Visions of the Past: Steel and Fire dropped today, and buried inside the patch notes is something quietly historic: for the first time since 2013, players can replay missions from Living World Season 1. Four missions. Through a Scrying Pool. In a newly reopened Eye of the North. It’s not the full LWS1 restoration the community has been asking for since the content went offline — but it’s the first crack of light in a door that’s been locked for seven years.
Key Highlights
- Visions of the Past: Steel and Fire releases March 17, 2020 as Icebrood Saga Episode 3
- The Eye of the North returns as an upgradeable hub for the IBS, replacing the standard map-select menu
- A Scrying Pool mechanic inside EotN lets players replay select historical missions — the first LWS1 access since 2013
- Four missions are currently accessible: Cragstead, North Nolan Hatchery, Canach’s Lair, The Nightmare Incarnate
- New story content follows Ryland Steelcatcher and the Steel Warband across the Darkrime Delves
- The Forging Steel story mission is the main new instanced content for this episode
What We Don’t Know Yet
- Whether more LWS1 missions will be added to the Scrying Pool in future episodes
- ArenaNet hasn’t confirmed any broader Living World Season 1 restoration plan — this could be the extent of it
- What the full upgrade tree for the Eye of the North hub looks like over the IBS’s remaining episodes
The Eye of the North Is Back — And It Has Weight
Let’s start with the hub, because the Eye of the North deserves more attention than it’s getting in the patch coverage.
EotN is not a neutral location. For players who came over from the original Guild Wars, it’s the location — the Hall of Monuments, the crossroads between two games, the place where a decade of franchise history lives in stone. Bringing it back as the Icebrood Saga’s home base is a choice with meaning. The IBS is set in the Shiverpeak Mountains, dealing with Norn history and Jormag’s ancient reach. Setting the player hub here, in a space that predates Guild Wars 2 by centuries, adds texture to the setting that a generic camp or command post wouldn’t.
The hub itself is functional: a central room that will expand as the IBS progresses, a few vendor stations, and the Scrying Pool at its center. It already beats the Sunspear Sanctuary from Path of Fire on atmosphere alone. Whether it earns its place mechanically depends on where the upgrade track goes — but the bones are solid.
Four Missions and What They Represent
Here’s where it gets complicated, and I want to be careful about how I frame this — because the community reaction is going to split two ways and both reactions are valid.
The four replayable missions are:
- Cragstead — the Flame Legion’s assault on the Norn homestead
- North Nolan Hatchery — the Molten Alliance operations
- Canach’s Lair — the Southsun Cove storyline’s confrontation
- The Nightmare Incarnate — the Tower of Nightmares conclusion
These are real missions from real Living World Season 1 content. They’re not reconstructions or approximations — they’re the actual instances, made replayable through the Scrying Pool framework. That is genuinely significant.
But here’s the honest context: Living World Season 1 ran from November 2012 to March 2014. It was a massive, world-altering arc — the Battle for Lion’s Arch, Scarlet Briar’s Breachmaker, the fall and rebuilding of a city. What the Scrying Pool gives us is four isolated story beats from a much larger tapestry. The threads that tied them together — the open-world events, the temporary map changes, the live community reactions — those are gone and they are not coming back.
Four missions is better than zero. It’s meaningfully better than zero. But let’s not pretend it’s a solution to the LWS1 preservation problem. It’s a gesture in the right direction.
Steel and Fire’s Story Content
The new forward-facing content follows Ryland Steelcatcher — Rytlock’s son, for those keeping track of the family tree — as part of the Steel Warband. The Darkrime Delves dungeon-style mission is solid: it’s underground, it’s cold, it’s full of Dwarven ruins and Sons of Svanir, and the production quality on the environmental storytelling is high.
What Steel and Fire does well is deepen the IBS’s secondary characters. Ryland has been a presence since Grothmar Valley but this episode commits to him as a perspective character. The Steel Warband mission structure — where you’re experiencing events from their point of view, not the Commander’s — is an interesting framing device that gives the content a different texture than standard Living World episodes.
The Forging Steel main story instance is tightly designed. It won’t take a first-time player more than an hour to complete, but it’s a satisfying hour. The pacing is cleaner than some previous episode releases that front-loaded dialogue at the expense of gameplay.
The Bigger Conversation This Opens
Four LWS1 missions inside a Scrying Pool mechanic raises a question ArenaNet has avoided answering directly for years: what is the studio’s plan for legacy content?
Guild Wars 2 is eight years old this August. The game has built an enormous amount of history — Living World Seasons 1 through 4, multiple festivals that have changed year over year, content that was deliberately designed to be temporary. Some of that impermanence was intentional and philosophically interesting. Some of it was a practical limitation of how live events work. All of it is now inaccessible to the roughly two-thirds of the current player base that wasn’t there when it happened.
The Scrying Pool is the first admission — in mechanic form — that this history has value and deserves some form of preservation. Whether ArenaNet follows through on that in any meaningful scale is the question. The GW2 wiki’s documentation of LWS1 is extraordinary fan work, but it can’t replicate actually playing through Scarlet’s invasion. Something needs to.
Today’s four missions don’t answer that. But they ask the question in a way the game hasn’t before.
Who Should Pay Attention
Lore players: The Steel Warband story is worth your time. Ryland’s characterization has implications for the Charr civil war arc that are going to pay off.
Returning veterans: If you were around for any of LWS1, the Scrying Pool missions will hit differently. Canach’s Lair specifically has aged well.
New players: The Scrying Pool gives you genuine historical access. Four missions won’t tell you the full story — read the wiki for context — but playing them beats reading a summary.
WvW and meta players: The EotN hub’s upgrade track has currency implications to track. Check the hub’s resource nodes and the merchant rotation for what’s coming.
What to Watch For
- Future Scrying Pool additions — the mechanic exists now; the question is whether ArenaNet expands it with more missions from LWS1 or LWS2 in coming episodes
- Eye of the North upgrade track — what the hub becomes over the full IBS is worth following closely; it’s been positioned as a significant feature
- Community response to the LWS1 framing — r/Guildwars2 is going to have feelings about the four-mission scope. Worth watching what ArenaNet responds to, if anything
- Episode 4 — after the Norn/Steel thread established here, where does the IBS go next? The pacing of the Charr and Jormag arcs needs to sync up
Steel and Fire is a thoughtful, well-executed episode. The Scrying Pool is the thing that will be talked about longest. That’s both a compliment and a challenge: ArenaNet has started something here. Let’s see if they finish it.