The new map for this living story chapter, Jahai Bluffs, is pretty cool. There's a ton happening in it.

You have a monument to Joko (who Aurene ate in the last chapter, and who is, supposedly, but probably not, dead):

You've got several areas that have been sucked in from other places and times, including this crazy place filled with mushrooms that make you trip balls and hallucinate:

When you hallucinate, you get big heads on everything, including your mounts:

Gonna get a bit spoilery here... I doubt that's a problem since most people who read the stupid shit I write here read things after the fact. But, you know, fair warning, the following has some Living Story Season 4 spoilers in it...

I mentioned previously that there's some pretty cool stuff happening this season of the Living Story. Quite a bit of it could be considered (or potentially could be considered) "game changing". One big thing that's happened is we've been given a new home instance.

In GW2 we have these places known as "home instances". In the early days, I had hoped they'd evolve into something similar to FFXI's homes- e.g., someplace I could decorate and store things. But that's not what GW2's homes wound up being. Instead, they are places where you can place various nodes for daily harvesting, or chests for daily looting. (They are also places for cats to reside that you do various quests to obtain. The cats are pretty friggin' cool, but not really something I'd call a "decoration").

The current living story introduces us to "Sun's Refuge" (which is the same location as Sunspear Sanctuary in GW1). This is a new home instance, one which, supposedly, uses the same tech as guild halls. This means it should be upgradeable and decorate-able. Emphasis on should.

In reality, after doing all of the current quests for it, it seems really underwhelming. I can't decorate anything, and the things I've unlocked from the quest are either NPCs or large collections of interact-able objects that simply give lore. Maybe they have big things planned for it in the future, but what's there now is pretty weak.

Getting the Refuge is intertwined with the living story missions. After a Shatterer attack on the previous temple and village, you and your crew are looking for someplace safe to marshal your forces and provide refuge (see? it's a REFUGE!) for the villagers and people who have been displaced by Krakakakakakakakakalatorik. Koss Dejarin, a character from the first game who is now undead (awakened) tells you about the Sanctuary and you lead a force into the cave where the Sanctuary can be found to clear out any beasts that have taken it over in the years since it was last used.

The Refuge has this iconic fire-pit in the middle of the zone which you must light. Once lit, spiders appear and you need to clear the cave of them. Later, a rift opens up, and various Krakakakakalatorik minions start flooding in, requiring you to fend them off.

When this happens, Braham (above), whose mother died in front of him in the HoT missions, and who has been, generally, a little bitch about it for the last 3 fucking years, takes aim at a beast emerging from the rift when.... oh snap! His dead mother's ghost fucking comes through the rift to fight along side him!

This fucks him up further... again... because he's a little emo bitch that has been raging in his room to Morrissey for the last three years. But hopefully he comes the fuck around because I'm sick and tired of his emo mopey ass bullshit.

Anyway, later on in the chapter, Aurene, our little baby dragon from HoT, and the commander (the player character) get a glimpse of several possible futures where Aurene battles Krakakakakakalakalatorik.

In these glimpses, we see Aurene die again and again, in a cutscene that looks suspiciously similar to the Dormomu battle in the Dr. Strange movie, and we discover that the future is looking pretty grim.

And that's how the chapter ends... On a fucking cliffhanger. What happens? Don't know. Won't know for a while because it's October now and we have Halloween, Xmas, and the boring ass News Year events in rapid succession before we can hope to see the next chapter.... Argh...

There's a lot of weird stuff in the GW2 data files... A lot of things that have never made it into the actual game...

One thing that was added recently was this... uh... really weird gun...

Yeah, doesn't really fit theme-wise, does it?

I could be wrong, but I think it's the same gun used in this April Fools joke trailer for a Commando Class.

One more screenie of the silly gun..

The latest living story chapter, as I mentioned earlier, is pretty awesome. One of the cool things about it is that there are these portals in the map that effectively take you into the past, and even other worlds.

In one of them, there's an ancient Orrian battle going on, around The Vizier's Tower, which is a tower we've encountered the ruins of over in Straits of Devastation (all the way back in the core game.) However, here, we encounter it as it once was... which is pretty awesome.

In another one of them, there's a view into Maguuma Jungle: