I’ve been so “engrossed” in ArcheAge Unchained (documenting the screw ups and also playing) that I completely overlooked the first episode (Whispers in the Dark) of the Ice Brood Saga that was released on November 19th. After completing Bound by Blood (the prologue), I took a break from Guild Wars 2 (and wasn’t really tracking the game). Even though I thought I was playing casually, it wasn’t actually at that pace when I looked back in hindsight at my leveling posting (in my first month, I had unlocked all of the land mount mastery tracks and was working my way through more of the Heart of Thorns masteries while also on the final chapter of the story; I had also completed Path of Fire and Living World Season 3 – in short, I was playing it a lot).
Fortunately, this first episode was fairly short and I was able to complete it and explore the entire map in a few hours. While there is a mastery track for the Bjora Marches area, just the first two are mandatory and fairly quickly to get; the others are bonus damage related ones (I’ll probably try to finish those at a later date). At least one of the main story events was bugged (so a bunch of us were continually killing mobs over and over again while the NPC failed to register; I eventually logged out and back in again in order to hopefully refresh into a new map instance and that one, the quest finally worked).
The zone itself was fairly small so I’m presuming this is just the tip of the iceberg for opening up the surrounding areas with future episodes. The one thing I do notice is the absence of Taimi (the Asura NPC); I know that towards the tail end of Living World Season 4, she admitted her degenerative disease was no longer in remission and was not sure how much time she had left. So it will be interesting to see how her story progresses through this saga.
