Lion’s Arch Is Under Siege. Man the barricades, round up the civilian, and mind those Aetherblades. We’re just gong to sit back here on the slopes of Gendarran Fields and have a quick chat with ArenaNet about the chaos that’s currently unfolding in this great city.
If you hadn’t heard, Guild Wars 2 Living World Season 1 is finally back in game. After years in the mists of time, players old and new are finally able to relive an iconic moment in Tyrian history, as Scarlet attacks Lion’s Arch. This free update to Tyria is the fifth episode of a reworked and remastered Living World Season 1, and thanks to Joe Kimmes, Season 1 Team Lead we now know a little more about Scarlets final invasion plan.
The Battle For Lion’s Arch is back but what are your memories of this iconic event from first time around?
Joe: Season 1 Team Lead: When this story arc was first running, I was working on Guild Wars 1, so I wasn’t aware of the earliest story planning and was shocked the first time I heard Lion’s Arch was going to be attacked! Seeing the opening cinematic depicting the attack and then loading into the city in flames is hard to forget. I remember seeing players helping the citizens flee and joining the battles raging around the city – it was chaotic and disorganized and you would happen across familiar landmarks now in ruins and wonder how things were going to come back from this.
A lot has changed since most of us kicked back in old Lion’s Arch. Was bringing it back just a case of dragging it out, dusting it down, and pasting it back in?
On the developer side, one commonly cited silver lining of destroying and remaking Lion’s Arch was that the map’s performance had never been great. It had a lot of overlapping scenery models and long sight lines, and on the server side, encouraged players to all stack in a small area where the bank, mystic forge and crafting benches were all in close sight of each other. Part of bringing it back for Battle was checking those beliefs to see if they were still true years later – with all the engine updates and ever-improving art in the newest areas, was the old Lion’s Arch still a standout especially with all the extra fires? It turned out that it wasn’t too bad, although we still had to do a lot of cleanup – years in storage meant that it hadn’t been rechecked as the engine updated, so a lot of small things needed to be retouched like pathing and collision.
Do you feel that anybody who hasn’t walked the streets of old Lion’s Arch will quite the same motivation to return as those of us that watch that poor poor lion get repeatedly vandalized?
It probably won’t be quite the same, but I was happy that we got to see a little of the old city ahead of time in Episode 2 of Season 1, and again in the early sections of Episode 5. There’s a real impact from seeing the famous lion statue in ruins, so it’s fortunate that Episode 2 had the bulk of its instances centered on the lion’s pavilion!
That won’t quite compare to having lived in the city as the game’s main hub for over a year, but hopefully players will still experience some of the original emotion of seeing the city besieged.
What changes can we expect to see with the return of Scarlet’s tumultuous battle?
As with the rest of Season 1, the biggest changes have been from revising the content into the modern Story Journal structure. We needed to tidy things up to work in a linear story flow that players can repeat later or on different characters, which meant more content is instanced or phased so that players on different steps aren’t seeing the wrong parts of the story.
A very common example of something that needed fixing was NPCs having dialog that gave away the end of the story! We had to fix dozens of Lion’s Arch refugees who were congratulating the player’s victory a little too early while they recovered in the evacuation camps.
We also had to make some decisions on where to focus for the climactic battles inside Lion’s Arch. The original release had an evacuation phase where Lion’s Arch was being overrun and players did their best to save people, and then an attack phase where players stormed in and retook the city. Originally, both were full open maps directly based on the Lion’s Arch hub – for this release, we converted the Escape section into a story mission to distill down that moment while leaving Battle For Lion’s Arch as the release’s repeatable open world meta event. The same tradeoff was made for the battle with Scarlet’s Prime Hologram, which is now a story mission – we wanted to make sure all players got to experience this iconic fight rather than it being limited to the tail end of the Battle meta event. With the Assault Knight’s makeover from the strike, they were ready to take point as the main adversary of Battle, so we split that content up between the meta event and climactic story missions.
How do you end up picking content to turn into strike missions, especially without simply repeating Season 1 boss battles on hard mode?
This was actually a point of heavy discussion – we knew we wanted to make a Season 1 themed strike, and Episode 5 was the natural place to put that effort. Within the episode the big boss fights are Scarlet’s Prime Hologram and the Assault Knights, so we narrowed the choices down to those. But End of Dragons had just shipped the Aetherblade Hideout strike, which heavily evoked the imagery and even some gameplay elements of the Prime Hologram – a strike version would have ended up with a lot of overlap with that very recent strike.
By contrast, the Assault Knights hadn’t been explored much – we already had model updates for them planned, and as mid-bosses in Battle their attacks had a lot of untapped potential for a full overhaul rather than just increasing the numbers. The theme of fighting a trio of bosses also felt promising, so we chose to put our focus there. I’m excited to see players tackling the updated Knights – I’ve been in a number of internal tests that came down to the wire looking for a win!
One of my abiding memories of the very first battle for this central city was the introduction of some epic weapon skins. Scarlet’s Kiss, and the particularly iconic Tormented Weapon skins. Are we going to see more new loot like these?
We knew going into Season 1’s return that Battle For Lion’s Arch would need a little extra on the reward side as the finale. In addition to the reward pattern from the previous episodes, you’ll be able to earn a matching cape and shoulder armor set themed after Arch’s pirate captains, and a full set of new Lion’s Champion weapon skins from triumphing in the Battle For Lion’s Arch meta. The original loot from the release is also returning, so I hope that players will find something to suit their style!
Returning to a villain that might be more relatable than an ageless force of nature is certainly something that might be new to some of the current players. Is this a nod to what we might see going forward?
I can’t speak to what the future will hold, but it has been fun for our internal team to go back to Scarlet’s story, especially now that players know where it’s going. In the original Season 1, she was a big departure from the previous villain in the personal story, Zhaitan, and with her motives kept very secret to keep players guessing, she had varying opinions among players. As the season progressed more players grew to like her, so this time around we got to revisit her earlier appearances and incorporate more of what worked without the concern that players would guess at her hidden motivations right away.
Much of Season 1’s return has focused on reworking some content and cutting other content. Has it been difficult to pick what goes where and what has to go entirely?
We made a few decisions very early in the process that helped, like placing the focus on Scarlet’s war. That let us table areas like Southsun Cove, and placed the main emphasis on introducing the player’s new allies like Braham and creating a single throughline centered on Scarlet’s machinations.
After that allowed some initial boundaries for what was going to go in, the challenge has really been to bring as much as we could back. Some scenes or missions felt skippable when we were sketching in the initial plan, but ultimately couldn’t be dropped – a good example there is the Twisted Marionette fight. It was already brought back as a meta event, so initially the plan was to direct players to that version and skip it in the main story. But it’s also the player’s first meeting with Taimi, and after some deliberation, we knew we needed to have that moment in the main story path. So it’s been re-imagined as a single player mission at the start of Episode 5 and serves as sort of a jump straight into action for the episode.
My hope is that with Episode 5 completing Scarlet’s story, we’ve made a satisfying bridge to once more link the personal story to Season 2 and the rest of the game’s ongoing story. It’s been a crazy journey to bring it back, so I’ll look forward to seeing you in Tyria for its conclusion!
If you haven’t already come to the aid of Lion’s Arch then you can do so for free now in Guild Wars 2.
