The Battle for Lion’s Arch
For a long time, Scarlet Briar’s campaign in Guild Wars 2’s original Living World Season 1 existed mostly as a set of memories, recap cutscenes, and old forum posts. In 2022 ArenaNet finally brought that stretch of story back in a permanent form, remastering Season 1 so that both returning and new players could see Scarlet’s arc play out in the game again. The updated season follows the same broad line from early skirmishes and experiments through to the destruction of Lion’s Arch, keeping her path from Ascalon’s unrest to Aetherblade airships intact while re‑framing it as a more coherent, replayable story.
The re‑release also benefits from the quieter improvements that have come to Tyria since those first episodes. Zones like Brisban Wildlands and the Molten Facility feel closer to the rest of the modern game now, with sharper textures, more confident lighting, and small bits of extra environmental detail filling out spaces that used to feel fairly bare. Voice work and cutscenes sit more smoothly alongside later seasons, letting characters such as Logan Thackeray, Marjory, Kasmeer, and Captain Magnus carry more emotional weight as the situation escalates. None of this changes what happens, but it does change how it lands.
On the mechanical side, the remaster streamlines and modernises some of the rougher edges of the old design. Story steps that once relied on time‑limited open‑world events now sit inside clearer instances or more structured metas, with objectives and rewards laid out in a way that feels familiar if you have played later Living World releases. Several encounters scale better to smaller groups or even solo players, making it possible to follow the whole thread without needing to arrange large crowds at specific times. The aim is not to make things trivial, but to bring them up to the standard that has quietly evolved over a decade.
Bringing Season 1 back fills in what had become a noticeable gap in the narrative. For years, new players were asked to accept that Lion’s Arch had been shattered and rebuilt, and that characters like Scarlet, Rox, Braham, Marjory and Taimi had a shared history, without ever seeing that history unfold. The remaster restores context: you watch Scarlet’s experiments, hear her logs, trace the first hints of Mordremoth’s stirring, and see how the core cast first come together under pressure. For veterans, there is a certain pleasure in revisiting that era with the benefit of hindsight; for newcomers, it stops later seasons from feeling like they’re referencing a book that has gone out of print.
All of this builds towards The Battle for Lion’s Arch, now presented as a publicly joinable instanced meta‑event rather than a one‑off world siege. The city lies in ruins under noxious miasma, and players work with NPC allies to push through Scarlet’s forces, recapture rally points, and bring down the watchknights and other engines she has scattered across the map. The finale takes you aboard the Breachmaker for the fight against Scarlet herself, tying off months of build‑up in a single, hectic run. A repeatable version sits in the Eye of the North rotation and through Lionguard Peltgnaw in Gendarran Fields, with achievements and the “Lion’s Memory” meta offering extra reasons to return—though its instanced nature and failure conditions mean it never quite competes in popularity with more forgiving, open‑world metas.
The Living World Season 1 remaster—capped by the Battle for Lion’s Arch—does what it needed to do. It preserves a formative slice of Guild Wars 2’s history in a way that fits the current game, lets Scarlet’s story be experienced rather than just summarised, and gives that scar on Tyria’s coastline a playable past to match the stories people have been telling about it for years.
