocked run trails as the sort of cosmetic feature publishers love because you can absolutely sell them.

Still, the prevailing mood was positive. Beta timing — reportedly not until Q3 2027 — gave people a useful reality check. Exciting? Yes. Imminent? Not remotely. That led to a funny little overlap with Scars of Honor, as players joked that GW3 might still arrive around the same time as Scars anyway.

And that’s the thing: Guild Wars 3 didn’t kill the conversation around Scars of Honor. It sharpened it. A major MMO announcement reminds everyone what confidence looks like, what scale looks like, what genre momentum looks like. It raises the bar emotionally, even if the actual game is still years away.

WoW Nostalgia Keeps Winning the PvP Argument

Late in the chat, World of Warcraft came roaring back in the way it always does: as both comfort food and cautionary tale. There was some talk about WoW Classic Mists of Pandaria and the arrival of Siege of Orgrimmar, plus the usual grim amusement about token economics and how much gold gets vacuumed up by raid prep.

But the more interesting thread was the split between affection for old WoW and contempt for retail. One player put it bluntly: they love WoW, but hate retail. Another said modern WoW feels so far from its roots that they can’t imagine playing it now.

The real spark, though, came from open-world PvP memories. Southshore got name-dropped like a sacred battlefield. One player reminisced about server-crushing wars so dense you couldn’t even read character names. Another came from Anarchy Online and talked about arriving in WoW already wired for hardcore PvP and min-maxing. Someone else mentioned Star Wars Galaxies. In a few lines, the chat turned into a veterans’ hall of fame for people who still measure MMOs by the chaos they used to create.

And then came the grievance: Blizzard moving players toward battlegrounds and away from that spontaneous world conflict. Another player took a shot at opt-in world PvP design in general, calling it garbage and lamenting the loss of always-on PvP servers.

That matters because it loops directly back to Scars of Honor. When players say they want PvP servers, this is the emotional archive they’re pulling from. They’re not asking for a toggle. They’re asking for a world that can still surprise them, inconvenience them, and occasionally ruin their evening in a way they’ll remember for 20 years.

What This Crowd Really Wants

The chat bounced all over the genre, but the throughline was surprisingly clean. Players want Scars of Honor to pick a lane and move with conviction. If that means NDA testing, fine — but make it count. If that means public momentum, then give people something firmer than a shrug and a maybe.

More broadly, this was a room full of MMO players starving for a game that understands why they fell in love with the genre in the first place. Not just progression treadmills or pretty zones, but stakes, friction, identity, and worlds that feel alive because other players can actually disrupt them. Guild Wars 3 brought a jolt of hope. The old WoW stories brought the ache. And Scars of Honor, whether it likes it or not, is sitting right in the middle of that expectation gap.

That’s the challenge now. MMO players will wait a long time for the right game. What they won’t do forever is wait politely.