Guild Wars 2

I thought Southsun just surfaced due to volcanic activity, which was why no one ever ran into before, and there are old sunken ships all over the island.

Why are there ruins at Pearl Islet waypoint? who made them, how old are they, any thoughts?

The introduction of this map is called lost shores. As I understood it, this island was so close to Orr it was considered dangerous to go there. After the defeat of Zhaitan the Karka where driven from the deep sea by another danger (Deep sea dragon?) to these shores. The Consortium also re-discovered the area and enraged the Karka, wich led to a karka invasion on Lion’s Arch. When investigating the origin the lost shores where unlost to everyone and became accessible.

The ships scatthered over the islands are likely shipwrecks from storms or tidalwaves (possible the one cause by Zhaitan when he woke up).

The island itself however has always been there. The ruins you are talking bout look like a krytan outpost and given the structure possible a early lighthouse, where on the top a fire was being lid at night to warn ships bout the landmass.

Regarding the islands’ age, there were some new objects placed in Southsun with The Secret of Southsun. One of which being a captain’s log which states, iirc, that the island is new, but how new is unknown (it is placed near Calach’s Folly PoI) because the waters were more or less unexplored. There was also something added in Southsun mentioning that the island was a volcano, iirc.

As for the ruins on Pearl Inlet, I always took that to be an early Krytan outpost – the volcanic part is the western island, while the eastern island seems to be fairly old.

The island as a whole definitely dates to no older than the period of GW1 – a land mass that nearly blocks off the Sea of Sorrows is not something that traders from Lion’s Arch would have missed during the time of GW1.

As Konig said, though, the eastern part – where the ruins are – do seem to be a lot older than the western part (parts of the latter even seem as if they may have been artificially constructed by the karka). The most likely explanation is that sometime when the world was safer and Peal Islet was the main island in the region, there was a Krytan or Orrian lighthouse there.

Hey hey, I called it a possible lighthouse, not ….well that other guy. It looks a bit as a lighthouse to me and it looks more krytan then Orrian.

there is indeed a lot of volcanic activity and the island seems a lot smaller on the old (foggy) maps in GW1 and GW2

I would say that it is very likely that the two edges of the island were originally there, and that either over time due to volcanic activity, due to the tsunami and debris dragged back into the sea by it, or by the karka, the island has grown to the point of bridging those two areas. Islands were known to exist on both sides of the sea of sorrows, this just fills in the gaps.

Only Owain’s Refuge looks like it was old, imo, on the western side.

If you go off of the old map, there were two islands on the western side and one on the eastern side that were incorporated into Southsun. I know the old map isn’t a direct comparison of what is real, but it is rather close.

Comparing the two maps, the bottom western island isn’t touched by Southsun – as it’d be south of where you can swim – and Pearl Inlet didn’t exist (or somehow it got separated from the larger island). The northern western island was effectively removed completely, replaced with an island a bit further south and much smaller (where the jumping puzzle ends) – or alternatively by the whole western half. More or less, the old map got retcon’d, just like when Eye of the North was introduced and some mountains got moved around on the GW1 map.

Indeed. In fact, if you look at the map, there is an island painted in just south of Owain’s Refuge that is cut off with a suspiciously straight edge when it buts up against the Southsun map. There’s a similar effect with the large island to the east (the one that has its eastern shore in Sparkfly) – while some of its coast is shown, you get another suspiciously straight edge extending north.

C’mon, guys. If you’re going to retcon your landmasses, at least do a proper job of it!

Comparing to the map in the novels, the Dappled Shores region, including Pearl Islet, existed previously, but it should be contiguous with the aforementioned eastern island rather than having a channel between it and the Dappled Shores and Pearl Islet. The northernmost of the western islands seems to map reasonably well to the Bakestone Caverns area, but the southern island had previously been roughly zigzag shaped, with another point aimed towards Captain’s Retreat.