Early in Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet piloted a series of updates that foreshadowed today's live service boom. The first season, called "Living Worlds," featured a series of episodes that temporarily altered existing maps for the current plot. In the season's dramatic finale, the major city of Lions Arch was transformed into a battle zone, and players had to fight to save it.

However, it turned out that players did not appreciate the fact that they only had two weeks to experience each part of the ongoing storyline. In the upcoming season, the structure of the living world will be changed, with each episode being a permanent addition, usually set on an entirely new map.

Thus, new players will be able to revisit almost the entire Guild Wars 2 storyline, but season 1 will remain lost in time, with dedicated NPCs explaining what happened, specific fractals, and more recently, Visions of the Past missions, and can only be experienced through the Past missions. Next week, however, ArenaNet will bring back one of the best encounters from its first season, Twisted Marionette.

Twisted Marionette, which was part of The Origins of Madness released in 2014, was arguably the design template for the next seven years of Guild Wars 2. While the game always featured world bosses (huge battles that encouraged the entire population of the map to work together to defeat the big bastard), the marionette required a higher degree of cooperation, as servers were organized into separate lanes to achieve their objectives simultaneously. This design philosophy was carried over into the first expansion of Guild Wars 2, which focused almost entirely on map-wide meta-events and has been a mainstay in recent releases.

At the time of its release, I called Twisted Marionette one of ArenaNet's best encounters. This was because much of Guild Wars 2's infrastructure had been reworked. Back then, maps were tied to the servers they belonged to, which gave the encounters a sense of community and camaraderie. It took our server quite a few times to get the hang of it, but the excitement grew each time we neared the end. [Today, Guild Wars 2 has largely done away with the concept of servers, and servers are only used for World vs. World multiplayer. Additionally, the specialization added in the game's two expansions has led to a surge in player power, with many meta-events seeming more automated than before.

Elsewhere in the game, ArenaNet is preparing for the upcoming End of Dragons expansion with a series of retrospective releases, encouraging players to revisit previous Living World episodes. Each week, new achievements point players to old maps, all of which, when completed, offer powerful rewards. The centerpiece of this comprehensive meta-achievement is the certainty of obtaining one of End of Dragons' new legendary weapons. Personally, the chance to get a 32-slot inventory bag is more important.

More generally, ArenaNet is in an interesting place right now. A studio update announced earlier this month promised more open communication with the studio and the return of key players to the development team, including former game director Colin Johansson. Concurrent with that post, the studio revealed that it is working on a DirectX 11 update that will roll out in an opt-in beta later this year.