To be honest, I suggest to you and anyone reading this to check out WP's back catalog and dive into his lets plays, lore, GW2 mysteries, Drama etc. and watching his videos. They are all made with so much care for the game.

WoodenPotatoes the king of Guild Wars content creator

I started playing GW1 after GW2, at first I wasn't really sold, but still gave it a fair shot, soon after I was finishing all expansions and additional content, definitely give it a try, but be prepared for slower and more strategic gemeplay. You can collect and customize your own NPC characters, so I'd say it is closer to something like Baldur's Gate. Elite skill hunting for self and those NPCs was one of the more interesting activities for me.

This video specifically goes through the events of Guild Wars 1. Guild Wars Prophecies is the core game and starts with you as a new adventurer right before the Searing. After the Searing you are one of the adventurers that is part of Prince Rurik's vanguard, so all of the battles and events listed here, you had a hand in. Without going into too much spoilers, you do meet a Dwarf or two in GW2, but events in GW1 have made them not a playable race and have changed them forever. If you keep watching the videos, or play GW1, you will find out the details. Guild Wars 1 was my first ever online game, before even World Of Warcraft. I have long thought of going back and playing it again. You do not need to play with anyone, because you can hire NPC adventurers to do content with you if you do not have anyone to play with. If you are curious I highly recommend another Laranity video called "The History of Guild Wars 2 - 2000-2021 Retrospective". She goes over the creation of GW1 and how both games evolved over the years. It is a really good video for someone who didn't get to experience GW2 as it came out.

Note that this video is describing what happens in the first game Guild Wars 1. The events WP is describing are what happens in that game. For Guild Wars 2, the events in GW1 in this video happened 250 years prior to GW2. This series doesn't cover the years between the games. There are 3 novels you can read for that info, and yes WP has some videos where he just reads the books. However the expansions all deal with or touch upon stuff that has its background in the first Guild Wars. So players of that game get plenty of nods from the later content of GW2. All that to say, there is lots of deep rich lore to discover. It used to be that WP would speculate between episodes on what was going to happen based on lore knowledge. Each Living World season has about 6-ish episodes of content. And many of those come with a new map, and lots to do.

They're all interesting, but if you wanted to focus on stuff that's more pertinent to GW2, watch from "destroyers" onwards. The rest of the stuff does give context on stuff in GW2, but you've not lost a lot from not knowing it as GW2 itself provides the chance in some character dialogue to learn the basics

Fall in love with my most favorite game, Guild Wars.

8:01 there you can farm charr's bags in Gw1 :p

It briefly touches on it before the searing during prophecies but the first campaign has you complete what is referred to as 'The Flameseeker Prophecies'

Guild Wars 1 can best be described as a tactical coop online rpg that plays like tab targeting mmorpgs but with lots of mechanics to watch for. GW2 basically made a lot of the old mechanics casual friendly with a focus on the pure action while GW1 was more about the strategy in the fights with enemys that have the same skills players could use once they learned them. While GW2 has 1 class and gearstats GW2 featured a dual class system with a main class that could not be changed and a secondary class that you could change later on . Youre main class would also provide you with a special stat that gave a game mechanic buff. For example Monks would be able to have additional healing for all of their healskills when main class, ranger would be able to lower the cost for combat skills while elementalist gain 3 additional energy to their energy pool for each statpoint, warriors would be granted the chance to ignore enemys defense, assassins granted energy on critical strikes, necromancer would regain energy when any living creature nearby dies and so on. The stats would work more like D&D attributes with higher costs in statpoints the higher the stat allready is up to a maximum of 12 points. Those character stats would benefit a variety of the classes skills which are all related to one of those stats and while you can equip them even without 1 single statpoint in it they would be weak compared to having 12 points in the stat. A typical build would concentrate on 3 of 9 possible stats (5 from main class 4 from the secondary class) with the focus on the chosen skills from both classes. One such famous build splits all statpoints to achieve a 12/9/9 setup therefore. (for example 12 in the main stat critical strikes from the assassin and 9 in survival skills and 9 in archery skills of the ranger creating a main assassin that can selfheal and use bowskills while being granted energy for each critical hit) Remember you can later on change the secondary class in any outpost or village and each class has arround 120 skills to choose from for the 8 skills you can actually use in combat. Those skills are set with little possebilitys to change something in the maps so you plan how to deal not only with your own acces to skills finding a goot setup for you but also with changing enemys that have their own skills and no other online game ever is anywhere near the encounters you will find in GW2 for a good reason which is the AI is doing great!! They use the skills they have and work as a team together so each fight is about realizing which sort of enemy you are facing and finding the enemy that is needed to be defeated first as mentioned the enemys use the same skills you can have access to as well so a healer can have the most overpowered healskills, any mesmer or necromancer can easely have dozens of hexes and curses that will be easely able to defeat you regardless of how powerful your attacks are and warrior enemys will not only be tanky as hell but also do major damage when they attack you. GW2 is basically a game for the masses while GW1 is a game for people that like story and challenging and strategic combat. In GW1 even walking from point A to B can be impossible if you are not prepared for an enemy encounter on the way. Under those circumstances the lore of the game the struggle of the NPCs like Rurik feel real and you are not the big hero that easely takes care of some small flys you are part of this world and underestimating any foe can take you back to the revive shrine in seconds with a debuff that makes it even harder for you to deal with the enemy up to a point you will need to regroup in the nearest outpost to rebuild youre character, heroes and the henchmen you choose to be better prepared. The Story of Guild Wars is both told in Quests as well as in missions which play similar to dungeons or even raids not to mention that there are dungeons in the expansion eye of the north as well as elite missions. And if thats not enough challenge for you after you beat the game each of the mission can be played as hardmode version and all the maps too with new enemys, new enemy skills, much higher quality of materials and items the enemy can drop and the goal to get rid of all the enemys on a hardmode map as well granting you gold as reward for doing so. Guild Wars 1 is also not 1 game it is 3 standalone games that are connected with each other allowing you to experience 3 great storys in this world and to search in all of the 3 games for the skills, gear and heros to be able to deal with all the encounters on youre way. GW1 is basically the oposite of the idea to run for max level and do just a few activitys for GW1 it is more the way to the end that matters and there are so much encounters on your way you will remember even 15 years later because how it felt to fight them and to be able to tell yeah I actually defeated those enemys and was able to go on with my adventures in tyria. In 3 days starts Halloween this festival is one of Guild Wars longest traditions of greatness when it comes to festival events and the lore for King Thorn alone give you a glimps of how the lore of GW1 was designed and how GW2 manages to be able to handle all of this lore without the need to abonden any part of it. By the way GW2 has many of GW1s original music tracks so you can imagine that they really had something special there.

As much as I'd like to recommend a GW1 play through, I recommend to just watch the lore videos and concentrate on getting up to date with GW2 first. Gw1 was fun, but it was a totally different style of play and more of an RPG.

No, Guild Wars 1 was not focused on the Guild Wars. It was barely mentioned. In the tutorial stage of Guild Wars: Prophesies, players were in a idyllic beautiful Ascalon called Pre-Searing Ascalon. When we completed the tutorial, we get thrown into the burnt out Ascalon and proceeded to help Rurik in the missions described in the video. Some players keep characters in Pre-Searing Ascalon, even getting them to max level in the tutorial stage by "death leveling", repeatedly dying to monsters so the monsters leveled up so when you killed them you can level up. It was a ridiculous long affair. People wrote scripts, and left their character there for days dying rezzing and dying again. Gamers are strange. Dwarves sacrificed themselves at the end of Guild Wars 1 by turning into stone to fight Primordius, the first Dragon to awake.

The tutorial of the game Prophecies starts right before the searing happens. The game treats everything before the searing as your introduction to the game, and after the searing, you’re left to do everything else on your own. The searing happens very fast, maybe 30mins of gameplay if you stick to nothing but the main story steps (no side quests etc). There are many people who have “perma-pre” characters, who never active the quest to trigger the searing and stay forever in the pre-searing section of the game. There’s even a title in the game that can only be obtained by leveling your character to max level before leaving pre-searing Ascalon. However that was no easy task, as quest rewards would only give you so much exp and the rest was only obtained through killing foes. Mad respect to anyone who suffered through that hellish grind before anet added in an update a few years back that gave 1 new quest per day to help those aiming for that title. Yes either play them or watch WP’s videos for a good summary of everything.

Yup, there are dwarves! Something happens to their civilization at the end of GW1 so that they’re a lot rarer now, but you will still meet a few in GW2.

I have played both GW1 and GW2, and I love both games, but for different reasons. It's absolutely possible (and not that expensive these days) to play the whole of GW1 solo, or even with a group in some areas as there are still active players. But the gameplay is an utterly different beast to GW2, and the combat pacing is a LOT slower, with a steeper levelling curve (especially if you are playing solo). If you're only interested in the story, it's possibly better to look up a summary/let's play, because GW1 is not easy to blast through the way you kinda can with GW2 these days. On the other hand, if you're okay with the look and feel of GW1, there's a heck of a lot to enjoy about the game, and an absolute wealth of lore and side-story content - and you can link your accounts for both games together, too, because there are some cosmetic rewards in GW2 which you actually unlock in GW1 through something called the Hall of Monuments. And as ArenaNet have stated that GW1 is so cheap for them to host they're never planning on taking it offline, despite its age and the lack of active development, it's not going anywhere.

eheheh there's "just a little" lore behind the game: brace yourself 🤣 but if you are interested, you can give a try to the fisrt game...pretty old, but still interesting

I suggest to watch the lore to appriciate and understand GW2 more and when you are done with gw2 and you have time to spare give GW1 a go to actually play through what woodenpotato is talking about

Gw1 is pretty much soloable, and has the best story better than the sequel in my opinion

If you are interested in GW1, check out this video where JSH does an excellent review of the game. And you can see actual gameplay. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/iZupntSesq_OgZ8.html