Guild Wars 2 Dev Tracker

Thanks for the screenshots. I went to the location and used your graphics settings, and the trees are rendering properly on the Mac (screenshot). So I'm wondering if there is an odd setup on your computer or if your graphics card is slowly dying (or maybe a fan isn't working properly). Are you experiencing graphics anomalies in other programs or applications?

This is Kevin with ArenaNet. I'm trying to repro this on my Mac and I am unable to. Can you post a screenshot of your mini map as well as your graphic settings? Thank you.

The Boneskinner track is great, I agree. It's not one of mine, so I can say that humbly! Thank you for listening.

I don't think that's one of mine, but thank you for listening and taking the time to appreciate!

Thanks so much. It's a team effort for sure.

Thank you! I'm very glad to still be working on the game after all these years. The world and the immensely talented people that create it are so inspiring and such a joy to work with, and it's so gratifying to know the music touches fans in the way we hope it will.

You are correct! Steel and Fire was already underway at the time but I didn't make their appearances until later once we got a better feel for their personalities :)

https://i.imgur.com/8TxcWBP.gif

I'll check with the team about being able to download them. It's something you have to set manually on each track when you're uploading them, which is an enormous pain. My guess is it's just an oversight.

Thanks for listening and caring about the music, everyone! This season's music has been one of the most interesting and diverse in the history of the game, in my opinion. I'm always curious how the community will react when the boundaries of what "Guild Wars music" is get pushed, so thank you for being open minded and enthusiastic.

Frigid Paw? More like Cold Shoulder, amiright...

+1

Now that’s a dude who’s seen some stuff...I almost feel guilty.

Happy (soon to be) anniversary!

Josh Foreman came up with the concept and wrote the first draft dialogue. Peter Fries and I punched it up and then George Coe acted it out. Turned out to be a fun little oddity in the game IMO.

I was in the VO booth when George Coe (R.I.P.) was voicing the captain. We asked him to play up the "many wives" bit and he absolutely killed us with his "blub blub blub" ad lib. I think I have video of it somewhere...

It isn't ideal for anyone, but I think, on balance, they probably made the right call.

We hope so. In the end, people's safety is more important. But also we wanted to make sure that people who wanted/needed to escape into Tyria to connect with friends and take their minds off of everything going on lately could do so. I feel like it was the best compromise but it was certainly a tough decision for everyone involved.

Ultimately, actors can turn their room(s) into quasi-studios. But that can take time and resources they may not have, or have shortly. Then there's the organization of recording.

This was something we looked into. This is fine if you're only recording a couple of people and are prepared to eat the cost of buying equipment for each actor, getting engineers in to set up all the gear (while wearing protective gear), and spending an extra day (per actor) getting all the software and hardware configured. Plus you'd be recording at half-speed (since everyone is remote it takes longer to provide context, do multiple takes, etc.) and getting audio at a lower quality than if you were using a full studio with more expensive mics, better soundproofing, etc.

We typically use 15-20 actors per episode, so this isn't a scalable solution unless the actors were already were set up to do this. And since the sound quality would probably have been noticeably ...

Wait, it is getting voiced, just later?

That's the plan.

I'm always watching ;)

I hear your frustrations, but let's try to stay away from hyperbole. The game definitely can improve in how it educates players in regards to it's various systems, I think that everyone can agree on.

How we improve that educative process is where the challenge lies, and it's something I know many designers think about regularly. There are lots of ideas on how to do so, and we try to figure out where in our content we can do things that ask players to engage with systems they may not be familiar with.

Since we're talking about Drakkar and world bosses here, if you look at Drakkar's overall encounter it focused on three encounter principles: General Organization, CC (Break Bars), and Optimal DPS. And, since you pointed out break bars as a pain point, let's talk about those.

The break bar requirements are easy to see: Drakkar needs to be broken to progress the fight past the shield phase, and the champs can be broken to turn off s...

Just want to pop in and provide some clarity, as it seems there's been miscommunications about our intentions with Drakkar.

The intent was never to be as difficult as Triple Trouble. That encounter has proven to be one of the most difficult in the game for a majority of players, and while I personally love the fight, I recognize that it is a level of difficulty that we haven't prepared many of our players to tackle.

We aimed for Drakkar to require *around* the same level of coordination as Teq or Vinewrath (splitting the group, catching orbs, bringing stability to counter some of the knockbacks and such) while setting a higher DPS expectation than Teq or Shatterer (those two drop WAY faster than we originally intended due to power creep across the last 5 years, allowing for people to kind of brute force their way through the fight, especially Shatterer). We didn't quite hit the mark we wanted when it came to communication, but based on our internal data collected si...

*thumbs up*

Jim Cummings. One of my favorite voice actors! Also does Winnie the Pooh and Tigger! He uses the Minsc voice in the Star Wars shows Clone Wars and Rebels as a pirate, Hondo. I might have gone a bit crazy the first time I heard Minsc in Star Wars. ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Cummings

I don't remember exactly but it was by far the most involved legendary. I had to do so much planning that I made a spreadsheet! I needed to figure out what the player animations all did for every race, sex, and class, then determine what shapes I could make the sword turn into that would work for all of those shared animations.
I'm making this up for the sake of an example - I don't remember who does what off the top of my head: human female guardian might spin around for skill 2 clockwise while others spin around counter clockwise. This kind of thing meant that I couldn't have the sword turn into a one sided shape, or some of the races would be hitting things with the blunt side of the shape. So I needed to do a lot of planning to make sure everything would work for all 16 of the shapes.
I also had to figure out shapes that would work well for the classes that shared the animation. I didn't have the luxury of making class-unique shapes - it had to be based on the player ...