Guild Wars 2 living world season one gets another shiny episode re-release

Over the past few months, Arena Net has been re-adding narrative episodes of Living World season one to Guild Wars 2 - the premier collection of limited-time patches that added important new quests, bosses, zones and more to the game. These eventually became permanent additions for all players, but that wasn’t always the case.

Today, we’re getting the third episode of this initial season Titled Clockwork Chaos. As a result, a collection of new rewards and world boss updates are on the way to further enhance the experience found in the game’s base map. Anyone who played in this primordial time for the MMO will likely recall warping from zone to zone, taking on these world bosses to farm rare weapons, materials, and more legendary weapon progress. Shout out to the fellow owners of The Flameseeker’s Prophecies back in the day.

To find out more about these updates, and the thought process behind them, we sent a few questions by the season one living world team lead, Joe Kimmes, to learn why these updates matter. “The further we got from the initial release of season 1 and solidified the episodic, replayable format of the later seasons, the more both the players and developers felt the gap left by season 1.”

Eventually, with the End of Dragons content out and concluding the long winding narrative of Elder Dragons and their impact on the world, an opportunity arose to go back and re-add this missing chunk of content back into the game. “The biggest impetus for bringing back season 1 was the gap it left in the game’s story” Joe elaborates. “Season 1’s narrative is about the world of Tyria showing the fallout of the Pact’s defeat of Zhaitan at the end of the Personal Story. The season ends with a direct lead in to Season 2, and for players who jumped the gap, there was a lot of confusion even with recaps available.”

So it’s a boon aimed for newer players, and of course for those who wish to go back and experience some of the earliest content updates the game received! However, for those of us who went through and beat it in the past, do we get anything special? The answer is no. “Adding a new exclusive reward would put us back in the same situation of having content that was no longer accessible and eventually offering a catch up, so we don’t currently have any plans for original playthrough-exclusive items.”

“That said, I’m sure there will be some bits and pieces that remain effectively exclusive to the original playthrough of season 1. For example, in episode 1 and 2 we’ve streamlined parts of the quest to avoid forcing players to carry key items in their inventory, so anyone still holding on to the original Tassi Box scanner might be able to lord that over their guildmates!”

Each episode is aiming to have an eight week release schedule following the previous episode. However, with increasing complexity to episodes potentially pushing this back somewhat, the overall goal is to have all season one episodes out by the end of 2022.

Have you jumped into Guild Wars 2 to try out these returning episodes? Or are you a years-long player still enveloped in the world? Let us know below, as well as what your thoughts on these returning episodes!