Sand Lions In My Own Garden : GW2

When the first promotional videos for Path of Fire appeared I commented that some of the shots appeared to have been taken from the Lord Room steps at Air Keep on the Desert Borderland in World vs World. The similarity was striking.

It wasn't just the generic desert nature of the two locations or even that the color and texture of the stone and the quality of the light they reflected were all identical. It was all that plus the fact that the very distinctive architecture, seen nowhere else in the game before, matched perfectly.

I speculated that the Desert Borderland map, far from having been an outtake from Heart of Thorns, as often suspected, might have been an early escape from the then-unsuspected follow-up to HoT. Now that we have our hands on the real thing that possibility seems even more likely.

The Desert Borderland, it was often claimed, must have been intended for HoT because it was clearly designed with gliders in mind. If you cast your mind back to the original design, with the barricades and the absence of stairways and ramps, it now seems likely it was designed for mounts as well.

The most convincing evidence so far, however, may be something I ran into tonight while doing my dailies. Since the expansion dropped I've barely set foot in WvW so I was taken completely by surprise to find that the familiar wildlife has been replaced by creatures from the Crystal Desert and points south.

Between Air Keep and North East tower I spotted sand lions, shadhavars and rock gazelles. Whether there are sand eels or sharks lurking beneath the dunes I cannot say. Only that I saw none.

With this change to the ambient environment I consider the case proven and closed. The Desert Borderlands are part of The Crystal Desert and therefore belong to the Path of Fire. They just arrived a couple of years ahead of schedule.