How much Guild Wars 1 did you play before designing the areas we see in the expansion? Could you estimate the hours played? :D
Many many.. I remember laying out many of the maps the first time. We made sure we lined up Elona with Tyria... and years later, it's seamless.
This isn't specific to Path of Fire, but I've always enjoyed that ArenaNet employees have the option to turn on the ArenaNet tag within game, and that plenty do! It's always a treat to see them in game and know that many are players just enjoying the game with the rest of us.
Out of curiosity, when/if you play in your free time, do you prefer to roll with the tag on, off, or a mix of the two depending on your mood? Do you find that the tag draws too much attention, is it mostly positive attention?
Thanks for all you do!
I roll mostly tagged up. I find interaction to be mostly positive, if not sometimes humorous.
From all enemies introduced in PoF, which one do you feel is the most frustrating/rage-inducing to fight?
Scarabs. CURSE YOU!!
Sincerely, a salty Warrior.
Hoping there's an animator in there somewhere, or someone close to it. :) First of all, as someone learning 3D animation, i have to say i'm in love with the mount animations, they are so interesting to look at and have so much weight and life to them! It's a real inspiration.
Now for a few questions:
-What's your favourite animation from GW2? (Mine still the rolling Asura laugh)
-In terms of animation, what's the biggest chunk of work in GW2 when it comes to making a new expansion? What was the biggest challenge. (for example, mounts, creatures, new elite spec skill animations?)
-What areas do you wish you could improve in terms of animations, but simply don't have the time to?
-Any handy tips and tricks for a starting animator trying to get into the game industry?
I can speak a little to your second question, from a production perspective. Mounts were by far the largest amount of work for animation in PoF (not to diminish the hard work for any of the other things you mentioned). In general, any time we want to introduce anything new, be it some new creature, mounts...we have to consider the investment that is required to meet the level of polish players expect from ArenaNet in GW2. Requiring a new rig, with 2 sexes and 5 player races...you can start to see how animation cost can blow up for things like mounts.
How much Guild Wars 1 did you play before designing the areas we see in the expansion? Could you estimate the hours played? :D
Lots of oldtimers here, but a few of us newcomers voluntarily started playing GW1 during development to familiarize ourselves with the older lore and content, especially Nightfall/Elona.
I loved all the GW1 callbacks and cameos scattered throughout PoF. Not knowing the ultimate fates of some of these characters has bugged me for the longest time, and while some of them definitely got downer 'endings', that sense of closure was much appreciated. I do have to ask though, where's Razah!? I really hope you guys touch on him soon, such an interesting character.
I'm glad you were able find and enjoy all the call backs, especially those that brought some closure.
Do you have any favorite little detail, be it in story instances or open world?
Getting to add content as QA is really special and the fact that I got to contribute something other than thousands of bug reports makes the whole expansion feel special. :)
First off I just want to say story spoiler
Now for my questions: also spoiler
Now, and this is a very serious question :P, have you or anyone you know ever intentionally taken advantage of your Dev tag to gather a zerg?
That really depends on what you mean by "gather". I can't be blamed if the enemy faction is unable to contain their desire to claim an achievement and blindly wander into a choke point where an allied zerg just happened to be returning from a successful assault on a nearby keep. >>
Thank you for creating such a beautiful, texturally-rich world.
Are there any plans to extend the new human hair to the other races?
Glad you're enjoying your time in Tyria. :)
Did that make it hard for you to come up with the mechanics for each fight?
And along side that how free were you to come up with the new skills they used? (Like the traffic light system).
Did you just come up with something crazy and have someone like Hugh who could tell you if you went over board on something?
Finally, I just want to say that bounties is an amazing system that i liked a lot, 2nd only to the mounts, so thank you, and the rest of the team, for your amazing efforts!
I don't think coming up with ideas for the bounty skills was difficult. Believe it or not, the ideas is the easy part of design. It's everything else that is a ton of work.
It was pretty much my system, so theoretically I could make whatever skills I wanted. My objective was to make it fun though, so... that can be a limiting factor in my craziest ideas.
Everything that I really set my mind to made it in in some form. The static build up one probably saw the most iteration as I really struggled to maintain my objective for the skill while still making the mechanic easy enough to understand.
You'll notice some of the skills I stole wholesale from other parts of the game (some needed to be tweaked significantly to work in the new context though).
Thanks for the praise! It was a lot of hard work, and a feature that is a bit under the radar, but I'm pretty happy at how it turned out.
Please tell Rob that I give him permission to 20 griffon race in each map (including core and HoT).
About those griffons race, which one of you guys holds the best time for the race in-house ?
Lisa Davis is one hell of a griffon rider and she puts almost everyone else in the office to shame.
Thanks for the response, Mo.
I'm sure there are lots of people who miss the "guild" part of guild wars. If a little bit of love to guild activities and guild hall costs could be given in one of the bigger quarterly update type patches, we'd love it.
Thanks Razorant. That's a good way to phrase it.
I'll take the heat from other posters in this thread for pointing out that we haven't had a guild team since the start of Season Three and aren't staffing one now. I think it's important to preserve our team's ability to focus. I'm not pushing new mandates onto the team.
But yes, we love guild content too. We have passionate devs. But no promises.
Mo
A non-trivial number of the staff across a variety of disciplines were around to create Guild Wars 1. :D
And some of us were fans who played 3000+ hours of GW1 that now work for ANet (like myself).
Hey guys!
Congratulations on the expansion, I've done nothing but recommend the game to family and friends with mounts being the main selling point :)
Irenio and Karl - will the DPS be pushed up from the older classes to be more in-line with the newer ones or will the newer ones be pushed downwards to be in-line with HoT classes?
Follow up question - which elite spec do you guys see as needing the most adjustments? which are you the most happy with? which was the most fun to develop/design?
Thanks for coming out guys, we love you!
We're going to try to bring them together bit more, but we don't want them to be the same. That'll require some combination of up and down changes based on what each spec is aimed at - for some it is more damage, for others more utility, movement, support, etc.
We tend to be more critical of the things we work on - at the moment Scourge is an outlier with high value both defensively and offensively. I'd like to separate those options a bit more.
I wish I could give a specific answer on which spec I'm most happy with and had the most fun to developing, but they've all been a joy to work on in ridiculously different ways to the point it was virtually impossible to compare for me.
Do you have any favorite little detail, be it in story instances or open world?
Been loving PoF so far! It's so great seeing African characters and dress and decor in a game's "African" setting, instead of a weird white-washing and otherizing mess. Also the heart in Vabbi where you occasionally set up lesbians -- I did a triple take with that one because I couldn't believe my eyes. I'm not used to such casual and nice queer representation in games.
My question: What was the reasoning behind picking Kalla as rev's new legendary hero spirit? I'm thrilled with it but I know a lot of people feel like she's not legendary enough or there were better options. I have my own headcanon about it, but would love to hear about that process from the people who decided that she was the one to go with.
We chose Kalla because she's a huge figure in charr history and partly responsible for a major cultural shift that made the charr nation more unified and more powerful. And we also wanted to achieve a better gender and racial parity among the Revenant legends, so a charr female fit the bill perfectly.
Read moreGot a few here...
The PoF promotional artwork for Balthazar really reminds me of the Transfomers G1 Movie designs for Unicron and Wreck-Gar. Is there any chance someone pulled inspiration from those?
When Spoilers. Is that simply a design choice or should we be reading into that?
You guys did a great job making the maps fun and nostalgic, but is there any area you would have liked to develop even deeper if it had been possible?
I remember seeing the interview where you guys mentioned having a grand plan for GW2 in terms of the huge story steps. So I'm curious, how far back have you been specifically planning to make Balthazar the rogue god?
...
Nope, I would chalk it up to artistic choice in choosing to visually represent SPOILER in that way. The narrative intent was simply to emphasize the massive power he accumulated since escaping from the Mists bursting from him.
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ArminBarkas, Doppleganger... Doppleganger, ArminBarkas.
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