At Gamescom, I got to see a hands-off demo of Guild Wars 3 and chatted to the developers about what they have in store for us when the MMO hits beta next year. You can read about the significant changes to movement and combat in my Guild Wars 3 preview, but we also discussed how different the upcoming MMO's scale will be when compared to its predecessors.

Guild Wars 3 sits between OG Guild Wars, which was very small scale, and Guild Wars 2, where you could fight a boss with a hundred other players. It still has that multiplayer focus, but compared to Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet has significantly reduced how many people you'll be playing with at once.

"At most, out in the open world, you would probably see about 20 players in a large combat scenario," says game director Colin Johanson. "Our movement systems and our combat systems, in particular, are really high fidelity. They're designed to lend themselves to being able to see everything that's going on, and we felt like that number is where it starts to cap out. You start losing some of the visceral sense of what the gameplay is like."

Johnason adds that, at the high end of player numbers, the action starts to become "more spectacle than it is understandable and readable," and while I love big player numbers, I can't deny that this absolutely happens in Guild Wars 2. It's almost impossible to know what's going on during the massive open-world boss battles because of all the over-the-top effects, and performance tanks for similar reasons.

"This is a game that is about players working together in meaningful ways out in the open world in combat, and we want to make sure that is able to be experienced the way that we intend it to," he says. "So in the open world, you'll see fluctuation—just like other Guild Wars games you'll be playing by yourself, other people come running over the hill, and you play with other people out in the open world."

Guild Wars 3 is more seamless than Guild Wars 2, with fewer loading screens, and Johanson says that we should expect to "constantly" bump into other players. It's also worth noting that cities and towns won't have the same player cap, since there won't be any combat. So the social spaces will be a lot busier.

It'll be easier to play with your pals, too, as ArenaNet won't be building walls around players in the form of servers. Like Guild Wars 2, players will play on instances, which are more like little fences that you can hop over to go out questing with your buds.

Since ArenaNet's approach to sequels is non-traditional, I'm a bit more open to the smaller scale. Guild Wars 2 won't be going anywhere, just as the original Guild Wars is still around and being updated. If I want massive PvE fights, I can just fire up GW2 again.

That said, the party size is going to create some issues in my regular game group. Most of my time in Guild Wars 2 has been spent with four friends, but at the moment ArenaNet is planning to limit Guild Wars 3 parties to four players. One of our crew is going to be left out in the cold.

Aside from the party size, though, I've loved everything I've seen and heard about Guild Wars 3 so far. And it's a rare treat to be excited about a new MMO.