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GW2 – Season 3, Episode 3, A Crack in the Ice

311 words.

Episode 3 of the Living World Season 3 takes us to Bitterfrost Frontier, another new map north of Frostgorge Sound.

The episode begins with some “challenges” in Tarir to train baby dragon Aurene how to be a good dragon. I cringed at first but it turned out the challenges were fairly benign, if somewhat tedious. It seemed like filler material to extend the length of the content, to be honest.

Then we went to Bitterfrost Frontier to find Braham and do an errand for Taimi-something about pitting the two dragons Primordus and Jormag against each other. Except we had to make an Elixir to survive the cold first, which took up most of our time and took us to all corners of the map. We killed a minion of Jormag, then found Braham and helped him find a scroll. Braham then had a huge whiny meltdown when I tried to convince him to join Dragon’s Watch instead of going off to kill Jormag.

I was a bit stunned by Braham’s outburst. I’ll admit it was one of the most memorable character conflicts in the game, but it seemed-stop me if you’ve heard this before-completely random and without cause. Correct me if I’m wrong, but did he not even know his mother back in Living Story season 1? Now she is the driving force for everything he does.

Besides that, though, I actually enjoyed playing on the Bitterfrost Frontier map. And overall, I found the gameplay in this episode to be much more casual, even the final boss fights with the Jormag minion and the scroll guardian. (The last fight was incredibly confusing, but somehow it sort of resolved itself without much interaction from me.) Looking back now, I realize it was just the calm before the storm of Episode 4, but it was nice while it lasted.

UPDATE - The Video

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Next: GW2 – Season 3, Episode 4, The Head of the Snake. Previously: GW2 – Season 3, Episode 2, Rising Flames.

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Archived Comments

Bhagpuss 2017-10-06T15:29:45Z

It’s really interesting reading your experiences with each of the LS3 chapters. I hope you post about all of them. I didn’t realize it at the time but in retrospect the whole “train Aurene” thing absolutely is the worst kind of filler. Aurene turns out to be important in a deus ex machina kind of way later on but as far as I can see absolutely nothing you did to “train” her ever has any relevance whatsoever.

Bitterfrost is a nice map. I still have unfinished stuff to do there. I must get back to it sometime.

Braham, on the other hand, I would happily never see again. Although I can easily construct a logic scaffold as to why, having been deprived of her love and indeed presence while growing up, Braham has refocused his identity so strongly on his mother after their all-too-brief reconciliation but honestly I would have to do ALL of the authorial lifting on that: there’s absolutely none of it in the source material.

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