Guild Wars 2 Dev Tracker

Appreciate the kind words about mounted movement, we think so too! Making the mounts feel like real creatures was one of the pillars of our design.

We're actually excited about seeing players enjoy mounts in the rest of the open world. For those of us where map completion is a means to an end (I'm looking at you, legendary weapons...), mounts could be quite the boon :)

It wasn't long into development for mounts when we decided we'd have to include them in the open world, just like we ended up doing with gliding. We hope you all enjoy the freedom of mounting up most anywhere just as much as us.

I personally really enjoyed trying to find ways to callback to GW1 and also to refer back to the events of Edge of Destiny, which happened offscreen, so to speak.

Getting everything right for the epic scene in the library was my personal challenge. It wasn't so much a technical challenge as much as it was a lot of coordinating with our awesome artists Tirzah Bauer and Phil Hunter to get everything right, and making sure that effect or this animation played exactly when it was supposed to and seamlessly transitioned to the next.

I would have loved to dive deeper into the Hidden City of Ahdashim or just build more Djinn cities/temples. I never tire of building magical floating cities xD

One of the things I enjoyed working on was trying to create memorable characters in the open world. The kids at First Camp are part of a family that has had some loss, so has Jingo. Giving the Followers of Ascension a motive why they seeking it. And how the last survivings sunspears still try to fight the good fight. Refering back to the GW1 characters in some way in the Desolaiton, that was really satisfying as well.

And finally as one who helped layout the worldmap for Tyria and Elona, just matching up some of the locations, and trying to show what became of them 250 years later. Not too many times you get to revisit areas that you worked on a decade later.

Praise Joko

This will likely stay. We currently don't really really have different classifications of transforms(they are used in all sorts of ways across the game) and a lot of them that would be cause issues or balance concerns if we let you mount and remove the transform.

One way story development changed from HoT to PoF was that in HoT, we started with a stable list of locations we wanted to visit, in the order we wanted to visit them. For PoF, we gave ourselves a lot more leeway to pick and choose the places we would go to support the story as it unfolded. And it's not like there was a shortage of awesome places to consider in the desert region...

Re: moments during story development when we had to rework stuff, we actually were re-working the story constantly to the point we were giving ourselves anxiety attacks. Spoiler So to answer your question more directly, the last six months were full of "aw crap, we need to redo/address/change this moment" XD

First off, there were many bugs that fit the bill of weird, and oftentimes funny (don't know if you had the chance to check out the mounts blooper reel from the Mounts Guild Chat).

One of my personal favorites was when I was playing Spellbreaker and I happened to mount up when the Bladestorm animation was still finishing. My character was permanently stuck in the sweeping animation he was making with the dagger, only without the dagger! This animation continued while mounted, and wouldn't go away even when I used a dev kill command on myself (in which case, I was a dead body, still animating the sweeping dagger attack from the waist up). Pretty funny stuff :)

"What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well."

We announced a lot in advance, but we held back some things to preserve that sense of discovery on release day.

Mo

A smaller cast of characters definitely helped--it allowed us to spend more time with fewer characters and have more and more meaningful interactions with the folks in your party.

We also looked at how we were using Cinematics and decided that the more we could keep the player in control (via in game action instead of a cutscene), the stronger the player's narrative experience would be.

I'm very glad to hear it, thank you :)

It’s likely that we won’t be adding new weapons to core professions (baseline). Elite specializations allow us to implement weapons with more direct themes and flavor, and ensure a more modular (within the elite spec) way to balance weapons.

I would have been glad to see it too T_T I might have cried when I played The Way Forward :x

It was something we've always wanted to do but didn't have time before. We wanted to add them into this expansion to give areas more moods from just day/night. You'll notice the rainstorm from the south of Riverlands will be on at the same time as the one in the north of Desolation too!

I was lead and mission designer for GW1, laying out the world. So returning to the Crystal Desert was really nostalgic. I enjoyed revisiting Augury Rock and the Trials of Ascension, missions remember designing. I put in the kids playing Ascension to help tell that GW1 story.

And finding a place to put the Flame Seeker Prophecies. The original text was written over a dozen years ago during Prophecies development. It's changed but to finally get it in game was cool.

Praise Joko

I can't really touch on the zephyite skills as I wasn't part of that team, but having mounts usable everywhere in the open world was the plan from the start. We knew that with such a big addition to movement and exploration, it would feel bad if it was limited to just a few areas. It would feel like we gave you this great toy then took it away from you whenever you played elsewhere. We hope it'll encourage a lot of people to go back and play areas they have played before to see it with a fresh pair of eyes. Maybe even seen some map complete speed runs. xD

To respond to your last question: Amnoon was a lot larger initially but had to be downsized due to performance and to add more content to the other parts of the map. The noble quarter for example hadn't been devastated by a sandstorm!

Mine's the Command... no, it's Joko