April Fools’ Day
Guild Wars 2 has turned April Fools’ Day into a small, recurring festival of its own: a mix of one‑off jokes, short‑run mini‑events, and, in one case, a full‑blown annual festival that long outgrew its origins. The tone is usually light and slightly self‑mocking, but the best of these events tend to hook into the game’s existing systems rather than just flipping a cosmetic switch for twenty‑four hours.
In 2025, “Cozy Café” stretched the day into a week‑long break from Janthir Wilds’ business, running from 1–8 April. Using a Café Console placed in your homestead, you set up a little café or tavern layout, then open it to waves of customers brought in through a portal, serving them food and unlocking achievements like “Commander’s Cozy Café” for Wizard’s Vault astral acclaim. Professor Smoll was once again the face of the event, sending mail that pointed you to her stall in Lion’s Arch and offering tonics and trinkets, while bonus tabs in the UI let you revisit highlights from past April Fools events like 2024’s Heights of Glory and 2022’s Dog Days.
“Heights of Glory” in 2024 leaned into Guild Wars 2’s running jokes about height sliders and long‑cat glitches. Professor Smoll handed out Fool’s Tall Tonics that temporarily stretched characters into elongated versions of themselves under the “Height‑Eye Enhancement”, then sent players climbing, racing, and perching on chairs around Tyria for achievements. Completing six of these granted the Celestial Invisible Cat Cape, a back item that appears only as glowing footprints and offers Celestial stats, and quickly became a favourite bit of visual nonsense. The achievement text and Smoll’s mail played the whole thing as a protest against tall‑person privilege and a celebration of “properly scaled” heroes.
2023’s “Fashion Wars Too” was effectively a love letter to the game’s fashion scene, with style‑focused challenges in Lion’s Arch and elsewhere that leaned into the unofficial “Fashion Wars 2” nickname. The year before that, “Dog Days” put the spotlight on canine companions: after eating Fool’s Dog Treats from Smoll, players used emotes around Lion’s Arch to trigger dog‑themed achievements, though the long idle timers needed for some of the steps made it one of the more patience‑testing April Fools offerings. In 2020, “The King of All Cats” seeded Lion’s Arch and other hubs with ghostly cats and let players use one‑day tonics to join a feline parade beneath a massive, regal cat looming over the city.
Visual gags were the focus for a few earlier years. “Airplane Mode” in 2015 briefly gave player characters aviator caps, outstretched arms, and a grainy film filter, riffing on a beta‑era bug and dropping a bit of slapstick into otherwise serious Personal Story updates. The 2014 “Bobblehead Laboratory” doubled head sizes for everyone and wrapped it in a fake lore explanation about an asuran experiment gone wrong. Both events were simple to implement but memorable, in part because they played out across the whole game world rather than in sealed‑off instances.
The most important April Fools’ experiment, though, was 2013’s Super Adventure Box. Originally pitched as a one‑day “game within a game” built by Moto in Rata Sum, SAB took players into an 8‑bit platformer complete with lives, baubles, and a princess in need of rescuing. It proved so popular that ArenaNet brought it back as a full festival, now usually running in March–April and accessed via Rata Sum or the Eye of the North, with its own dailies, weeklies, and reward tracks including Hardlight weapon skins. SAB temporarily suspends most external gear and boons, putting everyone on the same footing and turning the usual horizontal progression on its head for a while, which is part of why it still feels fresh each year.
Alongside these headline events, there have been one‑off jokes and side pieces: the fake “Commando” profession reveal, anime‑style Gwen‑chan art and filters, choya‑infested login screens, the Golden Sink decoration, and an April Fools’ vendor in Hooligan’s Route selling leftovers from previous years. Not every gag has landed—bloggers and forum regulars have grumbled about some of the more intrusive visual changes—but taken together they have given Guild Wars 2 a small tradition of seasonal mischief that sits comfortably alongside its more serious festivals. The 2025 decision to consciously revisit and re‑curate older favourites suggests ArenaNet sees that history as something worth building on, rather than just an excuse for a new punchline every spring.
