[GW2] A little SoS Speculation

The post scheduled (if I’ve done it right) to be posted on Talk Tyria a little later today borrows heavily from the fact-mixed-with-fiction style of Ree Soesby’s race week posts. I thought I’d try my hand at a bit of prose, rather than just blathering on about my opinion on this, and my staggeringly obvious advice about that. I was rather pleased with the result (especially the bit about a warriors bowels turning to water).


I always really enjoyed the posts which came on the last evening of the race weeks. Although I’ve never really read any of Ms Soesby’s work before, I understand her to be a very accomplished fantasy writer – and this is particularly apparent when she has such a small space to portray a compelling story, and still manages to write something interesting, funny and engaging.

For this reason, I’m eagerly awaiting Sea of Sorrows (the third and final GW2 interim book). The book is like one of the final few puzzle pieces which will link the years between the end of the EotN storyline and the start of the GW2 (along with the Elonan GW:B storyline). I was somewhat disappointed by the second instalment in the series. “Edge of Destiny” felt like it was trying to fit 100 stories into 100 pages, and consequently could never really get to grips with any of them. It’s not wholly the writers’ fault – they would have topics they had to cover and a timescale to do it in, and if the two didn’t marry up then the result was inevitable.

Sea of Sorrows is likely to be placed sometime soon after the end of EotN. Ghosts of Ascalon was set a few years before the timeframe of GW2 – after the truce between charr and humans, Edge of Destiny was set before that and told about the exploits of Destiny’s Edge and the aforementioned eventual ceasefire, so it makes sense that SoS will be even earlier.

The title “Sea of Sorrows” obviously suggests something vaguely nautical. If previous books hadn’t set a precedent for concerning themselves only with Ascalonian/Krytan exploits I would be tempted to suggest the story might be about the unfreezing of the Jade Sea in Cantha. As it is, the “Sorrows” element suggests to me that it will be about the rising of the continent of Orr from beneath the sea by Zhaitan – bringing thousands of angry undead with it. I imagine that hundreds of years moping around on the bottom of the ocean can leave you rather “sorrowful”.

Either way, I can’t wait to slot that final piece into the puzzle that is the intervening years between 1 and 2. One of the things which keeps me interested in Guild Wars 2 is that it isn’t just a new game to play, it is a continuation of a story which I’ve been watching play out for the past six years.