Guild Wars 2

I heard that the personal story was fixed, so I finally went and finished it, and now I’m not sure what to do.

If it’s important, I don’t want to spoil the story of season 1 for myself, but so many new things were locked behind season 2 content, and Heart of Thorns looks like it’s going to be continuing on from that.

I’m wondering if season 1 is important enough that it’s worth waiting until it’s fixed like I did with the personal story instead of just reading a summary of it and moving on.

With the case of Season 1, it doesn’t necessarily need “fixing” at the moment. It was temporary content that played out for over a year and a half, and as a result, an unfortunately large number of players did not experience its story.

They had added Magister Ela Makkay to give an overview of Season 1 in Lion’s Arch, but of course that will spoil the story for you. However, simply playing through Season 2 will also be pretty spoiler heavy for Season 1.

I think it goes without saying that you will have to bite the bullet and spoil Season 1 for yourself without experiencing it fully, as Heart of Thorns will revolve around a lot that happened in Season 1 and Season 2, and you will be rather clueless at some points I am sure.

Otherwise, Season 1 will likely not return until long after Heart of Thorns drops, as the developers will need to re-work it in order for it to be re-playable with the new GW2 engine (as they did not implement Season 1 with the story journal in mind). So since Heart of Thorns is coming first, I recommend you look into the story of Season 1, as you will most likely be spoiled for it in Season 2 or Heart of Thorns anyway.

Season 1 was notable for its big, epic (and highly enjoyable imo) events and set pieces not for its story (as many will testify) . It set the scene for the characters, introduced a villain (for better or worse) and at the end finally set up the over-arching story. The rest of the year was filled with linking teasers and cliffhangers which really wasn’t anywhere near as good as LS2 as it played out and took an awfully long time to say very little.

The NPC in LA tells you the story you need for LS1. It just wont replace the experience (and there were some fantastic gameplay experiences to be had – Nightmare Tower, Marionette and Battle For LA).

We don’t know if LS1 will ever be re-made in a newly playable form, so I’d advise reading up on S1 and watching the cutscene provided by the Priory in LA

Read up on Season 1. I doubt Arenanet will ever actually make Season 1 replayable like Season 2 is. It would be too much effort for them and they seem to sort of openly admit that they don’t go back and fix old content (look at the PvE dungeons for example, they’ve been completely abandoned).

ArenaNet has stated multiple times – via both Colin Johanson and Bobby Stein – its intent to make S1 permanent content in S2’s format. With them apparently publishing GW2 personally instead of via ncsoft, the likelihood of that has increased IMO.

However, this won’t happen until after HoT is released – and how high of a priority it is… is beyond dubious at the moment.

I do not think that it’d take as much effort as most people tend to think, as there’s a pretty strong mentality that Season 1 was mostly open world which just isn’t true when considering the main plot (most open world content was, in fact, side content/effects of main plot and not the main characters/plot – very similar to the events throughout Dry Top and Silverwastes, for example). But it would still take a lot of effort to turn those 30 story instances triggered by achievements, 2 dungeons, 3 zones, and ~6 event chains into permanent story instances triggered by the story journal. (all other events can actually be put back into the game, more or less, as they originally were with little to no change to the grand scale of things).

All things considered, I’d watch the recap video then read the wiki’s story summary then move onto Season 2, unless you don’t mind waiting another 6-18 months for S1 to be made permanent.