Guild Wars 2 Dev Tracker

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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