Guild Wars Afterlife is the original Guild Wars' first new DLC in nearly 20 years, with a roguelike dungeon on January 13

The original Guild Wars is getting new paid content for the first time in almost two decades. ArenaNet announced Guild Wars Afterlife today, calling it “the first new DLC for the game in almost 20 years” in its official announcement. It launches January 13, 2027 on PC, Steam, the Apple App Store and Google Play. It’s $29.99 at launch, and prepurchase is open now at a discounted $23.99, which also gets you the ancestral-themed Vestments of the Order costume right away. You’ll need Guild Wars Reforged to play it. As Output Lag points out, the last expansion was Eye of the North back in 2007.

Where you’re going

Afterlife sends you to Xotecha, an isle deep in the Mists, to help the Order of the Moonless Night. The Order watches over the Unformed, which ArenaNet describes as a jungle of shared dreams where lost spirits work through the regrets of their lives. Spirits that stay stuck too long turn into Nightmares. Lately the Unformed is flooded with lost souls, one of the Order’s elders is missing, and a group called the Cult of Odran is meddling in the afterlife.

A roguelike run, built on your own characters

This is the big change. You take your existing characters into the Unformed, an ever-changing dungeon where, per the announcement, no two trips are the same. You pick a starting loadout, then face a different lineup of maps, encounters and bosses each run. As you go, a skill-drafting system offers new abilities, and they aren’t limited to your primary and secondary professions. The ArenaNet press release says that can even mean running multiple elite skills from different professions. Finished runs unlock rewards for future runs plus permanent rewards you can use in the rest of the game, and the story unfolds a little more each time. You can run it with friends or with henchmen.

ArenaNet credits its co-dev partner 2weeks, the studio it worked with on Guild Wars Reforged, which brought the 21-year-old game to mobile and added regular content updates and a new dungeon over the past year.

PPR take: I didn’t have “new Guild Wars 1 DLC” on my 2026 bingo card, and I love that it’s happening. Instead of trying to bolt a classic-style campaign onto a 20-year-old game, they went with a roguelike, and that actually fits Guild Wars better than you’d think. The whole joy of that game was theorycrafting skill bars, and drafting skills from any profession mid-run turns that into the main event. Getting to stack elites from different professions is the kind of thing veterans dreamed about. The question is how much there is to do once you’ve seen the dungeon’s tricks, since roguelikes live or die on variety, and we only have the trailer and a feature list right now. At $23.99 to prepurchase, though, it’s an easy thing to keep an eye on.