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External link →Yeah, I'd love to know who is actually responsible for creating vistas, whether it's just part of the map designers job or if someone's whole task is to create them. They've always made exploring new areas just absolutely wonderful.
I can actually speak to this one.
Vistas tend to come in near the end of the dev cycle, since they depend so heavily on map geometry (which doesn't get a full lock until pretty late, so we can catch little bugs and world-outs and such). They also aren't really "load bearing," either in terms of gameplay ("is this episode, overall, fun?") or narrative ("does this episode's story make sense and feel rewarding?"). So often, as we're finishing iteration on the bigger-ticket items (like instances), vistas fall to whoever on the team has time. In this case, me.
Having worked only a little with our in-game cinematics tool (the knockout and wake-up shots in the Hero of Istan instance back in episode 1) and having never made any vistas, I was...well, pretty uncertain. So a lot of the credit goes to the cinematics team, who made time this episode to sit down and help me sand away some of the jankier bits after I presented first drafts. Also some to one of our tools programmers, Jennifer, who made some changes in our editor that really helped facilitate smoothing and stretching the camera movements. And, of course, lots to Justin, who arted the crap out of this map. So, TLDR: Jahai vistas = collaboration between designer / rookie vista maker and folks who actually know what they're doing. : )