With End of Dragons now live for over a month, Guild Wars 2 players are looking towards the future of the ArenaNet MMORPG. As ever, Guild Wars 2 aims to please, and has already released a roadmap of content and features for the next several months, even going so far as to confirm it is in the very early stages of a fourth expansion. Among the coming content, ArenaNet announced the re-release of Living World Season 1 as a linear story journal entry, allowing the missing chapter of the Elder Dragon saga to be experienced for the first time in almost 9 years.
Game Rant had the chance to speak with Guild Wars 2 advanced game designer Joe Kimmes about Living World Season 1: Scarlet’s War. In the interview, Kimmes spoke on the many challenges Guild Wars 2 faced in transforming the time-locked events of Living World Season 1 into a persistent, linear story. The process took nearly a decade of work across multiple levels of ArenaNet, and Kimmes shines light on how he and the other developers made it happen.
The Challenges with Living World Season 1
When Living World Season 1 first took place in Guild Wars 2 back in 2013, it ran as bi-weekly episodes. Roughly every two weeks, the Living World would change, providing a brand-new chapter that continued to develop as the story progressed. However, with each update, the content from the previous ones was lost forever, meaning players who missed it, or who didn’t play Guild Wars 2 at the time, could never experience it first hand.
Living World Season 1 was also massive in scope. It ran for over a year, with 26 total updates throughout its original run. While each of these updates may not have been as large as a single chapter in later Living World seasons, the revolving door of updates put an abundance of content in front of players at the time. Transforming this massive pile of events into a linear story was no simple endeavor, Kimmes explained, and Guild Wars 2 had to make cuts if it would make a coherent, containable story in the modern era of the MMO.
“There’s a lot of experiences packed into that year of Season 1 — I think we were able to refit the core story into the new episodic version, but it’s always going to be bittersweet to leave pieces on the editing table.“
Obviously, the Guild Wars 2 holiday events, such as Wintersday or the Super Adventure Box, were easy cuts from Scarlet's War, but other story arcs are being culled from the story as well. The Southsun Cove arc is one such casualty, as ArenaNet decided to focus on Scarlet Briar and her schemes first and foremost with the rerun of Living World Season 1. Unfortunately, this means characters introduced in that chapter, like Ellen Kiel and Canach, will have to be introduced elsewhere in the narrative.
Guild Wars 2 Could Rebuild it; It Had the Technology
Later Living World seasons in Guild Wars 2 work differently than the first did. Rather than a small update every two weeks, ArenaNet would instead introduce a long Living World chapter full to the brim with content into the game. The story is presented linearly, and while players can jump ahead, it expects them to complete it in order. Living World Season 1 made no such assumption, nor did it assume players had completed their Personal Story or any previous Season 1 content.
Kimmes used Braham, Norn champion and son of the Guild Wars 2 legend Eir, as an example of how this worked. “Braham had numerous checks throughout the year to see if this was your first time meeting him,” he explained. While reworking Scarlet's War into the story journal, such variables could be removed, and ArenaNet can ensure players have a consistent experience. “We've been able to go with the linear approach — since there’s no risk of previous missions or episodes being shelved again, the player can now meet Braham and introduce themselves just once!” Luckily, these old checkpoints also mean characters whose first introductions were the victims story cuts, like Kiel and Canach, can simply use later intro points.
The new run of Scarlet’s War will use this linear method of storytelling like later Living World seasons, rather than the limited-time events of its original run. This will allow Guild Wars 2 to tell the story exactly as it wants, leaving no players out of the experience simply because they missed it.
Another obstacle Guild Wars 2 had to overcome was how to handle the gradual inclusion of assets used in the original run of Scarlet's War. While newer Living World seasons added new content to the world by introducing new maps, Living World Season 1 updated existing Guild Wars 2 maps with new assets, such as the refugees from Episode 1, Scarlet’s machinery, and later the devastation of Lion’s Arch.
Kimmes explained this particular hurdle would be solved using the phasing technology it has refined over the years, as exemplified with the holo-news announcements of New Kaineng in End of Dragons. Using this technology, one player would be able to see or hear characters or objects others cannot based on their progress in the Living World story. Other events, like the Molten Alliance invasions of the Diessa Plateau, can stay active even after completing the story, representing the cleanup of remnant holdouts of hostile forces. “Where we can, the team is hoping to get the best of both worlds to let players experience the content as close to the original as possible.”
A lot of work went into replicating Living World Season 1, stemming all the way back to the original run of the story. After all, had the original Scarlet's War team not preserved the data after it was taken off the live servers, the project would have been dead well before it began. Kimmes explained the task of reviving the content was an arduous and gradual one, and took effort from just about every level of ArenaNet over the years.
“Living World Season 1 and the question of whether it could return has been a recurring topic at ArenaNet for a long time. There have been a number of advancements over the years that made this possible – the work of developers who chipped away at concerns that it wasn’t feasible and made incremental progress”
It is clear bringing the lost chapter back to Guild Wars 2 was a passion project for its development team. While the idea of the original Living World was a fascinating way to approach the story of an MMO at the time, the narrative-heavy Guild Wars 2 suffered greatly from the exclusivity of such a pivotal chapter in its history later in its life. Restoring this missing piece of the story does nothing but improve the game, and both old and new Guild Wars 2 players won’t have to wait long to live — or relive — the experience of Scarlet’s War.
Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons is available now on PC.