Queensdale
The Long Road South from Divinity's Reach
At eight in the morning, UK time, on Saturday 25 August 2012, a group of players stood together in the rain, at the foot of a very large wall. The head start for the launch of Guild Wars 2 had gone live moments before, and the queue to enter Queensdale was, by all accounts, the most patient traffic jam in the online games of that summer. Characters blinked into existence, stood for a moment to get their bearings, and ran off down the cobbled road to begin their adventures in Tyria. In the distance, a broad valley of pastoral countryside lay waiting to be walked through for the first time, and a village called Shaemoor was under attack by centaurs. Fourteen years later, it still is.
The two Krytas
It is worth being careful about what "Kryta" means, because the game uses the word in two senses and they do not overlap perfectly. The Guild Wars 2 wiki is explicit that the name refers to both a geographical region — the coastal band of land between the Shiverpeak Mountains and the Maguuma Jungle — and the last human kingdom in Tyria, ruled from Divinity's Reach by Queen Jennah. Those two things used to be the same thing. They are no longer.
The Krytan region, in mechanical terms, comprises the five Core Game zones of Queensdale, Kessex Hills, Gendarran Fields, Harathi Hinterlands, and Bloodtide Coast. Later expansions include Southsun Cove (from Living World Season One) and Lake Doric (from Season Three) as regionally Krytan for achievement purposes, and game mechanics count Claw Island and the Chantry of Secrets as Krytan territory as well. A player working through the Krytan Explorer achievement is asked to complete 175 discrete areas across those maps — a substantial slice of the world.
The Krytan kingdom, in political terms, is very much smaller. The wiki’s own description of Queensdale puts it plainly: "It is about half of the modern kingdom of Kryta, and holds the nation's primary farms in Shaemoor Fields and Beetletun Farms as well as the nation's largest forge at the Township of Claypool." That is a considerable claim, but the wiki also gives the reason.
Human influence across the geographical region has diminished considerably during the last century. Lion's Arch is a free city held by the descendants of pirates. Provinces along the Ullen River have been reclaimed by Maguuman wildlife. Sanctum Cay belongs to the tengu now. Much of Harathi Hinterlands and Kessex Hills sits inside the ongoing Centaur War. Bloodtide Coast is Steamspur Mountains pirate country, contested with Krait and worse. What Queen Jennah actually governs, in the sense of collecting taxes and enforcing law with the Seraph, is Divinity's Reach itself and the fields immediately around it. Queensdale and a working relationship with Lion's Arch, Beetletun, and Claypool are roughly the extent of it.
The zone is therefore both a small strip of a wider region and the entire heartland of a reforged nation. Standing in a wheatfield in Shaemoor, a player is standing in Kryta twice over: at the political centre of what remains, and near the southeastern corner of what used to be.
Shaemoor, first light
The village of Shaemoor sits at the southern tip of Queensdale, tucked against the great wall in which Divinity's Reach is built. From the city gates, the road runs out to Shaemoor Fields, described in the wiki as the nation's primary farming region. In practice, they are a handful of terraced strips falling away toward a river, a windmill turning against the ridge, and a scatter of stone farmhouses. The mayor is a woman named Camillia Foss. The inn is the Silver Bell. The stables belong to Karsten Hosstler. Every one of them is named and gets a line of dialogue.
Every new human character arrives here through Defending Shaemoor, the tutorial instance that shipped with the game in August 2012. The opening scene is straightforward. Corporal Beirne and Sergeant Walters direct the newcomer to a barricade. Centaurs from the Tamini and Modniir tribes press an attack across the fields. Captain Logan Thackeray arrives at the wall and marshals the defence. A Modniir High Sage summons an earth elemental in the field beyond the village. The elemental is dealt with. Thackeray thanks the new recruit personally and points them up the long path to Divinity's Reach.
It is a small piece of authored theatre: every human character has done it, and it works because of how it uses the geography. The tutorial does not ask a new player to imagine that the village matters. It shows them a wave of centaurs breaking against a real village with a real mayor and real fields, and it puts the capital directly above the fight, close enough to see. From the first minute, Kryta is a country under siege, and Shaemoor is where the siege has washed up against the wall. It is also where the newcomer chooses which class they will become and what they will do about it.
Fourteen years on, the tutorial has been tuned twice — once during the 2014 New Player Experience revision, and again in smaller ways since — but the shape of the scene is unchanged. Beirne is still shouting. Walters is still shouting. The elemental still comes out of the ground exactly where it always did. The scene has become one of the pieces of set dressing that the game leans on for continuity across expansions, a place a returning player can walk into and know the room.
The country beyond the wall
Above Shaemoor, the road climbs the long rise into Divinity's Reach. Below and outward, Queensdale opens into as pleasant a stretch of country as anywhere in the game. The zone comprises twenty-four named areas, most of them arranged around eighteen renown heart objectives. The topography reads like a piece of southern English pastoral: hedgerow fields, a manor house on a rise, a river valley with a mill, a bridge, an inn, a graveyard, a low ridge of forested hills to the north giving way to the Shiverpeaks. The wiki's line about the "reforged human nation" is not idle: Queensdale is what Kryta looks like after two centuries of retreat, and it looks like an English county in high summer.
The tone of the work here is domestic rather than heroic. The renown hearts ask a new adventurer to help Farmer Diah with skelk in the potato field, to muck out stables for Karsten Hosstler, to defend Shaemoor Garrison for Lieutenant Francis, to clear bandits from an old crypt for the Seraph patrol at Beetletun. The Township of Claypool, at the western end of the zone, is a working forge and a small town: it takes up two hearts in its own right, one for the smith and one for the local militia. Beetletun sits in the middle, with the farms that give it its name and the inn where messengers from the capital pause on the way through to Gendarran Fields. There is a bandit camp in the hills. There is an ogre band in the far northwest. There is a champion boar in the northern woods who used to be part of the Champion Train, of which more below. At the edge of the map is a place called Godslost Swamp, where the ruins are older than the country.
None of this rises to the level of a plot in the way an expansion story does. It is the daily work of a small polity holding its border together. Renown hearts have been out of fashion as a design device for years — expansions since Heart of Thorns have preferred meta-events and adventures — but in Queensdale they read as exactly what they were designed to be: a series of small, honest, necessary jobs that add up to a working nation.
Traces of Kryta before the flood
Underneath all of this, and often literally underneath, sits the older Kryta. It shows up in specific places on the Queensdale map, and it takes a bit of noticing.
The kingdom of Kryta was, by the standard chronology, the third and last human kingdom to be established in Tyria. The earliest founding is attributed to Mazdak the Accursed, a prince of Orr and one of the sons of King Doric, who, around 100 BE, gave up his claim to the Orrian throne and travelled north with pilgrims to establish the first settlements on the coastal land between the Shiverpeaks and the Maguuma. Lion's Arch is said to be one of the towns he founded.
When Mazdak's line failed, Kryta lapsed. In 300 AE, the coastal land was resettled as a colony of Elona and administered from the far south. In 358 AE, some six decades later, the colony broke free and became an independent nation in its own right, the youngest of the three central human kingdoms. Its territory then stretched across the whole geographical region: the coast, the interior, the offshore islands.
The next seven centuries of Krytan history are not on the map in Queensdale, but they hang over it. The First Guild War was fought over the shards of the Bloodstone that Doric's blood had sealed. The Second and Third came in the wake of the first. In 1071 AE, the Cataclysm drowned Orr when Vizier Khilbron read from a Forbidden Scroll and sank the peninsula rather than let the Charr take Arah. The Bay of Sirens became the Sea of Sorrows, and its wreckage still washes up on the northern coast of Bloodtide, six zones and one region north. A year later, in 1072 AE, Ascalonian refugees crossed the Shiverpeaks with Prince Rurik and were granted settlement in Kryta by the White Mantle, the theocratic order that had taken control of the kingdom after King Jadon fled the Charr invasion.
Those Ascalonian refugees are the reason Queensdale looks the way it does. Their descendants are among the farmers and blacksmiths of Beetletun and Claypool. Their children carry Ascalonian family names two hundred and fifty years later. Modern Kryta is a cultural melting pot by design: refugees from Ascalon after the Foefire, Canthans after the Ministry of Purity, Elonians after Palawa Joko, Orrians after the Cataclysm. The Ministry that composes the laws today has a seat for each of the great migrations. That accumulation is a large part of what "reforged nation" is meant to convey.
The White Mantle rule, when it came, was violent. Saul D'Alessio's cult had risen in 1067 AE with genuine popular support and used the Mursaat, the "Unseen Ones", to break the Charr assault. In the years that followed, the Mantle became a theocracy of the more familiar sort: prosperous where it was worshipped, cruel where it was not, and quietly selecting citizens each year for a "special education" that turned out to be ritual sacrifice on the Bloodstone in the Maguuma Jungle. A resistance rose in the jungle — the Shining Blade — and, at the end of a long civil war in 1079 AE, met the Mantle in a decisive battle at Lion's Arch. Confessor Isaiah was killed. All but one of the Mursaat were slain. Queen Salma the Good was restored to the throne. The surviving Mantle went into exile in the Maguuma and did not return for two and a half centuries.
Queen Salma's descendants are the modern royal line. Queen Jennah, who commands the Seraph and holds court in Divinity's Reach, is one of them. The Shining Blade she trusts as her personal guard is the same order, in continuous descent, that fought the Mantle in the jungle a quarter of a millennium ago. The White Mantle who tried to assassinate her in 1325 AE, and who at the end of Living World Season Three took Lake Doric before losing it to a combined force of Seraph, Shining Blade and Pact, are lineal successors of Confessor Dorian.
The three specific places on the Queensdale map where those older strata show through are all worth pausing at. Godslost Swamp, in the southwest, holds a ruined shrine to Melandru and is a spawning ground for Risen washed up from the Sea of Sorrows. The Temple of the Ages, a little west of that, is one of the older active places of worship in the region and is dedicated to all the human gods together. Caudecus's Manor, the mansion of the Beetlestone family, sits on the western edge of the zone as a working country house, and turns out — a couple of expansions later — to have been the seat of the White Mantle's returning leadership all along. A player who visits it in year one, in the course of a heart quest, will visit it again in year five, in armour, to burn it down.
The old Kryta is there in Divinity Dams, too. The dams at the mouth of the Divinity River were built to protect the modern capital from the sea after Orr sank and the coastline shifted; they are the reason the fields of Shaemoor exist as fields rather than salt marsh. Somewhere out beyond them, and beyond the Sea of Sorrows, the drowned peninsula continues to press its dead into Krytan waters, but Queensdale is peaceful for now.
Fourteen years in Queensdale
Queensdale is one of the game's pieces that has changed the least. It was in the head start on 25 August 2012, and it launched officially with the game three days later, on 28 August 2012. It survived the New Player Experience revision in September 2014 with the shape of its map essentially intact — no zones were added, none removed, and the level range stayed 1–15. The tutorial has been re-tuned; the events have been re-costed; the hearts have been softened here and hardened there. The land itself has been left alone.
The one significant piece of design history worth marking is the Champion Train. For a stretch of 2013 and early 2014, Queensdale hosted the most efficient loot-farm in the game. A rotating chain of champion boars, wasps, hobgoblins and troll bosses in the northern part of the zone yielded reliable bags of gold and rare crafting materials, and on any given evening a full server's worth of level-eighty players could be seen running the loop at speed.
New players trying to complete the level-five heart at Beetletun did so through a fog of two hundred elite characters sprinting past on invisible mounts. In May 2014, ArenaNet changed the champion mobs to veterans, retuned the loot tables to spread the reward across other zones, and the train broke up within a week. Queensdale returned, gently, to being a starter zone.
There is a certain melancholy in that story that is worth catching. For a year, the zone was the busiest place in the game. Then a spreadsheet moved, and it was the quietest. A returning player who last logged in during the champion train era will find Beetletun empty of level eighty warriors and full again of Farmer Diah's skelk. That is not a failure of the zone. It is what a starter zone in a fourteen-year-old game does: it goes back to work.
Returning to the fields now
To play a new human character in the summer of 2026 is to walk into Shaemoor just as one has since the summer of 2012. Corporal Beirne shouts. The earth elemental rises. Thackeray thanks the newcomer. Somewhere up the hill, in Divinity's Reach, Queen Jennah is negotiating with the ministers of a fractious court. Down the road, in Kessex Hills, the Hylek are keeping their own council along the Ullen River. West, through Gendarran, a Seraph patrol is scouting bandit country. In Lion’s Arch, a Free City that once flew a Krytan flag, a pirate mayor is convening a council with no monarch at all. What Queen Jennah rules, in a real sense, is the country a new adventurer can see from the wall.
It is a small kingdom — what remains of the last human nation on Tyria after the fall of Orr, the sinking of Elona, the Charr conquest of Ascalon and the century of retreat that followed. Its capital sits above a farming valley whose fields have been ploughed by the same three villages for nearly three hundred years, whose farmsteads are being defended from the same tribes of centaurs they have been defending against for as long as there has been a Kryta.
Fourteen years in, Queensdale has become an anniversary in its own right. It is where a very large number of players first stood in Tyria, and where some still return, on quiet afternoons, to walk out to Godslost Swamp, or across the fields to the mill, or up to the manor for reasons the manor does not yet know about. The zone is not the largest in the game, or the most spectacular, or the one with the highest-value loot; but it is the place that the game keeps coming back to when it wants to remind itself what it is for.
