Guild Chat - Episode 23

The following is an unofficial, player-written transcript of the episode. The accuracy of this transcription has not been verified by ArenaNet.
The 23rd episode of Guild Chat aired on November 20, 2015.
"Host Rubi Bayer is joined by Narrative Director Leah Hoyer, Narrative Lead Bobby Stein, Game Designers Jason Reynolds and Crystal Reid to talk about Spirit Vale, the first wing of the new Raid."
Transcription[edit]

Below is the raw unformatted transcript from Youtube.
happy friday guys and welcome back to guild chat i'm your
host ruby um it's sure to be a boring show because we're all very straight
laced today and very serious and not at all acting silly
um we will start talking about raids here
in just a second i have a couple things to tell you guys first
stick around after the show is over because we're debuting our pvp league
show on point with jebrow and herrick's and it's gonna
be really good uh jebrow and herrick's have both been
working hard to prepare for it so i'm excited to see what they have to say
we also have an awesome winter's day look to the set that you might notice
and we're starting a little bit before thanksgiving just because
i am 8bit who we've been working with for some great guild wars 2 merchandise
has debuted a couple new things just in time for winter's day we have the
amazing holiday sweatshirt for divorce 2 with our little quaggan i know i love
her she's so happy to get her gift
this is i've been saying all day this is like the most comfortable thing i have
ever had i know ugly christmas sweaters are like the thing but we went with a
holiday sweatshirt instead for comfort so you can check out i am
8-bit store and get that for yourself we also have a holiday plush quaggan
so i'll have mark push the quaggan button look at that
isn't that the greatest this is adorable yeah you haven't seen that yet
i have not seen it yet right it's a surprise for me
yeah so these are on i am 8-bit store now
so get your very own because they are so cute and they are so squishy
and snuggly we have one on set we don't have them in yet
last time we at least got like the little we got like the little prototype
of the regular guy not right now so that's all the cool
stuff we have that's not raids this this f i keep
wanting to say this morning it's just it's very early for me
apparently it's no longer morning no no so we'll just talk about if you're in
hawaii good morning there we go while i try to figure out
what time it is we can talk about raids i'll let you guys introduce yourselves
uh crystal you just introduced me you were taking too long
oh sorry i told you it's a very serious show today
ouch my name is crystal reed and i'm a game designer and i'm the team
lead on the raids uh my name is jason reynolds i'm also
apparently the sas king and a designer on the range i'm leah
hoyer uh narrative director here at arenanet
uh which as we'll talk about has some
impact on raids so just a tiny bit just a tiny bit yeah
so i know a lot of you guys have been getting your faces smashed in um
per collins prediction everybody's getting their faces smashed
but there's a lot more going on than just smacking around the bosses and
vice versa i mean there was there's a little bit of story
and one of the things that we've been talking about is how you manage to make
that work we've got the raid design and then we
have story that needs to kind of relate to the maine guild wars 2
story but not completely spoil it and intertwine because you've got
certain groups of players here that we're working with so how did you guys
how did you make those two work together for starters
well for starters and we just came up with this crazy
really high level story and we went to leah we're like we have like these ideas
and she's like okay we can work with this we have to dial it back
but a lot of it was we just gave them the high level direction that we would
like to go and we thought would be interesting to have the encounters in
these type of things and then from there yeah because i think
probably even to take a bit of a step back obviously like
we're coming out of hot hopefully most of you have played it and
played through a lot of the story and of course our
model of kind of continuing ongoing story isn't changing
you know we've got a sense of like we put a big nice chunk of story out there
but now we're going to spend some time in
maguma sort of diving into that further and and and so
the next several releases that are coming out are we going to have these
great raids that are we wanted to have continue that story
and so yeah we were looking at look we know
we'd love to have these kind of fights we'd love to have these sorts of bosses
and the narrative team also knew that we wanted to sort of
start weaving in some new elements of story and so
we started to really look back and forth like oh yeah there could be that
great awesome boss that does this kind of thing and here's maybe some great way
to tie it into all the stuff that we want to do and
it's actually been a really fun challenge to figure out
how to weave story into raids in the right way
i mean we've had many many conversations about that sort of thing so yeah it was
it was a fun process but yeah you guys came said
hey here's a b and c that we'd love to do and we were like yeah
that seems like it totally could work over here a little
bit and starting to balance the skills with the kind of things that
largely we're telling a lot of story ambiently so
you know that was how do we do that in such a way that that made that really
work but i'm excited yeah yeah i think that's the
great way we've been able to make the narrative
work in the raids uh because we knew from the get-go that it
was out of scope for us to have any kind of like
story instances we're like okay well how do we tell the story
inside the raids uh without your standard type of
you know single-player story instance but then um
like have all these like little little narrative bits like seated throughout
and how does this all tell a cohesive story
yeah because you know a person playing a raid doesn't want to stop and
have a one-minute conversation with you know uh
and you also don't want to wait for the person to having them nbc who's like
giving you an interesting lore dump that's certainly what we wanted to avoid
for raids you know well and you've got a certain
kind of player that's in there when you're doing raids and it's
if you're going into a raid if you're taking your group in and you're going in
there you're after there's a certain kind of game play
you're after and you don't want it to be on one hand you don't want it to be just
static you know here's this cardboard cutout monster that i have to
hit until it falls down you want something going on you want a reason for
being in there but like you said if you're that kind of
player that's going in there you're in there for one thing primarily
so you can't have a story taking over but it's i don't know it sounds like it
took a long time to get that balance um i mean i think we had good instincts
i mean these two folks are really they're experienced raiders kind of
first and foremost too so you know speaking to people who know
just truly understand what people really come to raids for it's not like
the narrative team had yes yeah you know tomes and tomes of text that you can
read places you know we we knew really early on that what we
didn't want to do was was put in lots and lots and lots of lord dump that
was never going to be the point the point was though
giving it a nice context that does relate
to where we're going and what we want to do and and starting to reveal certain
elements of the story and so i think we started off with the sense
that you know probably less is more and i think that was a really good maxim
across you know just all the stuff we're doing
in raids is like okay yeah let's make the awesome
super challenging group
to give that gameplay to give it some meaning we absolutely wanted to do
some you know some play around with yeah hey
let's start to see this idea because this is going to be super cool and maybe
there's a hint of this over here so that that sort of stuff
um were really where the refinements i think went in
yeah so you have this whole world you have 250 years of lore
that you're building on but again you can't do the big lure dump how do you
how did you use that as a foundation without letting it totally take over
wow how do i answer these things without spoiling stuff
that's an interesting thing that i cannot wait to find out
i think like with pretty much everything that we do obviously there's such a long
history because yeah there are 250 years of sort of from
when we started guild wars as an actual franchise but
even then the the story and the lore and the backstory
go back even further than that so there's
always an element of what we're doing and when we come to maguma i think
some of the the things that people have responded to in the heart of thorns
story is the fact that oh wow well we started to do all these
things and we've now we've gone and we've
found new enemies we found new locations we have
you know the golden city and we have red and novus and all this sort of stuff and
it's like and we've just we've barely kind of
scratched the surface and absolutely we've barely scratched the surface
it's not like there's not more to tell but so the point is
we've been seeding a lot of things for a while and now it's like how do you put
that next piece of all the kind of inner woven
storytelling that we are going to put into raids and our next season
and all of that and how do they work together in a way that
um feels like yes we are furthering the story but also
like we also recognize that there are people who really are into story
who probably aren't going to do a lot of raiding aren't going to complete the
raids and that sort of thing so how do we balance that particular thing
to yeah we want to move the world forward but we also want it to be
something that can be you know shared and recapped and and and
you have other ways to find out that really
critical information too like that's that's been an important part for us
yeah and on the other side of that this is
probably kind of a question for you but also for both of you
how are you you're building this gameplay that needs to fit with the
narrative design and i think it was probably a lot easier since you were
working with leah and with the writers from the
beginning but how did you fit the gameplay and the mechanics and
everything that you wanted into that narrative ooh um
and no spoiling so like
it was actually wasn't really that difficult you know
like we had pitched like i had worked on the last boss in the encounter and i had
a really clear idea what i wanted to do for mechanics
uh and we had talked a little bit about like who the character was
and why she was there uh and we weren't going to reveal
everything uh at the end of the release because some of it the story continues
into the next release uh and you know i just i was like all
right i want to do this really crazy fl like attacks with lots of fire
because you're in a tree fort and i want to burn this whole thing down
and they're like we really like fire around here
we can work with that and actually it was really funny because i
i named everything after like my friends so like they did i named all the
characters in the last fight after like my
guildies from uh that i did and uh like so i kept trying to sell them on
all these character names i'm like yeah her name is sabatha the saboteur and
like what is she saboteuring i'm like everything
somehow i managed to convince them that these are the best names
his character name was like nicole's oh my god doesn't make sense and we
actually call them nachos and i'm like yeah
they're never going to call them nachos to sell nachos as a character i try no i
i it's funny that's like these makes sense
and we had this whole backstory about why it was called knuckles
and it gets kind of revealed a little bit as you like discover some of the
narrative elements in the instance so see like
super with the punching no i'm not gonna no spoilers no you guys told me what we
couldn't spoil and i never tried not spoiling knuckles
i gave some names yeah and some backstory on the name i
kind of i kind of like this i did so jason took me through the raid
yesterday just to kind of give me a heads up because
you know my cheats haven't done it yet yeah with all the chidi dev hacks
i didn't see knuckles and now i'm very very excited to find oh yeah
that is i'm excited to find this character you can give him a highlight
i'm sorry oh that's okay he looks like byron
no he does
the everyone that all of your character development is like names of people you
know who look like people you know and you just mash those together and yes
basically no that's what we all do really
so you know there's a lot of little nods throughout our game
like that oh yeah that's everywhere oh my gosh
all right i'm gonna need to yeah i'm gonna need to find this guy
there's like a screenshot of like the three characters that are part of the
encounter no i've seen that i want to see him in
the game though okay i'm excited about this and now i know who i'm looking for
i like that he looks like byron is well that was the thing like
people saw it and they're like why did you why'd you make an npc that looks
like byron and i'm like it's not byron it's it's
knuckles he's also got his butt he also has a glorious beard
he has a beard and a mohawk there's not many people
that could be i mean i saw and i was like hey that guy looks like byron
so right you you totally did that even my inspiration when i was building the
composite a little and i'm sure he was really sad about
that i did make another bayern in the game at one point
what yeah there is a guild puzzle in um plains of ashford in the
human uh the langmar state i think it's called yeah and there's a curator that
walks around i think it's a ghost and he's just like upset about how how
messy everything is
everything's all messy and he's like oh the curtains and he's like straightening
the curtains byron but i did this back when he was
like in qa and so everyone was like ragging on him for a little bit i felt
pretty good about that i have never noticed this guy and i've
done that puzzle a whole bunch of times yeah so next time in the room where all
the paintings are when you pull the curtains
we're not even talking about raids anymore no we're going to have a huge
like fan base of people who just go there just to meet buyer in the don't
think anyone's going to be buying the nickety yeah he
doesn't he doesn't look like byron he looks he looks like is there someone
who looks like you in game yeah yeah a little a bit there's a a
pirate named gates and you you actually get into like a
little swearing competition with her oh that's so appropriate i won that
i won that i mean i lost that because i never cuss
yeah maybe i don't think there's a liar in game i'm okay with that
this is happening there you go we need to get some more
more people's work in there yeah oh my gosh that's amazing all right so now you
guys have some you guys have some real people that you
can go find in the raid you can be you can be the mushroom king
because he has a little crown huh all right okay so raids
and narrative um you had explicit storytelling i mean just
straight up here's here's the story here's what's
going on in the raid but then we have other things and we'll go into this more
because bobby stein is going to be joining us
a little bit bobby who is really instrumental in implementing
uh most the story and the grades with a lot of good details
bobby's going to talk about details with us but there's an overarching
just little hints of story that you can look around for
absolutely and how much i mean how much time
was spent in making all of that happen because here's here are the little
pieces of storytelling that we want to put in there
so make it happen from a design point of view
how did that work um well i mean we wanted to focus on the
encounters right and then get the story put in and
one of the things that we do very well in guild wars is having the one-on-one
stories um but when you have 10 players in an
instance you kind of want to give them an opportunity to like run around
and find things and sort of pick it up like a journal or something so we just
kind of spent some time developing that content
and making a little game of it and spawning it around the space
that's one of the things i like you take down the boss and okay now we're done we
never have to come back again except there's so much more to find in
there i think one of the things that came up a lot is
in the personal story it's your story and the voice is always your voice
uh and so when we're looking at raids uh the one the biggest things came up is
who's going to say all this dialogue like what character is going to speak
and at one point it was like well what if it's always the commander or what if
it's always this person really that doesn't really make sense you guys are
kind of here together as like this elite group of a team type
mercenaries or something it's not any one person's story
it's your your team's story yeah and so that's where
it's it's basically just the first person who interacts with these things
and it could be any person whoever runs forward first
their character notices something and then they say something that they
noticed in the world and then all the rest of people in the
squad can say oh or they can see oh that this person who ran forward
noticed something yeah i was joking with jason yesterday that
there's this is going to trigger like a giant stampede in every raid group like
everybody's trying to be the first one to get there
i saw it first i saw
yeah and players will hit it and like they'll say the line first
so if you really want to be the vocal one
just go ahead you know don't mind the landmines or whatever might be put there
you know just you just run created a legion of
leroy jenkins in spirit pale there's like one guy in
heavy armor just stampeding forward at every opportunity and getting blown up
i want to be the spotlight well he's going to be the
whatever he's going to wind up being the trap finder is exactly what's going to
happen thanks man we'll res you later
but i think also kind of related to this and you know i've said this before to
folks we know where we want to take our story
sort of long term and there are steps and this
actually became a really nice opportunity to start seeding in
something that we really want to play up a lot more in the future and so
it really became a lovely opportunity to to do that in a new way
and to find new ways to make that happen so that um
through the process of raids and making it all i know i'm
so trying hard not to tell people too much
is that um though through these pieces and these encounters you really do start
to get maybe some inkling of where we may be
going next and that's pretty exciting i think uh
to see it so it's it right now the story of raids absolutely takes a bit of a
turn from from where we ended off and hot but
i guarantee you it's all going to come back around together and sort of
make some sense and that was a really cool thing working with this team
that we got to say hey we'd love to start introducing this new thing that we
want to be doing this does seem like a really great
opportunity let's find ways to make that happen and
and i do i think it was really successful and kind of like crystal was
saying once we all kind of had a few of those
conversations it actually became pretty easy to find ways to make that
happen you know we were sort of going back on
balance of is this too much story here there
are people actually going to take any time to explore in this particular area
for instance which is a very different thing than
i hope doing do or not want to have that story and so it's also really thinking
about with the raiders playstyle in mind and with
the kind of speed and cadence that you get
when people are playing through a raid where are the optimal places to kind of
put stuff and what would be rewarding for people
that maybe once they finished a certain encounter like maybe
had an opportunity before if they ran off again could they do a little
exploration and find some stuff oh that might be rewarded
um but you know if if people also didn't want to it wasn't going to get
in the way of just a great hardcore raving experience that was the other
thing too is that it should be part of it kind of woven into it and
and i do think i think you guys did just such a great job and bobby too
bobby is in the back of the room bobby did a great job
we'll let him come in pretty soon okay but that is
that's one of the things that i really really love is that all of this story
is there if you want it but if you are not
a player who's into that kind of thing it's not gonna it's not going to
actively harm your raid experience if you're if you're not getting it it
struck a good balance so i have i have a narrative question
before we take a little break okay bring bobby in
how much i'm now i'm the one like okay how do i do this without screwing up and
revealing too much
i know people will go back to spirit veil much later
and in hindsight be like oh i see now what i was i understand now
what i was looking at how much do you expect peop do you
expect people to piece everything together right now or to
piece anything together that's a it's a kind of loaded question
i do think that there are certain places there's a trap yeah
no i think when we're look every time we design story we're always
aware that so many of our fans know the story just as well sometimes even better
than we do like people get super excited about certain areas so
what we like to do is create story that encourages
speculation and encourages where things can go and that's
i think the hallmark of good game storytelling particularly
in a vast rich world like the guild wars universe there's so many things in tyria
and so many places that things could come from that ideally what's always
really cool is if you can get people then having discussions it's like
oh i think it might go this way no i think it could go this way and when
there's really good reasons to think both things and i think
yeah folks you're gonna start to really get a good
sense of of kind of some of the stuff that's gonna
become important pretty soon so yeah i think um it is certainly not beyond
the realm of possibility that people will
start to piece certain things together and at least be having
strong inklings of where we're going and i think that that's exciting awesome
yeah there's some good theories i've been reading
some are wrong and that's good those are the best those are fun because
oh that would that would have been cool if that's weird
it's not but if we were doing that that would be kind of neat too
it's very clever they're all very very clever ideas yeah
all right leah thank you very much thanks for having me
and thanks for making an awesome raid that helps to further our stories a
little bit so yeah those were fun all right we're
going to take a quick break and we will be right back with bobby style usually
if you separate out your a and your b i might just
take the a and move there's also going to be other lines coming up where
it's like being treated in a gymnasium the idea is there's a part of the game
where you go inside the main bad guy's mind
okay so it's gonna feel like you're inside a gym it's like yeah
but now i know i'm here which means i'm coming for you it's a lot of that idea
okay okay okay so when i do the take a and b
do you want me to give you like no when we get to that pocket the bigger pocket
if if you just give me the a and wait and then give me the b
if i don't say anything okay uh most of the time i'm gonna jump in be like
keeper you know so i'll just say once we get
the right and i pulled back on the mic a little
bit because i know we're going to be doing a lot of louder stuff so you don't
have to like turn away okay great great great
how many pages do you average a day when you do this i'm sorry how many pages do
you average a day i have no idea i don't know how many
pages do i average a day is it more like lines right because the
5 pages we got to get that up
cool out of 11 000 or something i just know that they don't look angry when i'm
done so
and welcome back leah your hair's all gone and you're a
dude yeah i tried to fight sabbath and she burned it off
hello
bobby i will let you do the rest of the introduction so i'm bobby stein i'm a
hideous beast next to this guy i'm a narrative lead at
arenanet and i've been working with these fine folks and the rest of the
raids team for i don't know however many months but too long almost
yes i would have been so happy if you just stopped i'm bobby stein and i'm a
hideous beast we can just cut that right yeah
yeah we could have given you that title if you'd let us know
bobby stein hideous beast all right so we were talking about just the general
lore design and how all of that fits into raids and now
we're going to get into like the fun detail stuff
who did you name somebody after oh man i don't
know you know some people get really obsessed with
naming stuff and i i just figure this is an opportunity for the people on
the team to really have fun throw their ideas around i mean a lot of what
i think good narrative design has a solid foundation
but is also flexible enough to work within
the many ideas that people bring to the table so i think
oh man i probably renamed a couple things and upset a few
people but um i like that then he smiles
it's like peter freeze talking about killing something yeah destroyer fun is
a job title around here so it kind of is yeah
no i i don't even remember if i named anything i mean i
certainly like everybody else in the team through
little references and in jokes and things about you know
folks and whatnot but yeah i i don't know what i will say is if you
are the kind of person to go and explore the raid after you've beaten certain
things and you poke around you might actually see some cool stuff
nice so talking about naming things uh jason was telling us a cool story while
we were and it's legitimately a cool story it's not like oh yeah
so so first of all
so once upon a time when we were making the
we're actually doing like the designs and everything before bobby came on and
we started like you know cleaning it up he used to be a a plant
monster we actually call him internally bramble
boss um so it got his name because i was like
putzing around on the internet looking up plant names
i don't know and just like mushed them together and so we got gorsuval
uh the multifarious or of course of all the mouth full of marbles
because nobody could say it for a while because nobody could say it
really yeah the mouth mouth full of marbles
i thought he liked that was having a seizure or something when he first said
the name i'm like what did you say quotations
first of all
i'm like bobby we'll do a writing pass bobby will fix it bobby was kidding
sounds perfect it really but it really does i mean
sometimes you're just messing around you're putting around on the internet
and hit up on something that works really
well because it sounds it's got that scary
monster sound to it and it works out really well so well done yeah thank you
colin stole all the thunder anyways months ago when he showed the video and
he didn't know what to call he was like the tongue box
it worked out very very nicely i like it so good job make
make more accidental things happen because i try it's pretty much
my life so
so he was a plant boss and we decided to not do that anymore yeah so it i mean
once we started piling the narrative together it didn't
really make a lot of sense for him to be this like
thicket beast whatever he was why did we also want to like
up the ante on him so he's a lot more interesting now but these
it's all his hands he's very handsy uh and he's he's a he's a scary ghost guy
that's sort of like merged together so he's actually like
thousands of spirits uh like all speaking and thinking is one
yeah that was actually really uh a challenge
i think that we faced when we were like how do we convey this without
stopping and having somebody say you know what that guy
is so look at all those hands look at all yeah so
it was great so there were a lot of meetings were like how the hell are we
gonna let people know what this is without
saying it so yeah once you enter the the woods and there's all
the spoilers by the way for people who haven't gotten that far but this is the
internet so deal with it
so you go in and a lot of the the things that happen where these spirits are
popping up the things that they say like normally when when you fight a
character in guild wars 2 they say a bunch of stuff
right and a lot of it is you know contextual to what they do so that it
acts as a tell but what we wanted to do with the
spirits in here is we don't want them to say the same kind
of things that spirits elsewhere in the game say because they have a different
tie to the story in this area so we have all
new stuff that they say and it all tracks back to
where they come from and what they are and then if you
explore around you'll find things your character will say things about what
they are we even show the spirits kind of coming
together in a couple of spots to where it's like
this is a theme that we're running with so that by the time you get to this boss
you have a better understanding of what it is and yeah his uh voice
is actually a combination of two people talking
so it's actually meant to convey the idea that there's many of these spirits
that are trapped inside this thing but they're acting as one
so yeah we ran with the whole multifarious idea and kind of like all
right how do we really sell this and it's not apparent and i know some people
are like i don't know what this guy is i just showed up and i fought him but i
don't know what it is it actually does tie into something that we're gonna
if you poke around you'll get a little more of an idea about it but in
the future there will be more information about it so there there is a
point and actually right before you get to course of all when you clear the
graveyard area right after that a whole bunch of things become interactive so
what i would say to anybody is if you're playing the raids and you're lucky
enough and skilled enough to beat an encounter
some stuff may actually like appear that you can interact with we wanted to not
make it interactive during the fight so that you weren't clicking on
i mean i don't know from playing the game you're running next to an npc and
you accidentally click on them and they're like hey what's going on you're
like get out of my way you know we didn't
want you to click on never asked for this something that got
in your way so we turned a lot of that off but after you beat it if you want to
go find it and in fact if you go in your
achievement panel if you look at the achievements we even give you some hints
as to what you might find or where it might be
but we tried to be a little more vague so that was kind of the really cool
thing too when we were talking about like
game design and narrative design coming together it's like sometimes it's what
you it's how you present the the text or the
dialogue along with the gameplay that can
if you just tell somebody then it just becomes a checklist of things to do if
you're a little bit more uh mysterious about it it can actually
make it more of a game to actually uncover these secrets so that's what we
tried to do in the raids can i by the way say thank you for the
hints really really thank you i appreciate
that so much the funny thing about the hints too is some so there's the
crumpled pieces of paper from a journal which originally you know little
backstory that it was originally knuckles journal
and we had all this funny stuff about it sorry
the the first draft of all of it too was pretty funny because we wanted to say
well how did he get the name knuckles so it was all the stuff about him getting
in a fight and there was this rivalry between him and some of the other
bandits and you know it didn't quite fit tonally so
we had to change some of it but um there's the journal pages that
are spread out i think there's like 13 of them
and charlie who's the content designer who placed a lot of these things in the
environment and hooked it up he's just like yeah i stubbed in some
hints and this one is it was just like by the tree by the
water and that kind of thing and the best one was
in the tree crotch crotch and i said charlie i really don't want to change
this but i think i have to tell you so yeah
and uh there's there's your hint of the day there is a piece of paper in it
this is why all of our text has to go through a writer first
and what's even worse is all the things that i don't catch
and then i'm on to you guys then there are the things that i know you had a
hand in because i came and asked you about them
and we're so pleased we don't talk about that
things don't make me really really happy
so something that's not about a tree crotch
we were talking about players and the player voices and the player behavior
as we went and different people get to talk one of the things that we've done
with heart of thorns that's really great is that you have a slightly different
experience if you go through with a different race
and that carried over into the raid a little bit too yeah totally i mean
the hot team i think you know my involvement with hot was pretty minimal
the the team that worked on it was awesome
and they did a lot of things about like if you were playing a different uh like
race or gender we could take that into account so
obviously if you're sylvari the experience is a bit different right so
we wanted to kind of continue that spirit but definitely adapt it more to
the raids because again like like you folks were saying before
the raid is it's not really about like the pack commander stories it's about
the the story of the party you know like
what are we doing as a group so a couple things i mean obviously we
wanted to give all the players and the party the opportunity to speak when we
could you know at different times or whatever
like you know we run up and touch this thing and maybe you'll be the lucky one
to say the line or whatever but um come and touch this thing um
oh god i'm calling stankus that was assault
wow um crystal's just like wow that is collated quickly
sorry
um but the other thing was just that uh we expect people to fail a lot in raids
and and i know from you know we we all play a lot of games and every time you
hear the same line over and over and over again you're like oh god shut up
right so the good thing is like we now have a
throttling system so that we can not have things happen as much and
especially if you're replaying a lot of the same content
you shouldn't hear some of the lines as much as you maybe used to
but then also the fact that we where possible we tried to
vary it up so that at least by player race the lines even if they were saying
the same thing just had a different spin on them so
that was something we tinkered with so there should be a bit
of variety and it was just like you know if you play a game like gta
and you fail a mission and you retry it sometimes your character might say
something different during it so we kind of went with that approach that
hey if you're going through you might actually hear the same scene but with
some lines swapped out so we wanted to make it feel a little bit
more like you discover something new every time
because we want you to play it a lot yeah and as far as discovery
this was i'm just going off of some things that you guys have told me over
the past couple days because i haven't completed this
and it's neat learning all of this you didn't want people just to like hold
down the alt key and run like all right find all the
things because they're lit up now yeah and this is something really that
became a design discussion because i know like
elsewhere in the game we have kind of rules about when you create something
and put it in the world what are the things you needed
you know we made our own rules exactly
in the nicest of ways yeah we were just like whoop threw it out um
so yeah i mean
rates are supposed to be challenging right so why would you want somebody to
be able to push a button and then see everything that they need to discover so
we're like the hell with that we're turning it off
we're going to give you really vague kind of cool contextual or lawful
hints but we're not going to give it away like
really you have to work for it and and i guess the downside is for the people who
aren't going to work for it they might not actually see it but i would say hey
play the raids because they're fun as hell
i suck at them but i'm going to get in there and try and do it
party up later yeah totally we're not going to last very long
no um it'll be fun but there's really cool stuff in there to explore
and as i think you know leah and the rest of you folks mentioned before it's
like it's not a story heavy experience like
you would have in like the personal story or in the hot story
but there definitely is a story that ties into everything
that if you take the time to actually go through it you know we think that
you'll get something really cool out of it and if you don't care about it it
didn't slow you down because we didn't stop and make you click through a
million things right but if you're interested in the story
there's a lot and that's the thing raids are here i mean you're
not going to just do this for a while okay now we don't have this rating where
we're going to pull the whole thing out of the game
they're here for a long time so you can go back right now i think everybody's
kind of taking their time i heard a player say yesterday
that she's really loving she's trying it again and again and again with her group
and they're getting a little farther every time
and that feels so good just making that progress and knowing that you're getting
better as a player but then after you've finally conquered
it and even if you get to some point down the line where
you just don't want to do the raid part again there's a ton of exploration and
story to go around and find in there and it was it was a good thing to put in
there to give even more even more play time to put in
there and even way way way after everybody has
beaten this thing because i think it's going to be a while you
guys did your jobs really well too well well i'm hearing
i've heard a couple people you know oh gosh this is so hard
meant to be yes content um i mean that was always my favorite thing of raiding
those was sort of like discovering the puzzle
with the boss and working with my team to get better at it
and then finally overcoming that challenge and just as a as a unit
uh really just feeling that excitement and that joy of
beating th the just the ass out of this thing
that is amazing yeah so i'm happy that we were able to successfully recreate
that for guild wars yeah so speaking of watching players
progress over the week how has this week been for you guys
just kind of kind of low key for at least like this is
like bracing or something like there's something bad happening somewhere yeah
why is it so calm i've gone through a number of releases before and yeah you
know there's been a couple of like oh my god like i remember
some pretty bad bugs that we discovered on
it was like the jungle worm where he you the event failed when he was like
between like 0.9 and 0.1 percent he just wouldn't go away he would just stay
there forever and he was spawning husks and it took a while to figure that out
like there was some like really weird stuff like that
but for like this release i've just been kind of coming into work and
reading the forums and reading reddit and there hasn't been
like there hasn't been a ton of stuff like
well you're doing other work as far as well yeah
following up with the community following up with the community
where we're going with that i just realized that could be taken badly
no i mean the biggest thing was uh reading the feedback and seeing what
players were saying about it and players who have previously raided
and other games uh they're they're they're pretty happy
and there's other sides of the coin as well
uh and i think my favorite post i saw came from
someone a camera was on our forums or reddit and this guy had said
okay i don't really have a ton of people i play this game with
uh and you know everyone said this stuff wasn't puggable so i went and found like
nine other people who really wanted to kill this boss
and we got we got on someone's teamspeak server and we all coordinated
and we took him down after like you know hours of trying
and by the end of the night they had formed a guild and they had all met new
friends and i'm like like that is exactly what reading
is like that's what got me into raiding like 12 years ago just
i want to take down these bosses and you can't do it solo so you go find a
group of people that want to do i remember seeing someone was posting on
like my realm forums they're like all right we're going to do this we're going
to raid and i was like sign me up i want to be part of this
uh and that just got me into it and then like you know i met new friends
and i mean i met byron raiding 10 years ago
like i have no buyer i've known byron before ever
because we met raiding another video game
and those are the kind of moments that we really hope
guilt we can bring to guild wars 2 and that players can
take from raiding in our game yeah well you're doing it i mean you're seeing it
this week and that's extremely cool did you all watch the
video that colin sent around a couple days ago of the of the guild
that was taking down one of the bosses oh is that the one where he like enraged
and like just like yeah his like auto attack like
killed the boss and then he died i think he vengeance yeah he was he
vengeance was like a warrior vengeance that's
amazing it was the abs i mean you could not plan a better
clutch safe
but the absolute the screaming and cheering
on their on their teamspeak or mumble or whatever they were on was
absolutely so much i wanted to just i wanted to cheer along with them while i
was watching and it's those moments that are making this so
much fun this week it is it's been a lot of fun to see
so here's my question as we wrap up for you guys
my guild we're like super casual but we've been excited about this
okay we're going to do this we're going to get together a reading group and i
know i am not in the only casual player guild in the entire game
what pieces of advice what advice do you guys have for casual guilds who want to
get into this ooh oh yeah communication is key like you have to be
able to communicate voice is super helpful with that um but other
than like patience uh get a strategy together
um i mean we've accepted we're gonna go in and get murdered
immediately i mean we've accepted
he's right but i mean it's fun you just kind of have to have the patience and
take it with a grain of salt and work together and persevere
yeah a little bit will be challenging yourself as a player you know on a skill
level like maybe maybe you just have a bad build
that's true but that's what there's tons of guides out there for that and
you know if you're someone if you pvp a bunch the build you use there probably
isn't going to work in rates so use a different build yeah i mean
again i'm probably as casual as they come but i'm
very interested in playing this content so i think i really need to get more
active with a guild and kind of start doing the things that
i need to to prepare to it and yeah maybe i'll get in there and get
squashed or i know i will but there will be a learning curve but i
mean that you get better at it and the other thing too is like you're there
with a party of people so you know you get to learn
some things and rely on each other and the other thing i would just say too is
um you know it i realized that that you know i think
you had said the other day the venn diagram of
uh pure raiders and people who are purely interested in story there's
probably not a lot of overlap there's a little sliver but for the
people who are there i know like wooden potatoes for example i was watching his
video the other day it was really great and you know he
he was picking up on some of the cool things that we had hidden in there
and um
if you're in that audience where you're not only there for the challenge but
you're also there to kind of experience the the lore of the world you
know take the time after you're done beating something
or if you know any guilds or players that have already beaten it
if you go in with them as the the raid leader the whole thing will be cleared
for you and you can go in and explore without getting your face melted off so
i mean people will have the opportunity to go in it's just you need to
you know party up with the right people and maybe go and explore around so it
might be a cool you know you get to see the the
devastation that the the raid party went and did too bad we
can't leave the bodies around yeah oh my gosh the dream
all right well thank you guys very much and thank you to leah for
coming on and talking to us about raids thanks man you can't see me
we do not have a show next week because here in america we're celebrating
thanksgiving and i have no intention of coming to work on
black friday and i don't think i could get no are you going to be here
girl cheese let's talk afterwards let's talk afterwards maybe you can do
the show
closed yeah close next friday so we will not be here we will be back with another
guild chat the week after that which is december 4th and
right now we are going to debut our new pvp league
show on point with gibran urex and we will see you
guys in two weeks
Guild Chat - Episode 23

Transcription[edit]

Navigation menu

Page actions

Page actions

Personal tools

Navigation

Search

Wiki support

Tools
