Friends on April 19th the first part of Living World Season 1 dropped called Flame and Frost. I was so exceptionally excited to be able to experience this, and for me at least it did not disappoint. Some weeks back I covered what I considered to be the biggest challenges facing someone trying to get into Guild Wars 2, and the one that I highlighted as being the biggest was the huge hole in the story. The personal story of the core game is essentially one of saying goodbye to Destiny’s Edge and the rising if your own legend. By the time Living World Season 2 comes along you have an entire cast of characters that have been caught up in your wake and are given no introduction to them. This felt exceptionally jarring as I needed to understand where all of these people suddenly came from, and the answer is… Living World Season 1 was that introduction. In fact it seems to almost entirely be built around giving us the backstories of this new cast of companions that would ultimately be known as Dragon’s Watch.
What Living World Season 1 Episode 1 offers is about two or three hours worth of gameplay in total if you are pushing through it quickly. There were I believe four combat focused story instances, a few of them being rather lengthy. This is then combined with a good deal of story asides like this scene in Rytlock’s office. Then there is of course what I understand to be the original vehicle for a lot of the interaction… a series of email messages sent to the player that trigger progression in the story. I am not sure how much this version differs from the original version, but I feel like the team has done a pretty good job of taking what was ultimately a temporary event and packaging it up in the Living World format we are used to. For a moment however… can we just stop and marvel at how wide eyed and young Rox looks in this model? I knew the characters aged and changed over time, but going back like this it is staggering how many subtle changes have been made along the way. Rox has always been one of my favorite characters and I’ve loved every moment of her interactions during this story so far.
I’m also please as can be at just how many players are out in the world doing this content, or were doing this when the servers came back up on Tuesday. I popped in over lunch and did part of it, and then finished things up that evening. There is a tangible excitement in the community right now and it is infectious. Good things are happening and Arena Net has been nailing the communications with their new series of blog posts. Having a regular channel of information to the players is extremely important, the Destiny 2 community would not be nearly as cohesive as it is without the “TWAB” or “This Week at Bungie” a series of blog posts that come out on Thursdays. Seeing meaningful updates and forward momentum every few weeks is exceptionally important and I have to say I am enjoying watching this sleeping giant waking up. The faltering of World of Warcraft has caused a chain of events that I am not sure can really be stopped. So many players got disillusioned and branched out to explore the other games that were available in the genre… and it feels like ALL communities benefited by this not just Final Fantasy XIV.
We will have to wait until May 24th before we get to experience Episode 2, but given how fast time moves right now… that will be here before we know it. I have never played through content in Guild Wars 2 more than once on a single character, but I am honestly contemplating playing through LW1E1 again just to soak it in a little more deeply. I have to say the battles were extremely fun and I have some deep feelings about characters and their origins that I never had before. For years I have never quite understood why Braham as much of a dick as he ended up being at times. Now I know without a doubt that he had good reason and honestly it is probably a miracle that he is as functional as he is currently. It also is doing nothing to improve my opinions of Destiny’s Edge so far, but they were kind of awful to begin with.
If you never got to experience Living World Season 1, and also always struggled to get engaged with the story and characters of the game… then I highly suggest you check this out. It is providing the context behind actions that I really needed. It is providing a patch for the gaping hole in the story that the game desperately needed. This is a good call on the part of Arena Net and I am hoping that when we finally reach the end of this sequence that we get a glorious launch of Guild Wars 2 on Steam to christen the arrival at the end. If my math is correct we will be getting the final piece of the season around the time of the 10th anniversary of the game. I really think that would be the ideal time to welcome brand new players from Steam. Having a clear story progression is key, because your average player is not going to crawl through the wiki to try and piece together the details.
I am so freaking engaged right now, and seemingly picked the ideal time to get back into this game. I am still slowly catching up with Living World Season 5 and looking forward to starting Cantha with a clean conscience. I however was more than happy to take a quick break to get those missing bits of story. What are your thoughts about Living World Season 1 if you are playing through it? Did you also feel it was a rousing success, or did you find issues with it? Drop me a line below.
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