We are three weeks from the end of 2014, Wintersday is live, and Tyria is doing that thing it does every December - draping tinsel over existential dread and pretending everything is fine while an Elder Dragon sleeps somewhere beneath the Maguuma Jungle. It feels like the right moment to stop and take stock. This was not a quiet year. Lion’s Arch burned in February. Scarlet Briar died in March and took a city with her on the way out. The Wardrobe rewrote how cosmetics work in April. Living World Season 2 launched in July and immediately fixed the biggest structural mistake of Season 1. Seven episodes of story. Two major system overhauls. One dragon we still have not seen. Let us grade it.
Story: A-
Scarlet’s war, Mordremoth’s roar, and the best villain death GW2 has ever written.
The year opened in January with Origins of Madness - two simultaneous world bosses, the Twisted Marionette in Lornar’s Pass and the Triple-Headed Great Jungle Wurm in Bloodtide Coast, both requiring the kind of open-world coordination that made Season 1’s later acts feel genuinely epic. It also gave us Taimi, who arrived as a minor character and immediately became one of the most compelling presences in the game.
Then came February, and the fall of Lion’s Arch.
There is no honest way to overstate what ArenaNet pulled off. For two years, Lion’s Arch was the emotional anchor of Guild Wars 2 - the city every character passed through, the crossroads of cultures, the map where strangers became guildmates. Watching Scarlet’s Breachmaker reduce it to fire and rubble in real time, with thousands of players simultaneously fighting to evacuate civilians, was one of the most genuinely affecting moments this game has produced. It worked because the stakes were real. The city did not come back the next patch. It stayed broken.
The Breachmaker finale in March was nearly as good. Scarlet died on the Breachmaker after a confrontation that reframed everything she had done - not as chaos for chaos’s sake but as deliberate, calculated sacrifice. She drilled into the ley lines. She redirected the energy south. She accomplished exactly what she intended and paid for it with her life. A roar echoed across Tyria. The jungle woke up.
Season 2, which began July 1 with Gates of Maguuma, shifts the story into slower, more character-driven territory. The episodes are not as kinetic as Season 1’s finale arc, and some feel underweight - Tangled Paths in particular moves too cautiously for an episode that is supposed to be about urgency. But Seeds of Truth in December is the most formally inventive episode the Living World has produced, using a vision mechanic to tell Caithe’s backstory in a way that no open-world event could. The Sylvari connection to Mordremoth is being handled carefully and the mystery still feels earned.
Minus: Scarlet’s characterisation in the first half of 2013 was messy enough that the payoff in 2014 had to do extra work. Not a 2014 problem exactly, but a debt that the 2014 story was still paying down. Mordremoth himself remains entirely offscreen - we have heard one roar and seen his minions. For a year of buildup, the dragon himself still feels theoretical.
Systems: A
The Wardrobe, the Megaserver, Global Guilds - three structural changes that made the game better every single day.
April’s overhaul is the one that will matter longest. The Wardrobe system did something conceptually simple with enormous practical impact: it made every skin you had ever unlocked permanently yours, account-wide, forever. No more transmutation stones. No more per-character skin grinding. No more paying twice to dress two characters the same way. Fashion Wars 2 stopped being a joke and became an honest description of a legitimate endgame. Paired with account-wide dye unlocks and Megaserver technology pulling players together across worlds, April was the single most player-friendly patch the game has ever shipped.
September’s quieter overhaul finished the job. Global Guilds unified banks, influence, merits, and upgrades across servers - ending two years of administrative fragmentation for any guild with members on multiple worlds. Collections launched as a framework that still needs content to fully realise its potential, but the underlying idea is correct: give players defined things to accumulate toward with specific rewards attached. Commander tags went account-wide and gained four colours, which any serious WvW player will tell you was overdue since approximately launch day.
The only reason this is not an A+ is the PvP infrastructure, which received meaningful additions - Standard Enemy Models, the Glorious armour set, a cleaner competitive reward loop - but still has not received the fundamental queue rebuild the community has been asking for. Ranked and unranked arenas remain structurally flawed in ways that cosmetic additions cannot fix. That work appears to be coming. It was not here in 2014.
Living World: B+
Season 2 fixed the format. The content itself is still finding its level.
Season 1’s original sin was impermanence. Story instances that closed after two weeks. World-altering events with no replay. A narrative that demanded you be there or miss it forever. ArenaNet acknowledged this with Season 2’s permanent Story Journal, and the acknowledgement was the right call - each episode is now permanently available, replayable, purchasable for gems if you missed it at launch. That structural correction alone earns significant credit.
The episodes themselves are uneven. Gates of Maguuma is a confident opener that correctly prioritises character work over spectacle. The Dragon’s Reach two-parter has the most ambitious scope of the season - a diplomatic summit of all five races is exactly the kind of geopolitical storytelling GW2’s world can support. Seeds of Truth is the creative highlight: intimate, formally inventive, and genuinely emotionally affecting in ways Season 1 never managed.
But there are thin episodes. Tangled Paths moves too slowly. Echoes of the Past covers ground we had already theorised about. Seven episodes into Season 2 and Mordremoth still has not appeared in any direct capacity. The buildup is patient; patience requires trust.
Community: B
The player base found its identity this year. Population questions remain.
The fall of Lion’s Arch was a community event in the truest sense - not just a story moment but a mass experience that created shared memory. Players who were there in February talk about it the way veterans talk about the original Thaumanova Fractal release or the first time Tequatl wiped a disorganised map. That is what a living world is supposed to do, and 2014 delivered it once at the highest possible level.
WvW found renewed energy through Season 1 and carried it into 2014’s matchup cycles. The September commander tag improvements and siege additions gave the mode more tactical texture. The guild system’s globalisation has complicated server identity in ways the community is still working through, but the direction is correct.
The honest B comes from population. There are zones that feel emptier than they should be. The Megaserver helps in core Tyria, but the Living World maps from Season 2 - Dry Top, Silverwastes - depend on critical mass to fire their meta-events properly, and at off-peak hours that mass does not always materialise. This is a solvable problem. It is one ArenaNet needs to keep solving.
2015: The Jungle Calls
Whatever is in the Heart of Maguuma, we are going there next year. Seven episodes of Season 2 have established the Mordrem as a credible threat, set up the Sylvari’s connection to the Elder Dragon as the season’s central mystery, and placed Caithe - carrying Glint’s egg through the jungle alone - as the character whose choices will define what comes next.
The expansion question is the one everyone is dancing around. ArenaNet has been releasing the Living World as a content model since 2013, and it has worked well enough to sustain the game without a boxed expansion. But the Heart of Maguuma is a new continent. New continents have historically meant expansions. The community is louder than it has ever been about wanting one - a full, purchasable, content-dense expansion with new professions, new mechanics, and a conclusion to the Mordremoth arc that a handful of Living World episodes cannot fully deliver.
Our read: something significant is coming in 2015. The buildup is too deliberate, the scope too large, for a continued string of bi-weekly episodes. Whether ArenaNet calls it an expansion or not, next year feels like a structural turning point for the game.
Wintersday, and the Rest
Meanwhile, Divinity’s Reach is covered in snow and Tixx is back with his malfunctioning toy workshop. Toypocalypse, Snowball Mayhem, the Choir Bell activity, the Winter Wonderland jumping puzzle - the seasonal rotation is comfortable and warm, which is exactly what December is supposed to feel like after a year this heavy.
Log in. Get your Wintersday gifts. Run the jumping puzzle once even though it is annoying. Watch the snowflakes fall over a city that is still standing.
2014 earned this quiet.