Guild Chat - Episode 20

The following is an unofficial, player-written transcript of the episode. The accuracy of this transcription has not been verified by ArenaNet.
The 20th episode of Guild Chat aired on October 30, 2015.
"Host Rubi Bayer is joined by Associate Editor Casey Anderson, Game Designer Nate Johnson and Game Design Lead Mike Zadorojny to talk about the Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™ launch and Halloween!"
Transcription[edit]

Below is the raw unformatted transcript from Youtube.
happy halloween everybody that was probably the most insane thing that we
have done on the show and the bar is kind of high
i don't know i feel underdressed now like
i've been stood up by my colleagues all right i'm gonna need you to go change we
will wait come up with a costume now look i
improvised this so you can come up with something
all right so welcome back to the halloween guild chat
uh i'm gonna let you guys introduce yourselves first mike you're closest so
i think on you first sweet i'm mike zarrozner um
the one of the game design leads here working on guild wars 2 i'm nate
johnson i'm game designer working on guild wars 2 i'm casey anderson
i am associate editor working on guild wars 2.
thank you guys for coming today i appreciate it so
hot has been out for one week now you guys a week ago we did it
yeah it doesn't it both feels like five minutes and
10 years to me it's been insane but we were really really happy with how the
lunch went mike and i were talking about that before we went live
um it was frighteningly smooth that night like colin pushed the button
and nothing exploded and i know we were all kind of like i
was expecting everyone to you know he hit the button and
everyone would be rushing back to their desks to
fix stuff because my first uh game launch so i was really excited
thank you thank you so much for launch we actually
did it was just the reverse mo finished the speech and izzy and i immediately
ran down to the car jumped in drove home so we could play on live with the
fans this year we were a little more prepared so we just run back to our desk
so we could play with the fans yeah we just decided to live here yeah
exactly yeah is that it so we've been doing
we've been talking to you guys we've been listening to what you have to say
we've been sending out updates and bug fixes all of those little things it
was kind of a big patch so
um but it has been really really cool watching you guys and watching you guys
in house play and enjoy yourselves and um i'm just
like i just was gonna forget so i like made a
list of all of the things that i've heard people talking about claiming
their guild halls oh yeah um yeah we had a player who made
a pumpkin jumping puzzle in his guild hall did you guys see that
i saw the video it was really cool yeah it was amazing he placed like just a
billion pumpkins throughout his guild hall to show what could be done
just for fun i would love listening to like uh several i mean like in a couple
different guilds so i'll pop into their uh team occasionally and
one of them was like yeah i'm like bawling off this section this
is my room and then he leaves and somebody else goes why are all these
pumpkins here blocking this way see that is a man after my own heart i'm
still scoping out my guilds hall trying to figure out what is what is my spot
and now i know how so thank you sir for
rolling it off with pumpkins that is an excellent idea and i will do that
as soon as we're done here um let's see everybody's been
running around learning their new professions and specializations what are
you guys playing do you have a main uh my main is a
ranger so i've got to get going on the druid stuff
nice i've been working on my tempest it's a
lot of fun very interesting i wasn't expecting some
of the things i didn't spoil it before hot so
oh you didn't no uh too busy with other things what did you think when you
overloaded uh i really like the earth one where
you're like rolling around on that ball that thing is awesome and uh i didn't
know what i was doing at first but like uh the like the water bubble
one it was a lot of fun like uh i saw mad king with that oh really so it's
for my skill level it's it's pretty good that's totally okay what race are you
playing me yeah silvery okay that's why because
when i do the earth overload i play human
and she's like standing on a big rock and like
and skating around i don't i want to roll a savari now just to
make that tempest what about you uh daredevil
thank you gotta go my thief uh it's the character i've been playing since launch
so it's like i've got all my time all my investment in that one yep
and having that third dodge has saved me more often holy crap it's just evade for
days it makes me so happy it is a little bit
funny though because i took the condition side of it so when i
dodge roll now i throw the um the daggers and put like torment on things
which is great when you're in combat but then when you're actually trying to
avoid things to get through it automatically puts you in combat so
you're a little bit slower oh crud yeah that's right see i it's a
little bit of getting used to yeah it's a lot of getting i considered
kandi's for a little while and i was like i just want to hit things as hard
as i can how hard can i beat things with this
stick it's been so so much fun um but we people have
been playing through the story we're not going to spoil anything
um because i'm actually not spoiled for parts of the story and in carpool on the
way to work this morning i got a huge spoiler
yeah one week is not past the so statue of not spoil you're totally
safe for story to watch the show but we also had halloween at the same
time as heart of course yes we had some talk about why are you
doing halloween and heart of thorns at the same time
because this is when halloween is and this is when heart of thorns was
ready so yeah it was a little bit of that but
um halloween's always been something special for us um always going back to i
mean gw1 it was huge it was like the first
festival we always did yeah um and so for us like this is this is
our chance to continue that tradition and really you know have it there and
celebrate the moment um and we couldn't have done it without
these guys um just the amount of work that you guys put in
on top of everything else we're doing trying to get to launch was just uh
an underscoring of the importance of it is to uh this festival to us
as developers yeah we didn't want to just completely and totally abandon it
so it took it took some work it took some work to get it in there because
this was the first halloween with the expansion and lion's arch looked
different yeah yeah we kind of wanted to keep it
on the light side not like totally take over because we know you guys had
okay what do we want to play what are we what are we going to do here
um but we have i mean we have some new world drops in there
and i'm not sure was that kind of a group effort uh that was
izzy everything in the rewards like he came in and i got sick today
and and saved us like pretty much for the rewards and everything that went
into halloween because we were all working on hot like
heads down and uh we were worried that we wouldn't
be able to get a lot of these features in
and uh he saved the day so it was pretty good yeah thank you
izzy thank you we really really super appreciate that i go back to bed and get
better yes seriously we need you back um so
where did you guys i mean how did you all even start we have the
expansion we have new lions arch we don't want to completely overwhelm
everything with halloween but we still want to acknowledge how
special it is where do you even start fitting that in
that was a challenge a little bit yeah so uh
we started uh i pretty much ran through lion's arch and started like imagining
like okay halloween what can we do here um what
are we doing different for halloween this year what are we doing the same uh
we didn't want to really run with the bloody prince again so like why is the
bloody prince not here well we should know he hates candy corn
so we just put candy corn everywhere and that kind of kept oh
is that why yeah so you run into a few like priory members that are in the town
talking like hey do you know why the bloody prince is
in here it's because of all this candy corn
so cassie didn't waste her time after all oh that's amazing
i love it um so casey you and i had talked beforehand and
your involvement in this especially interested me because this was your
first time like doing content i mean you're usually editing the end
product right but you were doing content from beginning to end this time
yeah it was a really cool opportunity um you know i've been editing here for
about a year and a half and i had mentioned early on
um that i also would love to do some writing if the chance came up and
everyone's just been so busy trying to get hot out the door and when they
decided that they were going to do halloween
i got the opportunity to work with nade and then like
jeff bobby
but yeah nate really did a great job of getting the design kind of together and
then deciding which uh stuff to pull from the older
content and then we took that and worked together on
coming up with some of the new scenes and was super fun
like um researching all the different characters like we're
talking about like you know would the mad king say it that
way i don't know i remember remember at one point sort of arguing about like
his vocabulary because i was trying to throw a lot of crazy words in there and
some of them were like that's not gonna work i remember someone saying
what was it uh exercise look it up kids it has to do with wife killing
like that's not gonna work that's a little dark and also
i don't think the actor is going to be able to say it had to take that one out
kill a lot of wives he did and that's right matt king not the actor
i'm so sorry oh fred i'm sorry and he was
so cool uh like it was a really cool thing
writing those lines and um you know obviously like having
edited a lot of the game um i've heard a lot of voiceover that i've
worked on but it's kind of a different feeling when you actually wrote the
lines from scratch and then my words you get to hear the voice actors
interpretation of it and fred in particular was like really great
i really loved the way that he uh interpreted that stuff i remember in
particular i really liked it and he's like
oh he did an amazing job just like the little like
um things he added in at the end of the like certain lines he did this pretty
much a couple of little ad-libs that we actually loved so much we
had to go in after the fact and re-edit the vo
text because usually the text comes first when they're reading it we had to
go in after the fact re-edit the text to match his
little ad-libs because they were so good do you remember any of what are they uh
not all of them i would love to hear one in particular that was really great
was what we was referring to one of his wives who oh yeah and and he
was like i don't remember what how the lion went
he was at the end like oh ethel he was
talking about how he killed his wives or something and then he's like oh etho
like remembering like oh something his fourth
wife yes yes yeah about his fourth wife and
then continue down with the lion oh my gosh
so he just does a great job just um you know like throwing his laughs in
at good spots and he's he's such a pro he's got an amazing laugh too i don't
know how much we tweaked that after the fact but there's some like really good
source just that like insane bellow is
absolutely the best thing i think we must have had like half a
dozen lines that were just like crazy laughing insane laugh funny like
just all these different kinds of laughs just to get him to
really have the evil laugh oh look at the people i killed ha ha
that's fantastic it was it was interesting when we started writing the
mad king stuff um because i talked with bobby one-on-one
and he's like have fun with it like like fred can like handle this yeah and it's
gonna be a lot of fun like he can just go through and do all this
stuff and like don't hold back yeah and it was a lot of fun like especially
like seeing the final product like oh i wrote that joke and that thing says
and it wasn't tweaked too much after that
yeah we did have some some issues i think
the behind the scenes technical stuff you can
only put x amount of words into a line and we had kind of gone a bit overboard
when we were having so much fun writing the lines
so then later on during the editing process
uh we had to chop some of them down and try to fit them in and a few things got
kind of tweaked in the shuffle but we got most of the stuff in there we wanted
oh no does it just not fit when you yeah yeah it just won't fit
uh so you have to either split them into another line
um sometimes yeah it was kind of complicated it was complicated
yeah duo was a lot of fun
you don't i don't feel like you mean that is you picked up on that i feel
like it's your powers of observation
it's a really powerful tool allows us to do some really creative crazy things i
mean you look at all the events that we've done in the open world
oh my gosh i mean even going back like some of the creative things we did for
like the beta weekend finales like we can do really awesome and fun things
oh yeah but again it comes with its technical
challenges to work with it yeah and we're always
pushing the limits as well which i had to cry tonight several times
like i don't know how to do this you know you did something wrong or
right depending which side of the fence you're on when a programmer comes and
goes what have you done and you just go you're welcome yes all
right i'm not sure it's going to work but we can try
we'll give it a shot let's see what happens oh man
so you guys talked about how you talked a lot about
how the mad king would say things we have established characters that you
were writing for and we have this established character
we have new content and we have you coming in and making
something awesome with it how do you bring those three things together and
make them work and i think you know the wiki is such a great tool so going to
the wiki reading up on that stuff yes um yeah thank you wiki contributors
yes thanks for talking thank you so much yes yeah about the
like the previous year's content at least i was
around for last year's uh blood and madness and sort of had a
little bit of a feel for it but yeah it's uh go ahead
in the research time i think i spent most my time on the guild wars one wiki
going through and reading everything that the
original mad king did like his uh his invisible horse
and all that and just oh the invisible pony that's a guy
there's some crazy stuff in there and we had a lot of plans but we didn't have a
lot of space as far as like what we could execute it
on and so um we wanted to keep it light and i i feel like we kind of nailed it
as far as getting like the theme in lion's arch set like i walked in like
after we launched and like it felt like halloween and it was great
yeah it absolutely does i'm still i have a little bit of a problem with
all that candy corn because i can't harvest any of it so
that's kind of an issue because i do need candy corn well it'll be gone soon
so guess what i'm doing this weekend i'm
going to be catching up on halloween so can we talk about drew bert oh boy
here okay so i had this crazy idea um
what if in drewber's afterlife he got lost
and uh because he would yeah he would drew he
kind of ends up in places he shouldn't be he makes a few poor decisions along
the way um and the next thing you know he's in
mad king's realm kind of doing his thing there
and matt king uh wasn't too happy about it
but at the same time like what can he do so um
we uh we could ridicule him and make him your mind
so we uh brought drug about drewber back for halloween and um
it was it was fun um he's begging for candy corn uh did you do a spoiler tag
on this hey guys okay halloween's going on
i said we weren't going to oh that drew bird's dead
oh no no okay hey guess what died like a year ago you guys you're late
there drew bird's ghost is in lion's arch stay away
but uh sorry carry on it was a lot of fun it was especially a lot of fun
working off his established character and uh writing lines for that and so we
like had like the the line uh drewbert has
made some bad afterlife decisions right and uh
it was it was a lot of fun yeah i think that was one of my favorite
conversations that we worked on was the mad king talking to drewbert that
was good stuff please spare no vines for quaggan
so i will give one little spoiler because
i think it was you that told me about this uh drewbert in life was spare
changing outside the bar in dry top that worked
out really well for him yes um we gave him a lot of gold now
he's kind of spare changing for candy corn yeah
candy corning so i gave him when i was playing around just looking at the
content i gave him i think i gave him like 10 candy corn
and then i gave him 100 candy corn i was like you have taken enough of my
stuff and i wandered off turns out i didn't give him
enough things no there's an achievement for it yeah yeah
so if you give him a thousand candy corn he'll give you something this time
yeah it's totally worth it yeah yeah all right so what is your favorite part
of halloween that you worked on uh really seeing the mad king his
evolution um uh the very first year that we brought
it for gilbert's two uh kim kirsch and i kind of worked worked
on the initial bringing the festival to life and bringing mad king from guild
wars 1 to guild wars 2. um and so like even that initial
impression of seeing fred tedescher bringing
this iconic character who'd been in guild wars 1 for so many years
into a you know to life and actually hearing him for the first time what
would it actually sound like and we were kind of scared and so
actually seeing the evolution and seeing what these guys be able to do and
you know continue the story of year after year is still one of the greatest
things um and there's so many nods back to kind
of the traditions that he has brought to this game from you know mad king says
you know to his let's say questionable humor
um and things like that so it's it's always fun you know and it's it's like
nate says you walk into lion's arch and it feels like it's halloween and that's
always awesome for me so he does have terrible jokes
my favorite terrible joke is gone oh oh which one is that the pumpkin on head
joke does anybody remember that yes yes i can't hear you i have a pumpkin on
my head that was the best terrible joke i don't
know i'm still i'm partial to the dwarf jokes
which one like the fact that they aren't around and he's upset about it
there was one i was like oh i'm sad dwarves are gone um
i can't remember the rest don't know i was like why do you never ask
a dwarf for money it's because they're always a little short yeah
and he's like i miss the dwarves there was a norn one that something
about a moot and then he's like cause they're all drunk he's like joking
huh norn's drink that's bad when he has to explain the jokes but
it's so bad it's good it just circles completely around but yeah every year i
like listen to hear the pumpkin on head joke and every year
it does not come back and i'm really unhappy about it you should have put in
a special request
i asked him for it it's true she did i did you gave me an npc but you can't
give me this wow wow really we're going there all
right don't take care of it
i'll just go i like that we brought the mad king boss fight back uh
i always had fun with that when the first year it came out uh
when he destroyed the lion statue and poor lion statue
and uh it was fun to go back in there and relive that content again especially
for people who started after halloween right the first
time and didn't get a chance to experience it
it was a it's a good it's a good time as far as like
fighting him and kind of experiencing what he's about as far as combat
um other things i like we're setting up the scenes like uh so
on the alternating hours when he doesn't do matt king says he'll
wander in a certain direction at one end he uh encounters drewbert
and he does this the scene with him where he's like oh you're here begging
and like i don't want to deal with you anymore
and he's kind of mocking him but at the end he feels bad he's like okay let's go
terrorize people and yeah that was that's probably my
favorite line fred tatasha's read of that line is just fantastic
yeah oh i can't stay mad at you and then uh on the other end we uh we
ran into uh evan guarding his line statue because
this is a brand new lion statue right and mad king has a history of blowing
these up and so he's like you stay away from it
this year you're not gonna blow this one up
and they uh they have a couple of funny exchanges there i have not caught that
one yet oh that's pretty good i caught the drew
burton counter only because you showed me and i keep meaning to go
back in there and check it out more but i've been playing art of thorns sorry
i've actually been playing halloween so i haven't played hot yet
have you have you been in the labyrinth uh yes i have i've spent uh
quite a bit of time in there lately collecting candy corn and trick-or-treat
bags trying to get that endless batwing tonic
so do we want to go there nope nope where
are you i mean there's nothing better than
writing bad jokes like writing bad jokes for the mad king is awesome
it's so much fun um so yeah we had a really great time just goofing
around bouncing ideas off each other and um and it was fun too so some of it
had to be it was pretty much everything was
re-voiced right uh because we did a lot yeah jokes came in
but we had some technical changes that forced us to we had to
revoice all the trick lines so that that gave us a good or at least
for me because i hadn't heard all the jokes before it
gave me a good base of things to like i had to look at all
those first so i kind of understood how awesome the mad king truly is and uh
it was super fun riding this yeah that was definitely my favorite part
so are you guys one of the things that i really especially liked
was all of the things that you brought in that we can buy with candy corn and
candy corn cobs this year that we couldn't get before
because i spent so much of the past year being sad that i love mini pets they're
just a little fun addition while i'm beating things with my
daredevil stick and i was really sad that i didn't have
the ghost wolf pup all year i opened so many
trick-or-treat bags and when i found out that you could buy her this year with
100 candy corn cobs do we know whose decision that was
it's probably izzy see izzy come back i want to tell you thank you
i was incredibly incredibly happy about that that's what i had the most
questions about is is uh gwyneffred going to be on the
vendor or can you get it again this year and
like i don't know i don't know what's gonna happen and then when izzy came in
and saved the day he put quinnipito on the vendor thank you
yes yeah i love her so have you guys been using some of the new items
and which one do you like oh yes the um the batwing back piece the
the big oh my gosh yeah the like the glider combo thing that
thing is amazing um i remember the brainstorm for that
and uh and i was like hoping we could get it into the game
and we did and is everything i hoped for and more
yeah that was a day one purchase for me so running around hot was it really oh
yeah yeah those are amazing do you have the bat
sword also not yet you should get the bats and just bat
everything i may have been focusing on masteries for the past week
and farming the crap out of heart of thorns
and there's may have been an unofficial race between izzy and i to see who could
get more mastery points so that's really yeah i've only got like
this weekend to focus on halloween now that's why he's not here you poisoned
his food whoa whoa whoa maybe he was at home playing the game
the nicest guy on the planet and the first thing we do is like oh you're
responsible for that he made izzy sick it's a front no okay
it was bad when we came in on monday or we were chatting on email and we're like
we both made poor choices this weekend to how much we've played like
moderation all things players please make sure you're taking care of yourself
drinking water and things like that shower yes we may have made ourselves a
little sick no we're just playing so much oh yeah we
were racing each other it's like so what are you at now
oh that's interesting i'm one up on you i'm like damn it okay
you know alternate theory he's not sick at all maybe
and he's that's what i'm farming up mastery points right now
and he's got you on his other monitors just pointing and laughing going thanks
for taking this so i could play yeah exactly i appreciate that greatly
that's amazing all right so that's about all we kind of wanted to go
through halloween and go through the first week of heart of thorns
please don't give yourselves eye strain please drink lots of water
uh please bathe please keep the feedback coming as you guys seen over this week
we've done a couple of patches pretty much daily up until this
point trying to make sure that we're you know continuing our approach to
iterative design um and you know we want to make this
game the best that it can be so thank you for everyone who's been giving us
feedback um both you know positive and you know
the constructive feedback as well because oh yeah it's been good it's been
really helping us trying to you know nail this in and or dial us in
man is he's not here and i'm already doing the bad analogies per minute
uh but yeah it says a little yeah we read it we uh see what our fans are
saying our players are saying as far as like how they're
experiencing the game and what they like and what they don't like and we take
that into consideration definitely yeah that's pretty much all
we've been doing in editing is handling all the polish bugs i mean i
haven't even really had any time to play halloween or
hot to be honest and which is editing and loc being
kind of at the end of the line there i mean we're still just cranking out these
hot fixes really fast so hot fixes yeah
that's what you do there you can't you can't say
the word hot in this building without somebody going huh
okay so bad okay come to hang out with the comms team for
a little while because we can't we can't stop pointing out when
somebody says hot it's terrible so well i'll tell you what
since we have halloween on the brain we have an in-game event this afternoon
so in just a few hours you guys should log in join us a lot of the
arenanet staff will be and will be tagged up so you can see and we will be
playing halloween with you you guys need to come and spend some
time with us because that's our favorite part is playing with you guys
yeah that's the best all right i will let you guys get back to work
one last question heart of thorns or halloween for you this weekend
oh man it's got to be halloween because i'll make sure that you finish off all
the achievements get all the like the items and stuff like that before it
goes away so all right definitely halloween i think i'm going
to go heart of thorns you haven't played it yet yeah i've
barely played any of it so yeah really i would recommend getting gliding
because gliding is amazing i haven't gotten that yet then you want
to get in there you guys you get so that's okay he's been playing
halloween you see how i excuse you so i was i was
unlocking all my masteries on one account and then i swapped accounts
and forgot that i didn't have gliding unlocked
and i'm like no it's totally cool i'm inverted brink you know
there's gliding here account wide not accounts wide
they know it's me they can see me yeah so we were doing the mad king boss fight
like with just the people like uh on the team they're just super hard but
and uh there's this chain like right after you spawn in and you have to walk
down and i have to remind everyone guys you don't have gliding in here
and they're like oh i almost jumped off thanks and they had to run down the
chain yeah oh no so i have a guild mate who mentioned
that you know we've had a lot of players
talking about how they forget that there's not gliding
outside of a heart of thorns so they'll like be in divinity's reach
and go to glide and he said you know we're having all we have all of these
new players coming in they're probably standing around divinity's reach going
i thought these people have been around for a while and knew how to play
why are they all just killing themselves
oh man all right so i know you guys have a ton to do
and we have an in-game event to get ready for so we will
let you guys go and i will see you all in game and next week on guild chat
thanks guys bye thanks
happy halloween everyone
Guild Chat - Episode 20

Transcription[edit]

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