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Crystal desert team/story team: As a GW1 vet, I want to say thank you for the whole expansion. Its been amazing to revisit some of my favorite places in tyria, and to finally deal with plot threads established about a decade ago now. What were your favorite places to revisit and why?
The Bone Palace. It looks better than ever, and it made so much sense to me that Joko would build it up to be grand enough to suit his ego; plus, the lifelong horror movie fanatic in me loves the utter darkness of the idea it was expanded via the addition of a nation's worth of centaur bones.
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The story team kept the open world designers well aware of what was planned, even better than the good amount of coordination that was done in HoT. So kudos to them for making the Crystal Desert and Elona feel unified, so the open world story telling and help support the main storyline.
Crystal desert team/story team: As a GW1 vet, I want to say thank you for the whole expansion. Its been amazing to revisit some of my favorite places in tyria, and to finally deal with plot threads established about a decade ago now. What were your favorite places to revisit and why?
There's just so many. Augury Rock because of the doppelganger fight and how many ways there were to approach it. My favorite though is probably the Maw of Torment, it's only gotten even more hauntingly beautiful with the Forged occupation.
Loved the expansion so far, the only downside I found was that I feel like I completed most of what was new quite quickly compared to HoT but since LW4 is coming quickly that doesn't feel like a real problem to me. In other words, amazing work guys !
Now onto the question.
What's the thing you had the most fun working on for this expansion ?
And what's the biggest technical challenge you faced that you can talk about ?
The most fun part for me was putting in little hidden jokes and goofy stuff for people to find.
Biggest technical challenge by far was getting a Skritt to wear boots. Then getting him to take them off.
Mounting back up after interacting with something is a pain. There are many areas that are dense with mobs, mobs that have new AI that fire at range, retreat into the agro range of other mobs, and won't come closer even if you line of sight them. Chasing and killing a dozen trash mobs just so I can get back on my mount is a chore and really detracts from the fun of mounts. Can you look into letting us interact with things, harvest nodes, open chests, etc., or at least make remounting after doing so much less painful?
Originally, you could interact with many things while mounted. However, there were a lot of cases where things would completely break if you interacted while mounted, especially in core Tyria. With the number of different kinds of things that can happen on interact, with some of them being quite complicated, it's a lot safer to dismount the player before taking those actions. We removed this to prevent those things from breaking while still maintaining consistency with behavior for the mount interactions in general.
Read moreThank you for everything in this expansion, it's beautiful. Just waiting to see Kamadan now.
1- Well, it was gonna be a question about the Griffon. Why did you include something this potentially broken? (I love it)
2- I heard that Scourge being unable to maintain all of its shades at the same time was a conscious design decision. Is this true? What made you make this decision, compared to other, possible, alternatives?
3- Why are the Firebrand's Tomes not (using) the old Guardian's Tomes effect (actual Tome, book thingy)? Did you lose them like with the Mistward weapons of the Revenant (:P)?
Also I loved the detail that when you Story Spoiler
Finally, be honest with me, we're never gonna have land-spears are we? Between the Spellbreaker's lore, the existance of a number of staff skins that look kinda like halberds, or other types of polearms...
Glad you liked the blind ;) There was some discussion whether it was too annoying to have the screen effect up the whole time and whether we should pull it, but in the end the hardcore GW1 fans in the office felt it would be an offense to the Six (or I guess the Five) if we didn't.
How often do you praise joko?
Depends on how often people interrupt me while I'm praising.
Swordmaster Joko.
"I'm a god-king, you know?"
When designing the new PoF maps, was there any conflict between the map design you wanted, and staying true to the GW1 maps?
I think you did a fantastic job with map design, and loved the nods to GW1.
Also - favourite weapon / armor skin in PoF?
There was definitely a balance act between keeping Gw1 locations as close to the original as possible, or where we could fudge the edges a bit to give the area a Gw2 upgrade. For example for the Crystal Desert(crystal oasis) we took more artistic liberties with the terrain to make it play and look better, especially with mounts. But for some other areas we wanted to keep it closer to original for nostalgia.
Read more1) The raptor mini collection was pretty cool which made me wonder if there is any chance of seeing the fire and ice skins as usable legendary mount skins?
3) Much like ember bay's skulls, Desolation's mouth of torment has strange faces crawling their way out of the centre. Image What drives the land to take these forms and will it ever be tied to the story in any meaningful way?
4) Since PoF is a bit more demanding, what would be the best option for people upgrading? Going the route of i7700k or the newer CPU's...
QA team: "If you do your job right, people wont realize you've done anything at all" Working in software development, I understand the complexity of your job, and the massive responsibility to not get it wrong. We all know that some bugs and issues made it into launch, but I still want you to know that I think you did your part to help deliver one of the smoothest MMO expac launches out there. What was the funniest bug you dealt with during testing, and what was the most infuriating bug you had to help squash?
I think one of the funniest I remember is when we were first testing the introduction of a mount hotkey, if you hit it quickly enough it would spawn a second mount and send it flying across the map. The bug included a gif of us rapid firing raptors across the desert. :)
For infuriating, I'd have to say anything with a low enough repro rate that we had to have 50 people on a map just to get steps to narrow it down. :P
That explains a lot. I really like all the mounts myself.
Thanks! I love them all too. The mounts team did a huge amount of iteration on controls to get each mount feeling just right. They're a team of perfectionists and it shows. :)
Mo
Loved the expansion so far, the only downside I found was that I feel like I completed most of what was new quite quickly compared to HoT but since LW4 is coming quickly that doesn't feel like a real problem to me. In other words, amazing work guys !
Now onto the question.
What's the thing you had the most fun working on for this expansion ?
And what's the biggest technical challenge you faced that you can talk about ?
The most fun I had was Story spoiler
In terms of technical challenges, we all spent a fair amount of time getting the flowing color effects in the sky to be the way we wanted in the Domain of Vabbi and various story instances.
When is Lyssa coming into play? She is such a hidden, powerful figure that surely she and the other Gods will have more in Season 4?
I can't comment on S4 but I can say that as far as we know, the gods are gone from Tyria for good. But I also share your fascination with Lyssa--she's contradiction in divine form.
Will there be a continuation of the Rift Stabilizer side story?
Will we see halloween come to Amnoon?
Can we find new and exciting ways to further praise Joko?
Since Joko has so much love, you could start your own religion around Joko, just like the Jedi religion. Might have some tax benefits too.
Hello balance team.
Are there any near term changes for the weaver specialization, especially for the sword and barrier skills? To me, while the class feels nice, the weapon damage and barrier are too low for a squish spec.
The weaver is a nice spec.
There are a few changes being looked into for the Weaver, to improve some damage numbers with Sword. Barrier numbers overall have been balanced So that it’s a boost of survivability, but not the primary source of it. We’ve experienced periods of godlike weaver survivability (internally) due to barriers being too strong, so we’ll be careful with any increases. We’ll continue to monitor the numbers, analytics and feedback, but for right now we’re holding them where they are until the sword damage numbers shake out.
Can you talk about the programming side of things a bit?
What source control do you use? What is it like collaborating on a game?
What languages/frameworks are used? Why were they chosen?
What are some things that you didn't expect to be a really hard but ended up being really challenging to program?
Edit : Formatting
Glint was Kralkatorrik's champion, Vlast and Aurene were Glint's scions.
Vlast was always intended to be a tragic character, and that sense of missed opportunity (not getting to know him better) is part of the tragedy.
The Guild Wars 1 servers have been extremely laggy lately, almost to the point where it’s unplayable.
The issue usually comes when you alt-tab out of the game while in an explorable area. When you tab back in your character and NPCs start rubber banding across the whole map and it doesn’t go away.
Other people I have been playing with have also reported the issue. It happens when leaving from both American and European districts.
Is there anything that can be done about this?
We're migrating to a new datacenter in Europe that should have better peering, thus more consistent connectivity. Stephen, our studio technical director, just spun up new servers there last night. So try today?
Mo
@Trevor Bennett Any possebilities that bounties will come in ls4 maps or old core tyria maps? I enjoy the system a lot in my casual gw2 free time.
Sorry about asking on future releases.
That's going to be up to those content teams. I can say that my intention was for it to be easy to plug into future content, I'll have to leave you in suspense if things worked out as planned!
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