Guild Wars 2

I’m new on the game and just finished the main story. Bought the season 2 from living world, but couldn’t find the season 1.
I’ve heard there’s some sort of missing lore if I just start the season 2 not knowing what happened on the 1st one.
So I was wondering, is there a simple way to understand what happened on the 1st season, or what i have to know to understand the lore basics for season 2.

A comparison I’ve thought up would be kind of like: the personal story is akin to The Hobbit, Season 1 is akin to Fellowship of the Rings, Season 2 akin to The Two Towers, and HoT akin to Return of the King. So yes, there’d be a bit of a story gap if you go from the personal story to Season 2 leaving you confused on various pieces of information at the beginning of S2.

Unfortunately, when they made the content for Season 1, they never intended for it to be permanent. This was discouraged by the playerbase and said discouragement grew over time as people missed content and began to feel left out and confused, etc. So they made Season 2 permanent. They’ve stated that they intend to (and hopefully will) rework Season 1 to be permanent content and re-introduce it back into the game, however this will not happen before Heart of Thorns’ release sadly.

Best way to understand what happened would be to look up summaries of Season 1. The official wiki has one such summary

Despite common claims, Season 1 wasn’t mostly open world. If you’d rather read dialogues, etc. than read about about the dialogues, etc. I could make up a list of the wiki’s documentation of such. It’s a bit of work so I won’t unless wanted, though it is part of my to-do-list if I ever get around to it.

A crude mock-up of all S1 instances an certain collections of dialogues can be found here, but it’s by no means organized nor complete to our abilities.

Here is a list of youtube videos that I’ve seen suggested, though I have not verified their credibility/completeness.

Hey, and welcome to Tyria! I hope you’ve enjoyed the story and lore so far.

If you want a brief-ish summary of the main storyline of Season 1 (surrounding the main villain Scarlet Briar and her overall scheme) without going through the wiki, I’ve provided it here. I left out some of the subplots from S1 in that summary (mainly the Consortium and Ellen Kiel/Evon Gnashblade stuff), but the Scarlet saga is ultimately what you need to know while going into S2 because S2 continues not long after the events of S1.

Problem with your summary is that you also cut out the Zephyrites which were introduced in Season 1 and are very important to Season 2.

Yes, but the Zephyrites didn’t play that big a part in the Scarlet saga in general and were only tangentially related to the other plot which centered on the Kiel/Gnashblade shenanigans in S1, which is why I left them out. The Zephyrites’ importance is gradually revealed in S2, and OP should be able to understand what’s going on there by playing the related S2 episodes without having to know that much about the Zephyrites’ S1 appearance. I feel the Dry Top map’s NPCs and the S2 episodes involving the Zephyrites give a good enough explanation of the Zephyrites and their beliefs to understand the basic gist, and the story progresses naturally from there.