Living World Season 1: the content that did not exist for eight years

For eight years, if you started playing after 2014, the first chapter of this game’s story was something other players talked about and you could not see.

Season 1 ran as temporary bi-weekly releases through 2013 and 2014. Each one happened once. Lion’s Arch was destroyed in front of the people who were logged in that week, and everybody who arrived afterwards got the ruins with no explanation of who had done it or why.

Then ArenaNet went back and rebuilt it. The restoration was announced in March 2022 and the episodes started arriving on 19 April 2022, as playable instances, for content that generated no new revenue.

Every episode is permanently free for all players.

What came back

Five releases:

• Flame and Frost
• Sky Pirates
• Clockwork Chaos
• Tower of Nightmares
• Battle for Lion’s Arch

The Southsun Cove arc did not return with the restoration. It added the only permanent map the original season produced, and that map is still in the game even though its story is not.

What the season is about

It is known as Scarlet’s War, and everything in it circles one antagonist.

Zhaitan is dead, the world is unsettled, and a sylvari named Scarlet Briar starts assembling alliances that make no sense together: pirates, clockwork horrors, nightmare courtiers. The season is the slow realisation that they do make sense, and that the person joining them up rejected the thing every other sylvari is connected to.

It ends with a capital city on fire, and that ending was the single largest event this game had ever run.

Why to play it now

The obvious reason is that it is free and it is the beginning.

The better reason is what it does to everything after it. Season 2 opens on the question of what Scarlet had been doing all along, and answers it in a way that makes Heart of Thorns inevitable. Play in release order and a decade of plot lands as one motion (the full order).

And there is a third reason that has nothing to do with plot.

Studios do not usually rebuild expired content. It costs money, it sells nothing, and the people who missed it made their peace years ago. Somebody at ArenaNet argued for spending a development budget on giving away a story that was already gone, and then they did it.

Play it and you can feel that in the seams. It is the work of people who were unhappy about what had been lost, and there is not much else in this genre like it.