Guild Wars Reforged primer

Guild Wars Reforged is the base game Afterlife attaches to: a 2025 re-release of ArenaNet's 2005 online roleplaying game, sold at $19.99, with the three original campaigns bundled in. If you have not played Guild Wars before, this is the product you actually buy first, because Afterlife's store page says plainly that it requires Reforged to play.

The short version of its history: Prophecies shipped on April 28, 2005, Factions and Nightfall followed, and the game ran for years without a subscription. Reforged arrived on December 3, 2025, built with the studio 2weeks, adding quality-of-life changes, new content updates, a new dungeon and — for the first time in ArenaNet's history — a mobile release.

What $19.99 includes

The Reforged purchase is not a demo or a remaster of one campaign. It bundles all three:

ArenaNet's own site frames it as three parallel campaigns in one purchase, with hundreds of quests, missions and holiday events. There is no subscription fee, which is the line the official site leads with. You buy the box once and play.

For Afterlife specifically, the practical consequence is that your Reforged account already contains the characters, costumes, storage and henchmen the DLC expects you to bring. Afterlife does not create a new character; it sends the ones you have to Xotecha.

What Reforged changed about the original

The 2025 release was not a graphics-only pass. Its store page lists the same modern feature set the DLC inherits: full controller support, adjustable text size, custom volume controls, subtitle options, family sharing, and a Steam Deck Verified rating. The original 2005 client had none of those.

ArenaNet also kept updating it through 2026. The August to October update notes are a useful record of what "live game" means here:

• August 26, 2026 — the Purveyor bonus merchant added to five hubs, with account upgrades including an infinite identification and salvage kit bundle at $9.99 and the Purveyor's Bell at $6.99.
• September 30, 2026 — controller and mobile auto-targeting reworked to favour closer targets, plus a hotfix for a crash tied to switching secondary professions.
• October 22, 2026 — the Guise of the Wayward costume shipped as the first asset from a new art pipeline, with the old 3DS Max pipeline described as non-functional.

That last note explains something players notice: new cosmetics in 2026 look different from 2005 assets because they are being built with different tools.

Three campaign settings come with that purchase: Tyria and Ascalon in Prophecies, Cantha in Factions, and Elona in Nightfall. Each has its own storyline, its own hubs and its own two professions, which is why a Reforged account can feel like three games stacked in one library. Afterlife assumes you have one of those characters somewhere in that stack.

The mobile release

Reforged is the first Guild Wars game ArenaNet has put on phones and tablets. The Google Play listing shows 100K+ downloads, a 3.8-star rating from roughly 3,470 reviews, in-app purchases and ads. Steam login was enabled on mobile in July 2026, which is how existing accounts get in without a second purchase there.

Two consequences for Afterlife. First, the mobile version of the DLC has an app to attach to rather than starting from nothing. Second, mobile and controller play share targeting behaviour, which is why the September and October patches kept adjusting auto-targeting for both at once.

Two things it is not

It is not Guild Wars 2. The two share a universe and a studio, but Reforged is the 2005 game with its own campaigns, its own ten professions and its own combat rules. When ArenaNet announced the Windows 7 and 8 support cutoff for November 18, 2026, it applied to both Reforged and Guild Wars 2 — but they remain separate products with separate store pages.

It is also not a subscription MMO in the modern sense. There is no monthly fee, and the in-app purchases are cosmetic and convenience items — costumes, storage, infinite kits — rather than content gates. Afterlife adds a paid DLC on top of that model, which is the first time the original game has had one in almost twenty years.

Starting from zero, the order is: buy Reforged, play enough to have a character you care about, then decide on Afterlife before January 13, 2027 while the pre-purchase price holds.

The purchase also carries the original campaigns' account-bound rewards: Hall of Monuments progress, titles and cosmetics that have followed Guild Wars players between games for two decades. That is the long tail of a Reforged account, and it is the reason returning players tend to come back to the character they already have rather than starting fresh.

Checked 2026-11-05 against the Reforged Steam store page (app 29720), ArenaNet's Reforged update notes from 2026-08-26 to 2026-10-22, guildwars.com and the Reforged Google Play listing.