Guild Chat - Episode 42

The following is an unofficial, player-written transcript of the episode. The accuracy of this transcription has not been verified by ArenaNet.

The 42nd episode of Guild Chat aired on August 30, 2016. Host Rubi Bayer and members of the ArenaNet studio team take a look back at some of the most memorable moments.

Summary[edit]

Transcription[edit]

Halloween and Wintersday (0:25)[edit]

Rubi Bayer: Those were some of our launch day memories, but since Guild Wars 2 is an MMO, and MMO worlds keep growing and changing, we didn't just pat ourselves on the back and call it a day. We kept working to grow the world of Tyria for you. Another huge part of the world of Guild Wars 2 is Tyrian holidays. We brought over Halloween and Wintersday from Guild Wars 1, the Zephyrites came and brought us the Bazaar of the Four Winds and the Festival of the Four Winds, and we can't forget about Super Adventure Box, which arrived in Guild Wars 2 as one of our favorite April Fools' Day pranks in the history of Tyria. Let's talk to some of the developers behind those holidays.

All right, now that we are all emotional, over the past four years. It's time to talk to you guys live. Hi guys, welcome to our Guild Wars 2 Fourth Anniversary Livestream, we have a whole lot to talk about today, so we're gonna jump right in. Gaile and Anthony, you guys were two really good people to talk to us about the first Guild Wars 2 holidays.

Anthony Ordon: I don't know about really good.

Rubi: You really are, you're the best. And you can't leave, I'm sorry. It was a good try. Halloween and Wintersday were the two first holidays, and we brought those over from Guild Wars 1, so these have a huge history.

Gaile Gray: They do.

Rubi: And you've, Gaile, you've been around as both a player and a part of the ArenaNet team since the very beginning, so, -

Gaile: yeah

Rubi: do you want to talk about these first two holidays?

Gaile: Loved it. I didn't know how much we would be able to do in, in the first game, in Guild Wars, because we launched in April and we, the team was smaller and was very busy creating Sorrow's Furnace, the first,

Rubi Bayer: Oh yeah!

Gaile Gray: kind of, the new content that we rolled out, so I wasn't sure what was gonna happen, and I hadn't kept up with development, and I got into the game and saw Lion's Arch, and it was amazing. It was so amazing to see what they have done, the decorations, the décor and then, and to take part in the ever-evolving events, and so, Wintersday, I had a high bar, and they exceeded it.

Rubi: Yes!

Gaile: You too right?

Rubi: And for Halloween you probably had the highest bar.

Gaile: Oh oh well yeah and well I love Halloween and so it is my favorite holiday of the year. And to see what they did over the years and then to see bringing it to Guild Wars 2 again, new Lion's Arch.. hmm how's that going to work? You know and it was just amazing. I love our holidays. I think I've really said this, players are in the game for the first holiday and like 'wow you guys really do it up well' and I'm thinking-

Rubi Bayer: We know.

Gaile: -we do and I say it right out, I say best holidays in the industry. I'm telling you people, you know, cause I'm a big fan and they do a great job. People like Anthony, they do a great job.

Rubi: Yeah, so you worked on this. What were your goals in bringing this over from Guild Wars 1?

Anthony: If you take it back, shortly before the game launched, why are you laughing at me?

(laughter)

Rubi: I'm not laughing at you!

Anthony: So just before the game launched, we started dividing everybody up into groups so who's going to work on what after the game launched, and when they pitched it to me, we'd just done all of the beta weekend events, so I was ready to jump back in and so I didn't have any expectation about what Halloween was going to be cause we'd recorded some stuff for Mad King but that was it, so there was really no plan and we didn't really even have an idea of what the live updates were going to be yet. So we sat down, we had this big planning session and we were talking to, I distinctly remember talking to Josh Foreman and some of the other environment artists and they were talking about, I think it was Justin, and we were talking about how we wanted to, how many maps we could get, how many new areas we could add and we were thinking maybe one, maybe two, and they were like four. We want to do four, and so we just ended up pitching this giant Halloween update and then we had this crazy idea for how we were going to release it, cause there was no expectation for how the holiday was going to be so we wanted to like, yeah the first day there wouldn't really be anything going on, just some decorations in Lion's Arch and then we would slowly start unravelling the mystery of Halloween in Tyria and then it all led up to the big fountain explosion which everyone was super excited about.

Rubi: That was amazing. That was just, seeing the Mad King come busting out of that fountain-

Anthony: Yeah.

Gaile: Oh my God.

Rubi: -for the first time was so good.

Anthony: It was nuts. We were so committed to this idea that we were going to do something in the game and actually have it change the world and we totally did. We blew up that fountain and then it was just broken for a year.

Rubi: And you set a precedent that we will talk about later.

Anthony: Yeah, we totally did wreck that thing.

(laughter)

Anthony: Over and over and over again.

Rubi: Okay, you don't need to look that pleased

Anthony: Oh no, I'm really happy about that.

Rubi: Okay, so our players have really done a good job celebrating. Gaile and I were talking earlier this week about how much player art we see outside of the game I mean there's cosplay and the most amazing pumpkin carving I've ever seen in my life.

Gaile: That was amazing. We had somebody who was sending this to us from across the country, sending us different, like, they did the Guild wars 2 logo the one year that was launch year-

Rubi: Yeah, that was great.

Gaile: -and I wish I had pictures of those but can I show you a couple -

Rubi: Yes please.

Gaile: -we've got a couple of images that I think are fantastic. Here's the first one. This is the new Lion's Arch with the new Halloween and I think it just blows me away. It's so beautiful. Got the same lunatic luna or moon and there's another one here that's going from this is the beautiful, and this is the spooky.

Rubi: Still beautiful.

Gaile: It's beautiful.

Rubi: Bit spooky.

Gaile: Really well done, and then this one here, I mean that's the cute.

Rubi Bayer: Awww.

Gaile: I think it's super cute, and we've got all those and it's wonderful. We put out the call. You know I do the little show Community Showcase Live and we put out the call "Hey, share your Halloween art" and people really came through and we're doing another one coming up in October of this year, so we're hoping for more wonderful images like those.

Rubi: Yes please.

Gaile: For sure.

Rubi: And we've had, you and I participated in this last year, I mean we've kept expanding Halloween, we've done some more with it over the years, we have the whole thing going on with the Mad King and his wayward son.

Anthony: Yes.

Rubi: And the labyrinth that I'm kind of in love with. It's super super fun. It's a lot of fun and then last year we had an in game event that we held where we got to play with players a little bit.

Gaile: That was a surprise and I have to thank Izzy because he made it possible-

Rubi: Oh, yes, thank you Izzy so much.

Gaile: -What he did was amazing and we were very close to the vest about it and we didn't talk about it with other people, we didn't let players know what was happening, but what he did was give us the ability to convert people into various Halloween creatures. So imagine you're in Lion's Arch and Rubi's chatting with some players in one of the zones and I'm in another world and Regina and Stephano, all of us are in different areas and then we kinda synced up and said "okay now, start using that toy, and go with it as you will". So, for example we turned the whole city into bats, all the people.

Rubi: That's right, we turned them into bats.

Gaile: Yeah. Halloween cats, that was great, we had the kitties, we definitely had the kitties.

Rubi: Oh yeah, here.

Gaile: Yeah. Here's the bats and they were great and people were so startled, like "how can you do this" "What did this happen" "How long is this going to last?" and didn't you have one person...

Rubi: I, okay, I really need to apologise to this guy again, because one of the things that the toy did was shoot players into the air and it wasn't enough damage to kill them, you took a little bit of fall damage when you came back down, so we-

Anthony: (Laughing) Rubi committed the first Tyrian murder.

(laughter)

Rubi: You freeze, I'm looking at you! No, it wasn't bad, but we were playing and everybody was having a really good time and then one guy very nicely whispered me and said "I'm trying to craft. Could you not?"

Gaile: (laughter)

Rubi: It's like oh my gosh I'm really really sorry.

Gaile: But imagine those bats, you know, they're all bats, and then they suddenly start shooting in the air-

Rubi: It was a good time.

Gaile: -And then we got things really organised and we said "okay, we are going to get these players and order them and present them in a very organised manner here and we have this image here which is everyone as, as I've called them the fire doggies-

Rubi: That was from Stephanie wasn't it?

Gaile: -Yes, Stephanie over on the EU team made this and I thought it was a great idea. She didn't just do this she did candy corns, she did kitties and so forth so it was a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to doing that again, I think the team is (unintelligible)

Rubi: Yeah, it would be fun, Stephanie was so organised in creating these beautiful screenshots, I'm turning everybody into cats and leading a cat parade and I was a little crazy cat lady.

Gaile: Yeah.

Rubi: So it was, you know, some of us we find our own fun, we find it in different ways.

Gaile: It's so true.

Rubi: So those were the first two holidays in Guild Wars 2, what was your favourite part? You have to pick a favourite. From either holiday what was your favourite aspect of one?

Gaile: In the old-

Rubi: I'm giving you time to think about this.

Anthony: Yeah.

Gaile: In Guild Wars, the original game I think that I really loved the battle between Grenth and Dwayna

Rubi: Yeah

Gaile: That was a lot of fun, and the ways we learned to cheese it hopping from map to pull...I didn't properly say that out loud.

Rubi: It was player cooperation.

Gaile: Yeah, that's it, but in Guild Wars 2 I think that my favourite is the Mad King's Labyrinth.

Rubi: It's a lot of time.

Gaile: I spent way too much time in there.

Rubi: We need to talk about the Labyrinthine Horror because he just wrecks my face (unintelligible) but that's okay. I'll just get better.

Gaile: Yeah.

Rubi: Alright. That was Halloween and Wintersday but we have more holidays to talk about, so we are going to be back in just a couple of minutes and we'll talk about another one. Thank you guys.

Gaile: Thank you.

Anthony: Thank you.

Super Adventure Box (11:55)[edit]

Rubi: Alright, we are ready to talk about our next holiday, which is...

Peter Fries: Super Adventure Box.

Rubi: Super Adventure Box! Jerry's shirt kind of gave it away.

Jerry Schroeder: Oh, sorry.

Mike Zadorojny: Spoiler.

Rubi: Yeah. So, Super Adventure Box is known as being Josh Foreman's baby, but there were so many people that worked on that and we want to talk about that, too. But thank you Josh for all of the hard work on that. So, Mike you were the lead on that?

Mike: I was the design POC which basically meant that I was overlooking a lot of the high level stuff that was going on. Josh was really there in the trenches, kind of. It was his brainchild. He and Lisa were like the two that really conspired of most of this. And so like Lisa was the one who was actually spawning everything and putting everything that went in the environments. And then we had, you know, Jeff and Trevor who were actually making all the art assets and making all the animations. And then we had a very dedicated QA member at the time known as Byron Miller-

Rubi: Ohhh!

Mike: So he was the one who was actually going through and making sure that it was all working. And it was just- It was a cool evolution because this was a project that started as just one brainchild, and it evolved into something bigger. It was something even larger than what the team started as. Like when we started seeing what they were doing with the physics engine and with everything else, it was, "Cool! Let's- How do we make this bigger? How do we make this even bolder?" And then you saw like it devolved into like the commercial and everything else. And then even when we brought it back in the future, for future runs, like the team changed. Like Byron was now designer at that point so he was helping on additional.^{[verification requested]} We had a new QA member who was helping- take his place and do those things. So it was, I mean, it was a great festival to creativity and originality that we hadn't seen in a long time.

Rubi: It really was. That was one of the greatest things about it to me was that it was just this fun little side thing because Josh's brain works in amazing ways. And it was this fun little side project that turned into this huge thing that you guys love and that we've had a ton of fun with over the years.

Peter: Right.

Rubi: So you worked on... (laughing)

Peter: I'm sorry.

Rubi: No, it's okay! I'm just thinking about how much we've got you scheduled to be on this particular episode and that you're just going to spend most of it making me laugh.

Peter: Hope it will be good.

Rubi: So you have done alot of Moto's dialogue?

Peter: Yes I did. That was voiced by Steve Blum who does Rytlock. And he does- Some of our voice actors do different characters along with their main characters. So it is kind of cool to hear somebody that you are used to hearing as one character doing somebody completely different. I wrote some of the ambient scenes that take place around the outside of the Super Adventure Box.

Rubi: Like at Rata Sum?

Peter: Yeah, in Rata Sum. So when it first appeared that there were like you know, different characters walking around Rata Sum talking about it. It was fun stuff.

Rubi: Did it feel like you were breaking the fourth wall when you-

Peter: A little yeah.

Rubi: I mean there is a super fine line there

Peter: Yeah, a little. There is a little meta stuff going on there. I think there is even a reference that sounds like it's about Arenanet's (unintellible) design.

Rubi: Really?

Peter: Yeah.

Rubi: Ok, I don't remember that, now I have to go. I'm going to be like digging through lines of dialogue now.

Mike: That seems to be a trend for Peter, I feel. He will hide those all over the place.

Peter: It is like a game within a game so it is neat.

Rubi: (Laughing) Yeah, I'm immediately thinking of some of the other things you have done and be like "Oh yeah, that is right".

Peter: Yeah.

Rubi: And you named the Bee Dog?

Peter: I did not name the Bee Dog.

Rubi: I was really trying to invoke bitterness here.

Peter: (Laughing) Bryon named the Bee Dog. But it was supposed to be called Bumble Pug and they made me change it so-

Rubi: Why?

Peter: Because Bryon wanted it to be Bee Dog.

Rubi: I like Bumble Pug.

Peter: He is a bad man.

Rubi: Ok! (Laughing)

Peter: That is why he is not here today. So Bumble Pug, never forget Bumble Pug.

Rubi: Jeez...Alright, Jerry what about you? Do you want to talk about- There is totally different sounds inside of Super Adventure Box.

Jerry: Yeah, it was just super fun, super creative. Able to just kind of go back to my roots, you know, old school gaming. Just, you know, to fit the look and feel. I did a ton of the voices in the studio for infantile cloud. You know the uh- (Imitates Happy Cloud) That kind of stuff.

Rubi: It is good.

Jerry: And the hillbillies of course and you know, the ninjas and all that stuff.

Rubi: I forgot about those Raccoons. Ohh, those jerks.

Jerry: Sure, it was great. We used you know, some interesting plug-ins that emulate old console chips. So, you know, we got alot of them blips and boings and all that, that sounded like authentic stuff. So, it was a really good time.

Rubi: What was the most fun about making all of the sounds for SAB?

Jerry: You know, I think it was just the working within some self-imposed limitations was really cool. You know, just ok, I want this to be very simple, very to the point, you know. Tells from everything before it happens, that way it would be really obvious and just yeah, it was refreshing.

Rubi: (Laughing) Did you need something? Alright what is your favorite part about Super Adventure Box, each of you? Bumble Pug? You can't say something besides Bumble Pug.

Jerry: No, just the general look of it is really great. I mean you go, you first appear and it is totally different than regular Guild Wars.

Rubi: It is awesome.

Jerry: Yeah, it is so colorful and pleasant. Yeah, everyone loves jumping puzzles, so it is jumping puzzle taken to the nth degree.

Mike: Everyone asterisk loves jumping puzzles.

Rubi: Scare quotes.

Peter: According to judge, everyone loves them. They like what we tell them to like.

Rubi: (Sighs) Jerry, how about you?

Jerry: I think the frog boss is still my favorite.

Rubi: Oh my god, yes!

Peter: Oh, I like the guy that is in the shop where you are wrecking all of his stuff and he is asking you "Please stop".

Rubi: He makes me feel so bad! (Laughing)

Peter: That is the best part. I'm sorry.

Rubi: You are like breaking everything he owns and he is going "No, that is ok. I didn't really need that". I am like waiting to steal his lunch money and stuff them in a locker or something.

Mike: So are you one of those people that like, that after you finish the level, there is that destroy the cart. But if you don't actually damage the cart, he will come out and give you a bauble. Are you one of those people or are you actually destroying the cart to get the bonus baubles?

Rubi: I am the person who did not destroy the cart because I felt bad enough.

Peter: Oh, nice.

Mike: He only had like 11 payments left or whatever.

(Laughing)

Rubi: And here we come. I tell you what I did do though. I don't know who made it, so you can like go into one of the little hidden rooms and pick up their furniture and run away with it outside. But it made me so happy. I have like this enormous side table and my character is carrying it all over SAB. So, whoever was responsible for that, thank you so much cause it was the most stupid fun I have ever had in this game.

Peter: It was probably Josh.

Rubi: It was probably Josh.

Jerry: Probably so.

Rubi: What about you, Mike?

Mike: All of these festivals- Anthony kind of alluded to this in the last section where we are talking about like the beta weekend events and things that- These were all chances to express things that we hadn't done or were outside the normal of what the rules of Tyria would allow us to do. And so it gives us new tech, it gives us new ideas and new things to do. So it was cool to come to something new, fun, original. I think the fact that it was kind of this April Fool's joke for us was amazing. And you know, the legacy that it is. There is such a fan following about it and this is one of those things. It starts from a small idea and you never really know what it is going to take off into. And watching kind of the evolution of it and you know potentially, where it goes in the future, that is the fun part.

Rubi: Yeah, you just reminded me of the players who pop their commander tags and spell out SAB in the harbor in Lion's Arch. Because they love it absolutely so much. And it is so much fun getting to make that departure and do something that is absolutely dead opposite of everything else we have done. It has been really neat. Seeing it continue and turn it into a yearly thing.

Mike: Yeah, I am super happy that it has come back as one of those yearly festivals where we were struggling for a long time to figure out how to place it in the world because it was so outside the box. Pun intended. So like I am happy that we were able to find something there. It becomes a tradition now that players know when to expect it to come back. That there is always something to look forward to in that you know, that month of April.

Rubi: Yeah, thank you guys. We have more holidays to talk about so we will be back in just a second. We are really like blasting through this but if we didn't, there is so much stuff to talk about that we would be here for 6 hours. So, we will be back in 1 minute.

Festival of the Four Winds (23:32)[edit]

Rubi: Alright, we are back we have more people and more holidays. So, we were talking about, we kept naming things four winds we cannot do that again. Its super confusing. So some of the next things we brought to the game were bazaar of the four winds and festival of the four winds. See? This is hard for me.

Matt: Bananza of the four winds.

Rubi: Stop, (laugh) No more four winds anything. So lets just talk about what some of you guys worked that you did some of the ambient scenes in the bazaar that i hadn't noticed until you mentioned them.

Peter: Yeah, there's a marketplace with traders. They're doing their business at different stalls, and if you were just walking around you would hear these ambient scenes fire off with different characters. There was one guy that was trying to get rid of a bunch of stuff that he had stolen and the Seraph were like on his heels and he was trying to get rid of it before they caught up with him. There was a young kid and a thief partner that were trying to also get rid of things and so like if you listened, you could hear these things playing out over the course of the event all around the marketplace.

Rubi: That's one of the things that I love that we do, and we do this all over the world, is put these little B-roll scenes going on in the background.

Peter: Yeah, yeah, it's fun to do that stuff.

Rubi: So much fun. And this is where we introduced - we had the Flying Dolyak Race, we had the - you had to escort Trader Owen's Dolyak, and we brought in the Zephyrite skills. That was fun.

Matt: Yeah, the aspect skills was a designer who is no longer here unfortunately - Lina. But yeah, just some amazing stuff to be able to like do things that again our engine wasn't necessarily designed to do, so we like pushing the envelope a lot and so doing these movement skills and being able to jump around on all these different platforms and create a new way of movement. The theme for that release we were told consistently from, you know, our teamleads and stuff was "joy-movement, joy-movement, make it all about how much fun it is to just get around". So we created all kinds of things that were like events that took place on multiple layers so you had to like jump across and use the tether to get across platforms and then the crystal scavenger hunt being able to like: go and find all the little hidden nooks and crannies that our map artist Curo had put in. We did that conjunction with our alpha-testers as well, we basically said them "listen, find all the little places that you can use to get the skills". So they came up with all kinds of crazy like, you had to use this skill to get up on the wooden platform and then another skill to leap across so it was lots of fun.

Rubi: Okay so we have joy-movement, and you just knew you wanted to move in a new way. How did you get from there to these cool skills, what was the baseline for that?

Matt: Really it was just down to: our game is very combat-focused, you have the skillbar. So it's a matter of: "how do you do interesting movements using the skillbar?". So we came up with the idea of all these different sorts of gadgets around that you could either tether to or ground-target and so that is kind of the basis for that. We kind of roamed in the narrative out to: "what would this group of people who we have never met before in Tyria, how would they interpret things?". So we took a look at elemental skills and refining those down to a: "what if they were speacilized into a very particular thing?". Once we had that brainstorming, skills was kind of fun and we had a lot of ideas. The three skills that were in there were the ones we though were the coolest.

Rubi: Yeah and learning to get around with those was a good time. Just-

Matt: It was.

Rubi: -once I got past the challenge of "wait a minute I keep banging into this waterfall and I can't get past. What do I do?!"

Matt: Yes

Rubi: I don't understand!

Matt: It was the release that had I think probably the most fall deaths. At least, I mean I don't know. I would love to see if we have analytics on that

Peter: That's something to be proud of.

Rubi: It kind of is. It's fun.

Matt: Seeing lots and lots of skulls and crossbones on the bottom layer. I had some fun running around and-

Drew: Shoot off. Go back up and shoot off again.

Matt: Yeah, yeah.

Drew: As you learn these new skills. That's part about learning new skills.

Rubi: It's true. I'm suddenly remembering that part of- I mean, you know. We're all running around in there with our friends and I was running in there with some guildmates and one of them, we were still refining our use of the skills, and it was hard. And we were way up high and one of my guildmates he fell all the way to bottom, just landed with a splat in that water. You know that little puddle of water that isn't deep enough to save you from death?

Matt: Yeah.

Rubi: And he landed on two Sylvari who were having a roleplay session. And it was *that* kind of roleplay. And here comes this 9-foot cat just splats on top of them.

Matt: Ruined the moment I'm sure.

Peter: That's tragic.

Rubi: I'm sure it spoiled the moment. It had- It was a lasting lesson in how to use the skills. So all of this took us to the flying dolyak race which was absolutely one of my favorites.

Matt: Yeah when we brought it back for the second time, we wanted to say "ok, we don't want to just recycle the same event over again, so how can we do this in a different way that takes advantage of some cool stuff?". I can't remember what it was that I thought of; because Trader Owens, who is by the way named after my son-

Rubi: Yay!

Matt: -I wanted to do something with his dolyak because his dolyak was his faithful companion and we thought "well what if you were a baby dolyak? Wouldn't that be cool". So I immediately grabbed onto that idea and we did it and I actually kind of pushed the animators to give us the animations because the dolyak did not have all the animations for that. There was a long period of time during development where it was pretty rough. But thankfully-

Peter: They begged you not to do it.

Matt: They begged us not to do it.

Peter: You did it anyway.

Matt: Herron was having the heart attack I think.

Rubi: Ok, but we say thank you.

Matt: We do.

Rubi: For making it happen, because it was pretty awesome content.

Matt: Yeah. I really enjoyed being able to do something that was also outside of my comfort zone. I never worked with transforms to that degree before. So that was kinda nice.

Rubi: How do you feel it turned out?

Matt: I thought it was really well received. I really loved doing it. You know taking the spirit of Guild Rush you know which was the basis for that event and doing it in the open world with PvE and having you know just zip up to the top while being a dolyak was kinda fun.

Rubi: Nice! I like it. Alright so this festival brought us a whole new map. This brought us Labyrinthine Cliffs. Which we will talk about their fate later. But that Drew, that gave you the opportunity to do all kinds of cool things with sound.

Drew: Yeah.

Rubi: And this is the point where I just sit back and have fun.

Drew: Just kinda, uh. Yeah, I mean we had some new skills, we had some Zephyrite skills. Jerry did a fun job of kinda giving it this (whoosh sound) wispyness, and it's kinda hard to show that. So, uh. 'Cause that's kinda in our little workstations. But I did bring some toys.

Rubi: Do you need somebody to hand you things?

Drew: And, uh-

Rubi: They're kinda far away.

Drew: Actually that would be awesome.

All: (chuckle)

Drew: As I was thinking- As I'm sitting here, oh my god, I forgot to bring my toys over.

Peter: Your lovely assistant will hand them to you.

Drew: Yes, thank you-

Rubi: Thank you, Mark!

Drew: Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Mark. Okay.

Rubi: He's gonna be handing him, like, the sound baffles in a minute.

Drew: Uh...

Rubi: He's just handing him everything.

Drew: Okay! Now, that's- that's fine. Okay, so. We have, uh. So we have in... in town, there is a, uh, just a kinda- sprinkled around, some- some wind chimes. Near the temple. Here's a little one. (rings chime) And we- we go bigger. We go bigger. (rings larger chime) So it's just kinda like this pleasing, nice vibe thing.

Rubi: And this all sounds familiar to me.

Drew: And we got a big one! (rings largest chime) Uh, these are elephant bells. And, uh, this would be for a big elephant. This would be for a small elephant. Or maybe a newborn.

Rubi: (laughs) Yes!

Peter: So you put that on an elephant so that people know they're coming?

Drew: Yes, exactly. Yeah.

Rubi: (laughs) Peter!

Drew: And, uh. My friend, Serge Gubelman has, uh, I think we have probably 15-16 of these? So I just took three of these- um, actually I have a smaller one, a little dinky one, too. Uh, so. There are a whole bunch of different levels, and they're all made of these wood decks, y'know? So I thought, we'll make them outta bamboo. (bamboo creaking sounds) So you have that kind of- going into it, as it tensions up. And then you can step off of it, and then you have this tension down. So you- it kind of ebbs and flows. We did bigger and smaller, uh. And so, y'know, it depends on where you step and kind of what landing you're in. And that was a lot of fun, kind of coming up with, uh... with some- with some newer things-

Rubi: I was gonna say, how much fun for you was that when they came to you and said "Okay, we're gonna have, stay with me, a whole city made of bamboo."

Drew: Yeah.

Rubi: "And it flies."

Drew: Yeah.

Peter: It's really squeaky.

Drew: And the winds- uh, I think, I'm trying to remember. We did a, uh, a wind trip, kinda, through my Subaru Outback. It's got a sunroof. And so we would hang stuff out of it and-

Rubi: What!

Drew: -and record 'em while we're driving down the highway. And, uh, people thought we were absolutely nuts and, um- which is true. And, uh-

Rubi: But in a good way!

Drew: But yeah, we were putting out like, tennis rackets, and, uh, just odd things. But the wind would whistle through there-

Rubi: Yeah.

Drew: And then we would come back and kind of, y'know, stretch it out or kind of take different frequency bands and... (high wind whoosh sound) so this was a little more wispy so when you're on a ledge, you'd have this kind of "ohhh, I'm up top", or if you're down below it has more of a lower vibe. You know you're safe, (low wind whoosh sound) just a nice, gentle breeze. So you can kinda contrast where you are vertically by changing up the winds.

Rubi: That's extremely, extremely-

Drew: Uh, four winds, I think.

All: (laugh)

Rubi: Stop that! (laughs)

Drew: But I think we have many more winds than that.

Rubi: I'm trying- I'm stuck on this whole sticking things out of the sunroof of your car, so is it like- Tennis racket, microphone?

Peter: Subaru, it was a Subaru.

Rubi: Oh.

Drew: So, yeah. We had a microphone right underneath the edge so it wouldn't get the wind, and then we were just putting other stuff- yeah, it was- we drove all the way to, uh, past North Bend and back. Which is-

Rubi: Jeez.

Drew: Which is quite a ways.

Rubi: Yes.

Drew: Um, it's like, okay Jerry. I think we don't need to go to the Cascades, we can turn around.

Rubi: Jerry's like, "But I wanna. :( I wanna."

Peter: That's a long time to be in a car with Jerry.

Drew: It was like-

All: (laugh)

Drew: It was like a 45 minute drive one way. I think we ate in North Bend and came back.

Peter: Wow. And he's like, all full of sugar and stuff.

Drew: Yeah. Him- yeah, you don't wanna- like a hamburger and a shake. Yeah. Problem is it's not a good idea, but, we prevailed.

Peter: Oh boy, wow. That's a long ride.

Rubi: I feel like that's- that's more, like... Jerry high-pitched noises that you could've recorded and done something with. This might've been a lost opportunity.

Drew: Yeah. Yeah, and used for SAB. For those creatures. A kinda amped up (unhinged gremlin sounds). Yeah. And then you 8-bit it. Y'know. Grunge it up.

Rubi: Somebody please get a gif of that, please. Alright, we have one more festival to talk about, so give us one second and we'll be right back. Thank you, guys.

Dragon Bash (34:55)[edit]

Rubi: Alright, we have one more festival to talk about, and Steve, do you want to introduce this one?

Stephen Hwang: Um... We're gonna talk about Dragon Bash and bashing dragons.

Rubi: Yay! Now you have to sing the song!

Peter: Can you sing the song for us?

All: (laugh)

Stephen: Well it's... The song's kind of interesting because of like, you know, I remember, you know from the beta weekends, you know, Matthew Moore's you know, uh, there's a song, Slay the Dragon, right?

Rubi: Yeah, this was... Yeah.

Stephen: And he's like, well I approached him I was like well, can we use that? And he's like yeah! And then he and Maclaine just went off on that and created this awesome pub song that like... I don't know, this is weird like there's this weird vibe that was happening in the studio at the time. Cause we were all, you know, getting used to the live kinda cadence and it really galvanized I think, not just you know players to you know fight for Tyria but like to the... You know the studio itself got behind it, you know people were singing and chanting and doing the...

Rubi: It's so catchy!

Stephen: Yeah.

Rubi: So, the thing that you and I were talking about was wanting to give the players this shared sense of challenge and we're coming, we're trying to go get this dragon, we wanna get everybody pumped up.

Stephen: Right, I mean, uh, it was uh, I like trying to give the player a like, a greater sense of purpose, kinda unify them, feel like 'oh yeah we're in this fight against the dragons together'. You know that's... 'This is awesome' feeling you know.

Rubi: Mhm.

Stephen: We're not just different races and you know, in real life and in-game, we're working for this common goal, kinda bring Tyria together and bring them to LA and have, bash these dragons. And the funny thing about how dragon bash came about was, you know... In GW1, Dragon Bash was this like, you know, let's celebrate dragons, they're awesome! But in GW2, dragons are feared. They're the big bads of the world. So I was having this discussion with Ben Miller and he's like you guys should kinda do it like the snake day in Simpsons where they're just bashing on them.

Peter: Whacking day.

Stephen: Yeah, whacking day.

All: (laugh)

Stephen: And it's like, wow, we should try to do that. And it was like along with the 'slay the dragon' song, you have this great thing where you can call it 'Dragon Bash' and there's this double entendre with 'bash' as a celebration and 'bash' as a, you know, you're hitting things.

Rubi: As you're actually bashing the thing.

Stephen: Right. So I actually talked to Localization about this and tried to make sure that that conveyed in other languages a little bit...

Rubi: Oh.

Stephen: Yeah, so that was kind of unique.

Rubi: How did that go - or did that go in other languages?

Stephen: They said they tried their best, yeah. I think it did.

All: (laugh)

Peter: (inaudible)

Rubi: Trying to remember why I let you stay.

Peter: (inaudible)

Rubi: It's just because I really like you so you get away with stuff.

Peter: You needed this chair filled.

Rubi: I needed this chair filled. So do you feel like the whole festival of Dragon Bash came across the way you originally intended?

Stephen: It was really amazing because, you know, we were just forming up--this is when we were just starting up all the different Living World groups and that was the first one we had with this really tight cycle, we got our artists together, Phil made this awesome pinata which we ended up making and bashing in the studio, that was...

Rubi: That was fun, that was so much fun.

Stephen: My son, who was like three at the time, started singing the song at home, that was awesome.

Rubi: It is incredibly catchy. It's ridiculous how much that song has hung on.

Stephen: Yeah. It did what I wanted it to, which was bring the player base together and kind of really celebrate Guild Wars in this unifying cause. It was timed together with some interesting things like um CSRs (?) was starting to come out and I remember like a year or two before GW2 launched I read a preview of the book and there's all these things in the book, and like we have to make sure these things are in Lion's Arch. And so I worked with Josh - he was working on Lion's Arch and making sure we had these spots where Cobiah went and so like...

Rubi: Yeah, ohhhh...

Stephen: Yeah, under the docks, a place for his sister's grave, things like that.

Peter: Yeah, you could do the tour that takes you all around the city...

Stephen: Yeah, the tour. And you know we didn't have Malchor's Fingers at the time either, so, you know we added that to Cursed Shores and made sure the Indomitable was the name of one of the ships. So that was kinda interesting how years of planning ahead got revealed in Dragon Bash.

Rubi: You know, you mentioned living world a minute ago and provided a very nice segue to me because that was, we had all of these holidays that we've come through but Living World is a huge thing that we added to Guild Wars 2 over the years so we're going to talk about that in a minute. Thank you for coming on and talking about Dragon Bash with us.

Stephen: Thank you, no problem.

Rubi: So stay close I'm gonna need you again soon. Alright, be right back.

Living World Season 1 (43:23)[edit]

Rubi: Welcome back. We just blew Anthony's mind, he has never seen the Quaggan deep thoughts, so he was over there going..."what... I don't know how to cope with any of this".

Peter: It was weird...

Rubi: It was weird in the best of ways. So, well, let's talk about Living World, since Steve so kindly gave us this little segue in there. This was a brand new thing that we were trying, and we started with Lost Shores, where we kind of, again, harmed Lion's Arch. Again, setting a precedent that carried on for a while.

Peter: Burning it to the ground.

Rubi: Burning it to the ground? That was later - it's okay. We'll get to it soon, it's alright. There will be all the death you can handle, very soon. I promise. Do you guys want to talk a little bit about the ideas behind Lost Shores and what you wanted to accomplish there? I know. Killing everyone.

Matthew: Yes. The impetus behind Lost Shores was definitely to give players that feeling that this was not just a game that was going to stay static. It was going to consistently get updates that would change the way you experienced Tyria. And we thought 'why not start off with a bang?' and literally knock the light house down and have Karka invade from the ocean. So, that was our big idea, and it just kind of grew like the Karka horde.

Rubi: It grew like the Karka horde?

Matthew: Yes, it did.

Peter: It was a "you are there" thing. Like, you had to be there.

Matthew: You had to be there.

Rubi: Yeah, that was like our first, big, one-time weekend event.

Peter: Yeah.

Mike: I mean, the breaking of the statue on Halloween was kinda the first epic moment.

Rubi: Oh, that's right!

Mike: But we did want to make a huge impact with Lost Shores. And so it was - I mean, Anthony alluded to this earlier - we broke into teams just after launch talking about what our goals were going to be. We had, obviously there was the festivals team. We knew we had to knock that one out of the park. But we also wanted to start telling - Cool, we built this world. We have these dynamic events that are evolving and changing based on what the players are doing. We wanted to take it one step further, right? What's the next iteration of that? Which is: what if the world is changing as well? And so, we wanted to have it be almost like, I think the original idea was an invasion of something coming from somewhere. And alien invasion is usually what it starts with. So that's why the Karka are so drastically different from everything else because it was like: How do we make this fit? How do we make it seem like we have this huge world and you have these creatures that just don't fit coming up from the sea, coming up from the depths and what does that mean? How do the cities react? How do the alliances of the player races come together to defend Lion's Arch and take the fight back to them?

Matthew: Yeah, the Hollywood movie blockbuster was definitely one of our guiding principles of: Big invasion happens, what do you do? With players getting to play the role of the hero, of course. And so, having a monstrous form that was completely new and like nothing we've ever seen before. And had displayed qualities that we also have never seen before. Like, when we first meet the Karka, you can't do much damage to them, and it's only through the course of that weekend's story where you learn how to do damage to the Karka and then you took the fight back to them. Which was all part of that whole "you had to be there" to experience that.

Rubi: Yeah, it was kind of an interesting new - I mean, these were our first steps into what was going to become Living World. And what were the challenges there?

Peter: There were no challenges.

Rubi: You get out! Because you are a liar!

Mike: We always, anytime we do these things we're always exploring and experimenting and trying things, and we're always pushing the tech to the boundaries. So we wanted to figure out how do you make it so when you first get on the island and there's these first several events where you're setting up the outpost and clearing the trees along the way and actually getting those settlements up. But you didn't want to have that run every time a brand-new map started up. So after a certain point, after X number of hours or days we would set some triggers on the back-end to say, ok, these are always here now when you come into the map. And now it's the next tale of the invasion. And so, it was always about trying to progress this thing all the way up to the final encounter with the Ancient Karka. That massive, almost earth-shattering epicness of that fight to the point where it kinda broke everything.

Rubi: I was sitting here thinking, we really need to talk about what happened with the, yeah...

Mike: The "Hi, here's this Ancient Karka that you can't see that's rolling over you." But yeah, it's one of these things that we were pushing the bounds of what we thought was possible. Even beyond what our internal tests or with our team to build this cool epic moment to the point where now there's a permanent mark left in the world. Like, you can still go into the center of that cave and there's that Ancient Karka corpse still there that kinda crawled out of the lava after it was knocked down in there. But we really wanted to bring this moment where it was getting everyone together for this one giant weekend event to really bring these things down. And we learned a lot, obviously, because it's shaped the future of what Living World actually meant. But it was also a fantastic experience. Being in there with the players to come together for these monumental challenges was so awe-inspiring and also breathtaking and also cringe-worthy when you realize we really have pushed beyond what this engine can do. We need to either put new tech in there to allow us to do certain things, or we have to start redesigning or thinking about how we design these epic encounters so we could take this into account.

Matthew: The toughest thing for us I think was making some assumptions about what we could or could not do, to the point that we learned a lot of valuable lessons. Like, please don't ever put everybody in the same map doing the exact same thing all at the same time. That is just a recipe for disaster. So we've learned how to do things a little differently and design around those constraints. Maybe we should put one thing here, one thing there, and let people break themselves up and do stuff. And I think that despite all the challenges, I still think of it as one of our best experiences as a studio. I was here the entire weekend, and we were putting out fires left and right and trying to make sure that everything- But all that time we were learning and growing and coming together as a studio and everybody was pitching in. And it was just a full team effort, unlike anything I had ever encountered in my career. And so it was really cool.

Rubi: And I think that's an upside. There's some rose-covered glasses going on. And it was hard! It was a difficult weekend. I know you were dealing with the in-game, I was dealing with the social channels, out of game, and people were frustrated and they weren't sure what was going on. But all of that was because you guys broke the boundaries of- you did more than we've ever done before.

Peter: We broke things.

Rubi: You did. You broke boundaries, and you broke all the things.

Mike: The thing that I really take away, one of the highlights for us internally as a studio is that we looked at this at this saying “Cool, we’re not done yet, there’s something more we wanna do, there’s a new story we wanna tell, we’re onto something here. And then we started investigating, how do we actually make this into something bigger, how do we make it so that we’re doing this more episodic style of content. Basically from this one event we then kicked off four full teams that were leapfrogging each other for the next year, year and a half that became the living world strategy. It was one of those big things where we looked at- yeah, this is great, what’s next. What’s the next hurdle that we’re gonna overcome and those types of things.

Rubi: It was definitely good. You look like you were gonna say something.

Matthew: I do?

Rubi: You do. Maybe you just have this naturally expectant look. Much like that, now you just look like Loki. We also introduced a lot of new characters. Canach. This is where Canach showed up.

Peter: This is the first appearance of Canach and Ellen Kiel who people later voted in as the captain.

Rubi: How do you feel about that?

Peter: I am fully in favour.

Rubi: Okay.

Mike: We had buttons around the office for a while, like vote for Kiel or vote Evon.

Rubi: I still have one of those.

Mike: I remember [someone?]^{[verification requested]} was trying to bribe everybody , “Vote Evon”.

Rubi: Seriously?

Mike: Oh yeah. He was hardcore Evon.

Rubi: Is he? I voted Evon too, so…

Mike: I won’t lie, there was an achievement so I did both.

(laughter)

Flame and Frost and The Secret of Southsun (52:09)[edit]

Rubi: Alright. So we also brought Faren and Kasmeer, and Faren hitting on Kasmeer on the beach.

Mike: That was when we returned.

Rubi: Who did we see first? This has been so long.

Mike: They were both together. Yeah, so that was bascially November...

Peter: That was The Secret of Southsun.

Mike: We started doing a little bit of hinting with Flame and Frost and stopped going into the New Year. This started as a small project. There were two designers that were- “We’ll put signposts here, we’ll put the audio turrets that were around showing up” because we wanted to start hinting at the bigger things that were to come. Ultimately, we had these grand plans of, here’s this big dungeon that shows up, and it rotates what map you can enter in between the four maps in the Shiverpeaks. Now we start going even grander and we started down this path of “Here’s all these intricate little stories”, but we knew we were coming back to bringing it all together towards the end, and that’s when you start seeing Scarlet pulling the strings behind the scenes. Flame and Frost was the first episode of that and then we did come back to Southsun, and that was the first time you saw Kasmeer and Lord Faren on the beach-

Peter: In his speedo.

Mike: Yes.

Peter: He’s very fashionable.

Rubi: He is. He’s a very fashionable man.

Peter: Yes, yes. He’s a fancy fancy man.

Rubi: It’s one of many many things that you can say about Lord Faren.

Peter. He’s a delight.

Rubi: So that took us into what was the prelude living world, which was Flame and Frost. How did you get from Lost Shores to Flame and Frost and say “Okay this is what we’re gonna do, this is what we’re committing to”?

Mike: It started with narrative design coming from behind the scenes and writing this big epic story of where we’re going next. We knew we wanted to bring a bunch of these hostile races coming together to form an anti-organization to the players’ versions of the pact. That would be the “super villain” sort of tone to the story. It was bringing out those and playing those out over those month-long episodes. Each month you got introduced to a new faction. There are usually about two releases per month that were dealt with an individual story and then we’d move on to something else. Steve and the Dragon Bash team were dealing with cutthroat politics and Dragon Bash and building up that dichotomy of “We wanna do cool festivals, but at the same time we wanna continue telling these cool stories” in such a way that they’ve fed into each other. That the natural story of the world was something that was strife, but at the same time there was something positive about it, there were always these festivals, or new content, or new dungeons or things that we were bringing into it. The overarching story of Season 1 was these big epic [?] where we wanted to bring everyone together, have some cool story moment or some cool epic battle, like the Marionette, and just continue down this path of all these cool- “Hey look!”… At the end of the day, MMO’s are: There’s a game, but the thing that’s going to last forever is these conversations that we’re having. Where were you when the ancient Karka was defeated? Where were you when the Marionette came down or when the Super Adventure Box was first announced? Those are the stories that are gonna last even beyond the length of Guild Wars 2 and almost like it’s the legacy of the game.

Rubi: How scary was this from a narrative point of view? Like sitting down, be like “Hey guys, here’s what we’re gonna do.”

Peter: I wasn’t actually part of that planning myself, but I hear it was pretty scary. They kinda locked themselves in a room for a while and tried to hash this all out ahead of time. It took some twists and turns over the course of the year to a place they weren’t expecting, but it was a challenge.

Mike: No plan survives contact with enemy. The enemy is sometimes ourselves. We put this in front of the team, and the team is like “Yeah this is really cool, but we got this other cool idea”, and you wanna incorporate that as well. It was always an amorphous plan. We kinda knew where we were going at the high level, but it was always kind of – each team would bring its own flavor to it and would add something to it that we didn’t necessarily predict from the very beginning.

Peter: That’s true. That’s how all our development goes. We could never predict it.

Matthew: The narrative folks for season one of Living World deserves extra kudos because they had to do it without the benefit of a story journal because none of that tech was there, so we had to rely on a lot of special UI bits and bobs to make things work and communicate to players “Here’s what you should be doing!”, and none of that stuff had been designed for any of that stuff, it was designed for festivals and things that were a little bit more special event type content. They had to rely on a lot of smoke and mirrors behind the scenes.

Peter: We were swapping things out every couple weeks so we had to somehow find ways to bring people up to speed. The next two weeks, “Oh suddenly this is happening”, and “Wait a minute why is this happening”. Where did Lion’s Arch go and that kind of stuff.

(laughter)

Rubi: Don’t worry, it’ll be back, we’ll just do it again. I think those of us that have been around, players that have been around for a long time and players that have come in later, pretty much everybody- we forget that this game used to exist- I mean we just kept adding things on. Like you said, story journal didn’t exist, and we forget that that was the thing that we had to work without.

Mike: We didn’t have achievements when the game launched, we couldn’t even rely on that as a way to like.. we’re doing with the current events right now, you can actually see some of that and we can hint at some of the things that are going on. We didn’t have that technology back then so we were basically- It was very much trying to lead a pack of cats, but not really knowing where they were gonna go or what they’re gonna discover. That’s why we actually did a bunch of more scavenger hunts early on, that was the way that we’d do it, like with the backpack from Halloween and things like that. It was laying the players kind of- crowd-source the information, trying to figure out how to actually overcome some of these challenges that we were throwing together.

Rubi: I have a final note on here before we move on to the next part, that you had a trailer idea that we ended up not having time to do with, but pieces of it are still in the game.

Mike: Oh, for Southsun.

Peter: Yeah for Lost Shores actually, I had wanted to do this lost golem footage trailer for Lost Shores, like you know the trailers that you saw before Blair Witch or like Prometheus or whatever- just showed that there was like this mysterious thing that was gonna happen. So the idea was that there was an expedition that was sent, out sort of contracted by the consortium through Canach, and they went on the SS Prospect to go explore Southsun ahead of all the stuff that happened. And that was the tragic story of what happened to them just through the like- it was gonna be like quick flashes of “This happened, that happened“-

Rubi: Like terrifying found footage.

Peter: And then the only thing that really- there’s only two things I think that survived from that, that pitch where Owain, who’s the sylvari crazy chef that’s like making omelets on the one part of the island-

Rubi: Oh yeah!

‘‘‘Peter’‘‘: She was part of the original expedition. And then there’s a memorial I think that mentions the other people that were on the ship at her area of Southsun, but it’s kind of like this outside of game thing that never happened. (laughs) It was supposed to be like a marketing promotion, oh well. I’ve failed.

Rubi: You didn’t fail. We just…

Peter: It’s so sad.

Rubi: We had very big goals and fun ideas that sometimes we don’t have the time to do.

Peter: I can act it all out but…

(laughter)

Mike: Shadow puppetry! [?]

Peter: (silly voice) “Oh no look out, it’s a karka!”

(laugter)

Rubi: I think that needs to be a whole other live stream, where we do like Peter Fries theater.

Peter: (laughs) Okay.

Rubi: Can somebody write that down? Alright, we’re going to jump forward a little bit and talk some more Living World stuff in just a minute. We’ll be right back. You sit down.

Living World Season 1 (Part 2) (1:02:57)[edit]

Rubi: Alright, we are back with Peter, Anthony and Teddy. Did it startle you? Are you alright?

Peter: It always does.

Rubi: Do you need a minute?

Peter: Yeah. There's a mild electric shock when we come back on.

Jessica Teddy Croft: Peter's never going home.

Rubi: Do what?

Teddy: Peter's never going home

Rubi: Peter's never- Peter lives here now.

Teddy: We[?] worked on literally everything.

Rubi: We've actually stapled him on this chair. I'm very sorry.

Teddy: That's why he's so dead inside.

Rubi: (laughs) Alright so let's talk about the continuation of the Living World. We went back to Southsun, the Queen tried to have a party and everything was ruined.

Peter: Ruined.

Rubi: Ruined. Do you guys wanna talk about what each of you worked on with this? Cuz we've kind of- Yes you.

Peter: Do we? I don't know.

Rubi: You do. That's why you're stapled to the chair.

Peter: We've skipped around at times so I forget where we are now.

Rubi: We did holydays, now we're doing Living World. I had to organize this somehow. There's just a lot of you. Let's talk about Southsun.

Peter: Actually it's funny, like we were talking about journal technology before, one of the interesting things about getting that finally is that we could put a date on everything. Before that, everything was happening in a non-linear fashion where you didn't know when it was happening relative to anything else, and it's really hard to tell a story like that, when page 20 might come before page, you know, 3...

Rubi: Yeah. Is that why the story journal came to be? Because you couldn't stand it anymore?

Peter: Yeah it kind of- Yeah, we wanted to definitively say "This is happening after spoiler, Zhaitan is killed, and-

Rubi: (looks away miffed)

Peter: Sorry. I'm sorry.

Rubi: I didn't know!

Peter: Like we can actually say, this is you know, year one, this is year two, this is year three. This is when these things are happening, and prior to that we couldn't actually say that, so it was like, "Did this happen before Zhaitan was killed? Was Zhaitan killed? Maybe he wasn't killed!" You know, nobody could really make heads and tails of anything, so that finally sort of cemented stuff. Like, this is when this is happening.

Anthony: It is also the nice part about, you get to put stuff even in the game so you could play it later.

Rubi: Did that feel pretty good?

Anthony: Yeah.

Peter: Yeah. Sadly we can't do it with season 1.

Rubi: I know. I'm sad, because it's making me miss that stuff.

Peter: I'm sorry.

Rubi: It's entirely Peter's fault.

Peter: I'm sorry everyone.

Rubi: Okay. So let's talk about going back to Southsun because Teddy, you put in a ton of work on this.

Teddy: This was the first release I was hospitalized during.

Rubi: We've talked about this before.

Teddy: It's not because of work. Just get that out of the way so I don't get in trouble. I went to the hospital with blood clot. I was in the hospital for like a week. A bunch of people like Z (Mike Zadrojny?) came to visit, bless'em.

Anthony: We brought a laptop to you so you could keep working.

Peter: Keep working.

Rubi: Rude!

Teddy: Yes, that's definitely what I was doing! (whispers) That's not what i was doing.

Rubi: Z came in and took your laptop away so you would rest. No more! We continued working with Southsun. Anthony, you added Crab Toss.. Was Crab Toss your baby?

Anthony: Yeah, Crab toss is my fault.

Rubi: No, we can thank you for that! People have fun it.

Anthony: Crab Toss was fun because because they had asked if I could come to work on Living World and I was like "Sure", and we were supposed to do Queen's Jubilee but I came to the team a little early, so they were like, "What could you add?", right? So we had this crazy idea for Crab Toss. Originally it was supposed to be like single round elimination. Like once you got rolled over you were just dead. And then that was kinda boring so we changed it to be more like, you just get flattened and you get up and it was kind of a score based thing. If I could go back and do it all again, i would change it so that once you got rolled over by karka, you just become a karka and then you could roll over other people. Yeah, that's what I would do.

Rubi: Is it too like..? Okay sorry.

Anthony: Probably, it's too late.

Peter: It's always too late.

Rubi: Alright fine.

Teddy: It's always the thing, like, as you draw as a designer, you look back at your old stuff and you're like, "I could have done so much better!".

Anthony: Yeah. But like, getting that little crab to like work properly, that was fun.

Rubi: Really?

Anthony: Yeah. The hidden secret of that is, when you pick'em up, he doesn't actually- you're not holding it, you're holding like a fake item, and then the crab becomes invisible and follows you around. While you're carrying them. So yeah.

Rubi: Alright.

Anthony: It's good times. Big hack.

Rubi: You make it work.

Anthony: Yeah.

Rubi: However you need to.

Anthony: Just make it work. Just fit those square pegs in the round holes.

Teddy: You'd be shocked how many things in our game are basically built with invisible creatures or invisible gadgets.

Anthony: But that was a great one.

Rubi: Really.

Peter: It's a web of lies.

(laughter)

Anthony: It's a very fragile web.

Teddy: It's only a lie if you figure it out.

Peter: Fragile web of lies.

(laughter)

Rubi: Oh man. So what else did you guys add in Southsun that you especially liked?

Teddy: I worked on the Canach boss battle.

Rubi: The Canach boss battle was awesome.

Peter: That's right.

Teddy: Yeah. So I work on raids these days, and Canach boss battle was one of like, our first attempts at making a more structured mechanical fight, that's like the first time we started seeing UI call-outs for mechanics going on. That kind of thing. Which I've carried over into raids. And it just goes to show you that we're learning while we do this.

Rubi: Yeah I mean we're constantly adding things and that's what we talked about earlier, pushing the boundaries of hat we have in the game and adding the Karka Queen.

Anthony: Oh yeah, speaking of pushing the boundaries, that was another one.

(laughter)

Anthony: I think I worked on that one mostly, yeah. And the way she actually works is, she throws all those crabs, the little karka, and that really pushes the limits of how many projectiles we can have in the game at once.

Rubi: How many projectiles can we have?

Peter: Eight.

Anthony: That is an undisclosed number.

Peter: We can have eight.

Rubi: We can have eight?

Anthony: Eight? Oh no it's way more from that, I tell ya.

Peter: Nine.

Teddy: Anthony is our mad scientist.

Rubi: We just brought Peter on to make things up.

Anthony: A little bit, yeah.

Peter: (shrugs) Yeah.

Rubi: Awesome. So we talked earlier about- We come back to Southsun, we've got all of these new characters that we introduce. So part of writing these guys was some of yours, wasn't it?

Peter: Yeah we introduced Hob-o-Ton. Oh sorry, Job-o-Tron.

Anthony I think it's Job-o-Tron actually.

Rubi: What are we calling him this week?

Anthony: We didn't have a story journal, and we needed someone to give you a job.

(laughter)

Peter: We liked the idea of a golem that was like, would be insulting and kind of a jerk, and he's picked that up from his owner there on the island.

Teddy: He picked that up from Peter actually.

Peter: The consortium guy there...

Anthony: It's really Peter.

Peter: What was his name? Oh man.

Rubi: It was Peter.

Anthony: Subdirector Noll. He kinda had a little bit of his personality. The same guy was voicing the golem and Null and he was also the voice of Faren, so at some point we teamed up all three of them up together so Yuri can be voicing all three characters on an adventure together.

Rubi: Let's try to break Yuri Lowenthal because Peter thinks it would be funny.

Peter: Yeah. But Job-o-Tron ended up having a whole story arc that went over many episodes where he sort of redeems himself and becomes a hero eventually.

Rubi: Yeah he's still around, isn't he?

Peter: Yeah. And in some of the recent releases I insisted he have this huge ribbon on him. It's his heroic- Now he's Hero-Tron.

Rubi: He is. Wait is he Job-o-Tron again?

Peter: He went from Job-o-Tron to Hobo-Tron during the Queen Jubille where he was busking for money with his-

Rubi: That was amazing.

Peter: -minstrel buddy. They hate each other. And then he had some adventures where he got captured with Scarlet holding him hostage with the minstrel and with Faren.

Rubi: The giant boiling pot.

Peter: Then they got blamed for that and they got put to work over the Christmas holiday. They were taking donations and working for the Lion's guard.

Anthony: We changed his name then too, didn't we?

Teddy: Yeah, it was Hero-Tron.

Peter: I can't remember...

Rubi: Hero-Tron, Job-o-Tron. He was Hobo-Tron for a while.

Peter: Ho-Ho-Tron!

Anthony: Ho-Ho-Tron!

Rubi: Ho-Ho-Tron!

Peter: That's right, Ho-Ho-Tron.

Rubi: Thank you.

Peter: Yeah that's right. And he was taking sweater donations.

Rubi: Where are you getting all these sweaters you guys?

Peter: Then he was Heal-o-Tron. He came back and was healing people during the battle of LA, like the people hat were coming out of the city that were injured and stuff. He was doing some-

Rubi: Was that five? I lost track.

Peter: Yeah.

Rubi: Okay. That's quite an arc. Has that been just incredibly fun, keeping him in the background?

Peter: Yeah, it's really fun.

Anthony: You know what's really great about Job-o-Tron is that initially he was not a character. Like his art was just a little prop that we had added to... I don't remember what map. And then people rigged up a version of him that could move around, and then the animators got really furious and gave us proper animations for him.

(laughter)

Peter: That's how we make them do stuff.

Anthony: It was good. We got a whole new asset for free.

Teddy: I think the first place we used him was in the personal story, actually. I put him in for, like, as the thing that communicates to you to let you, like, bombard one of the Orrian temples.

Anthony: Yeah, his initial, like, name in the tool was "Typing Assistant". Because he had that little animation where he'd pull up a little screen...

Rubi: That's right.

Anthony: ...and then his little hands would go...

Teddy: It's how I picture fans when they're typing comments to us...

Anthony: Yeah.

Teddy: Angrily.

Peter: When he was busking with the minstrel, I asked the sound guys if we could get, you know, the minstrel to sing some things and then have Hobo-Tron sort of play it back like he was sampling what he had just heard. And so we put that in as, like, you know, he's doing, like, some sampled effects of the same songs and playing it back again and trying to get money for playing what the minstrel just played across the corner from him. (laughs) So they were, like, competing with each other.

Rubi: And the minstrel comes over and is just ready to shove him in the bay.

Peter: Yeah, the minstrel's one of my favorite characters ever.

Rubi: He's so... He's just so sad.

Peter: At one point he wanders under the bridge and he just kind of sits there and goes, I hope I die soon.

Rubi: (laughs) I just got that first.

Peter: That's one of my favorite lines.

Teddy: This is what we call a warning sign.

Rubi: You write some dark stuff. I'm just saying, there's, like, this underlying thread.

Peter: When they're captured by Scarlet and they're being held captive in her... I think it was at Clockwork Chaos. There's a point where the minstrel is begging them to kill the golem first.

(laughter)

Peter: And then he says, this is the second worst gig I've ever been booked for.

(laughter)

Peter: Because they're forcing him to play the songs over and over and over again...

Rubi: Oh my gosh.

Peter: ...to entertain all the henchmen.

Clockwork Chaos and Queen's Jubilee (1:13:35)[edit]

Rubi: Oh my gosh. Let's talk about Clockwork Chaos and Queen's Jubilee because we needed a summer festival as the birthday of Guild Wars 2 was coming up.

Peter: Yeah, the anniversary event.

Anthony: Jubilee came first, and they were like, you know, we needed a summer festival. And the team kind of went off and designed this... It was kind of the idea was a tournament. And so we... Channeling a little bit of what made Mad King's Labyrinth so fun, we wanted to do the Divinity Arena, which was in the sinkhole.

(laughter)

Anthony: It was formerly known as a sinkhole. And then Teddy here was like, I want to do a boss challenge mode. And we were like, we don't have the scope for that. And Teddy was like, I'll do it anyway. And she came in and built...

Rubi: We seriously need to talk about this Teddy.

Teddy: This is...

Anthony: ...a boss every day for about 20 days. And then we had a full set of bosses.

Teddy: Yeah, this is why I always end up in the hospital.

(laughter)

Teddy: So the Queen's Gauntlet wasn't planned. It was just... I wanted to do something that challenged players on an individual level and also gave you a chance to show off. Because, I mean, that's really why we do any of these games. I mean, to show off to other people. So that's why the arenas are visible from the catwalk, basically. And, yeah, every single day I would come in and just knock one boss out. Just like that.

Peter: (laughs) Just that easy.

Anthony: Knock them out. She was knocking them out. It was like, every day there's another one, another one.

Teddy: There was a couple days I'm like, I have no idea what I'm going to do for this boss. And then I'd go to lunch. And, like, I would go to, like, a tourist area, like a Brazilian steakhouse. And then I'd be sitting there and be like, I should do a meat-themed boss. And that's why there's that boss, Chomper, where his owner and Strugar, he throws meat out and Chomper goes and eats it. And then he uses the sword Calladhog, which is a great sword.

(laughter)

Teddy: A pig's cured eye. It's a play on Calladhog, but you don't get it.

Anthony: Do you, do you remember the exploit with Deadeye?

Teddy: There are many.

Anthony: Yeah. There was one in particular. And then I remember we had this crazy plan that we were going to put him in the open world if you had exploited it. And then he was just going to shoot you dead.

Teddy: Oh, yeah.

(laughter)

Peter: And then steal everything.

Anthony: Just flick a cigarette on your body.

(laughter)

Teddy: That's so very true.

Peter: Clean out your bank account.

Anthony: We went off the rails on that one a little bit, and that never happened.

Teddy: Like, you did do the thing where scarlet would stalk you in the open world and kill you.

Anthony: Yeah.

Peter: People like that.

Rubi: So what, what was the favorite boss that you created? Who did you like best?

Teddy: I think I like Liadri.

Rubi: Yay!

Teddy: Who's based on a friend of mine. Um, not because thematically she's the most interesting, the funnest. It's just the pure amount of pain people have suffered at her hands. It's legendary. (laughs)

Rubi: Is it your friend Peter? Is this what you're talking about? Like this.

Teddy: I don't enjoy my own suffering like Peter does.

Rubi: All right. Let's move down below in this formerly known as sinkhole. And we had all these boss battles down there. And can we talk about the champion bags? Can we talk about the tsunami of champion bags? So were there enough?

Anthony: No, we...

Rubi: I think we needed more.

Anthony: We had this thing going on at the company. Basically you're trying to address the issue of champion bags not being very, like champions in the open world not being very rewarding. They'd just be alive for days. And so we thought, man, we'll just add champion bags, you know, special champion bags to every champion in the game. And we did this in the event about fighting champions. So yeah, there was a lot of champion bags.

Peter: Problem solved.

Anthony: Yeah, it was great. It was a river of goals.

Rubi: Well, I do have to say that you solved the problem of not enough champion bags.

Anthony: Yeah, they were great. I mean, there was no downside to that whatsoever.

(laughter)

Rubi: What is the entire, the entire player base was like, "let's farm these champions for eight hours a day."

Anthony: Yeah.

Teddy: I mean, when we were looking at player numbers, it's like high five.

(laughter)

Teddy: Good job, team.

Anthony: We should have called our map "Divinity Fun Farm".

Teddy: Meanwhile, our analytics team is like, oh.

Anthony: Yeah, the systems team, not too happy. Goal exchange, maybe not so happy. But, you know, this is all good.

Peter: The players are happy.

Anthony: It was a lot of fun. And then the best part was is that I'm pretty sure we were aware of the problem at that point. But I don't know if we just didn't correct anything for the Clockwork Chaos release because we just added more champions to the game. (laughs)

Anthony: That's what you do.

Note: The text below hasn't yet been converted from raw subtitle text into pretty print like above. https://youtu.be/pA1YCkGfL7k?t=4695

'''Rubi''': I feel like analytics is coming down going, I can't help but notice that you put more champions in.

Yeah, no.

Do you hear the sobbing coming from fifth floor?

So I think that, I'm not sure what happened there, but there was a change to the dynamic scaling system that would auto promote guys. And some of the guys that would be promoted were champions. And so, you know, that was how we made content really hard.

And those champions, I mean, they were cleaning up. They were just wrecking players all over the place. But, you know, there was equal losses on both sides.

And let me tell you, many champion bags were released into the world that first day.

So, like, that's a secret. When you find a trash fire, you pour gas on it.

Yeah. That's how we do it. That's the secret to great game design.

You heard it here first. Trash fires. And Subarus.

I just like how every story that you just told ended with, so we put more champions in the game.

We heard you like champions.

Specifically, we heard you like champion bags.

Champion loot.

All right. So, all of this was part of the Queen's Jubilee. And the introduction, we had this mysterious voice coming in here.

Yeah, we did.

Sorry, I'll turn off that little electrical switch.

Yeah. The mysterious stranger, mysterious stranger, suspicious bush that was appearing in that one episode.

I love that. I want to call her that forever.

Yeah, she was. There was an instance that we made, I think it was the only instance in that release, where the first time you went into the arena, you had to watch Logan have his battle with the clockwork, what do you call them, the marionettes?

Watch knights.

The watch knights, yeah.

Watch knights.

So, that happened. And then the mysterious stranger had this big ambush. And then, I don't know if a lot of people noticed, but a Sky Pirates, or AWA Pirates airship actually flew into the arena at that point.

It was kind of overhead. We wanted to do a cinematic of it. We just didn't have time.

So, yeah. That was cool. We should have had somebody point up and say, look at that airship.

It came in through a portal, right, which was the same portals that Scarlet later used to invade all over the place.

Oh, yeah. She was working on a lot of stuff in the background.

Yeah. She had plans.

Here's my important question. Before we knew who she was, she was just the voice, and she was like a mysterious hooded figure. How did she get the pigtails under the hood?

She had a different haircut at that point.

They're clip-ons.

Okay. I can buy that.

She's a sylvari. She just grew them.

Yeah, but it happened so fast. She didn't really have time for that. She just went, and the pigtails kept popping up.

I accept that they're clip-ons. It's a hologram.

I like that. Just the head? Just the hair.

Just the hair is a hologram.

Just the blunt heels. They're clip-ons because when you go into her room, there's a bowl full of them. That's right!

Oh, that's right!

She was growing those. Steady, serious.

I forgot about that. It's literally a bowl of hair.

So just like an avocado pit, you could take one of those pigtails and put it in some water, and eventually Scarlet will grow back from that.

Could you not do that, please?

So I just confirmed that she's coming back.

Yeah, don't spoil, like, don't spoil her next release, Peter.

Sorry.

I'm leaving. Tell them you're lying.

She's leaving. I'm not lying.

You're the worst.

When you're live, you don't believe it. I'm lying.

You are definitely lying.

I'm sorry, everyone.

People off-camera are, like, turning pale. Being like, make him stop, make him stop, make him stop. Alright, so we had the Queen's Gauntlet, we had the...

I really do like the showing off up there where you can be seen from the catwalk. For those of us who aren't as good, it was a little intimidating. I was like, alright, you guys, I'm going to do the thing.

Everyone's going to be able to see me. I'm not going to do it. I don't want to do it.

Please don't make me.

I mean, performance anxiety is a thing, but I think the thing that... Stop it. Peter, you're fired.

I've never had that problem.

Oh my god, this is going so well.

There was a couple of reasons why we did that.

So I was making a point.

Go for it. No, go ahead. I was going to say, a lot of people asked why didn't we just put the...

Why didn't we put the gauntlet in an instance, right? So there was kind of two things. One was we wanted to foster the sense of, yeah, you can watch.

There's a community around beating these bosses. And the other part of it was we just didn't want to open that many instances because as we proved with releases like Lost Shores, there's lessons we learned. You don't just put a bunch of people on the same map and make a billion versions of that map.

It's not great. So that's why that turned out the way it did.

Well, and I noticed there were some nice side effects to that because I did go in. I wanted to go in there and participate and run the gauntlet. And you're dying.

You would wind up back on the catwalk. And there was always that player waiting their turn. And people would run over and rez you.

And there was this sense of players helping each other, which is something that we've always made an effort to make part of the world.

Well, the thing that's really satisfying on my end for it was it was very much this visual progression of players getting better. Yeah. I would see people go in and they just get creamed by the first boss because they stand AOE, lol.

And they would die a couple times and then they'd learn and then they'd beat that encounter and they'd get to the next one and get stuck on it. And then they'd just keep trying and keep progressing. And that was ultimately the goal of it was to give you the means to be a better player.

Additionally, you could watch players who were more successful and learn from them or ask them what was going on.

Yeah. See how they got through this.

It's a very organic way of teaching the combat.

I like it.

We were super happy with the way that turned out overall.

So Scarlet put her pigtails on, took off her hood, ruined everything. And then we had Nightmare Within and the Tower of Nightmares. Tower of Nightmares or Towers of Nightmares?

One tower meant many nightmares.

Tower of's Nightmare.

Oh, okay. Thank you. This is why we keep you around.

So this is where we got into the plant theme and we're foreshadowing the plant dragon.

Yeah. Also the three-headed worm thing was a shadowing of plant creatures.

Oh yeah, we had the great jungle worm. That's when that showed up.

Mysterious creature that had all kinds of plant powers and stuff.

Isn't that strange? I wonder where that's going to. All right.

So how did we, from a design and story both perspective, how did you push that forward? Because we knew for a long time where we were going with this, but this is where it starts getting really more overt. Peter's like, I just want to kill things.

How do we get more overt with it?

Because now we're back to the wonder monster.

We put a giant plant tower in the middle of Keswick Hill.

There we go.

That's how we got overt. We changed that map and then we left it that way. We just, you know, we wrecked that tower and it fell over and that was, you know, the pretty map was destroyed.

Yeah, that's, that was, I thought that was overt. I don't know.

Yeah, we were not doing anything by halves at that point.

No, no. So you go in that tower that Scarlet grew with her toxic alliance and you fight all kinds of nightmarish versions of different characters that you've encountered along the way. And we kind of geared the story to conditional, conditionals that were based off, you know, choices you made in the story or things that you'd experienced.

So you might see your mentors or you might see Logan or, you know, whoever was there to fight you.

Yeah, that was a really personalized experience.

Yeah, personalized. That was the word I was looking for. But yeah, it was a personalized nightmare for you that Scarlet cooked up and you fight your way through all that.

And that was where she, I think she pretty much vows to get her revenge on you or she's going to fix you good at the end of that because you ruined her whole scheme to, you know, develop this toxin. Knocked her tower over. Tower, yeah, you knocked her pretty tower over.

I think what Peter meant to say in terms of going more overt is we like to start with subtle plot lines. There's hints. And then as we got later in the season, like the attacks became just more blatant.

And it's always fun for us to be able to see your theories on, like, where the plot is going because half the time you're right and half the time you're completely wrong.

That's the fun of it, watching players speculate for me, is that there's always, and this is a consistent theme, there's always somebody in all of these guesses who nails it, who gets it absolutely right. This, I'll bet, is what's going to happen. And there's this fun of sifting through all of these and being, hey, you guys, I found the person who figured it out.

And they're just building the story based on what they found.

And then we go back and we do it that way.

We just comb our forums and we look for the people who have the best stories and then we just steal them. And the next five posts are people calling that person who got it right an idiot.

All right, this is also where the group that eventually became Dragonswatch started really making more of an appearance. Kazmir and Jory, I mean, Kazmir unveiled the Nightmare Tower.

Yeah, that's right.

And this is where we started seeing a lot more of them.

Yeah, is that actually where we introduced Jory?

Did she come? Yeah, no, they both show up there hanging out outside. I thought Jory came in with the whole...

They're in the camp lightly flirting. That's when the ship started.

That's when the ship started, yeah. That's where the KazJory ship began.

My ship, it sails.

Yeah, there were hints that they had a relationship going at that point that we sort of paid off that whole storyline eventually at the end of the season.

Yeah. We also started scattering more of... I mean, Scarlet's invading all over the place.

We're scattering more of her things around the world. Do you want to talk about Scarlet's room a little bit, Teddy?

Her room in the Alpine map? The secret room.

The secret room.

I didn't actually make that, but I can talk about it.

Wait, which one did you make?

You did make the secret room, the one that was never... Oh, that secret room.

Okay, you know what? From now on, everybody only gets one room.

So I made a secret room that you probably have never seen. Some players found it, but there's a room in Gendarren Fields, and it's just full of fire and full of Watch Knights named Scarlet. And if you ever go into it, all they do is point and laugh at you until you burn to death.

And the original plan for that was during the investigation into the Clockwork Chaos attacks, there's this portal you inspect that's one of the steps, and it used to say in dialogue, don't touch this. No, really, don't touch this. And if you touch it, it sends you into Scarlet's little burning room because obviously you weren't supposed to touch it.

We told you. Yeah, I mean, we ended up pulling it last minute because, is player unfriendly according to some people?

I thought it was hilarious. To be fair, burning to death isn't the friendliest experience.

It's very Scarlet, though.

It is.

And also, you were warned. You were warned.

And you did it anyway.

They did let us send a bomb from Scarlet into your inventory.

That's right. It was a little thank you gift. Oh, bless her.

And if you haven't opened that yet, the longer you hold on to it, the more the explosion is. If you open it now, it's going to take out most of Tyria.

That may or may not be a lie. I'm hoping it's a lie.

It's definitely a lie. It's not a lie.

You have to stop lying.

It wipes your account. Oh my gosh!

Steve's back there just going, oh gosh. All right, let's keep dragging Peter down memory lane and see what else he comes up with.

I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Well, we get to talk about Exploding Lion's Arch next.

Okay, that's good.

All right, we'll be right back.

I didn't actually work on that book.

I know, we're making you leave. All right, welcome back to the Guild Chat with the most set changes ever. This is enormous.

All right, so we are getting to the part now where we blew up Lion's Arch and nobody thought we were actually going to do it.

Right. I mean, it really shows what we're able to do with the game and how much world-changing we can do. I mean, that was pretty large.

I know. Like, if you think about it, it was a bad idea from a production standpoint just because Lion's Arch is our most popular city. Everybody goes there.

It's basically our hub and then we nuked it.

It's definitely a risk. I mean, we needed to make sure that the hub remained somewhere so we created Visual Keep to be that surrogate for a while.

There are times when our ambition to tell cool stories outweighs our common sense.

Yeah, and the logistics just around that was really tricky to kind of make sure that, okay, this is live, this is going later, and yeah, to making sure everything was perfect. Because the logistics of it was, this was before Mega Server, so we had to map out where all the personal story went through Lion's Arch and make sure they still ran. I mean, you did that.

Yeah, that was a thing.

That was a thing. And make sure that the personal story could just run through. People could still do that.

Just coordinating where all the different services would go. We had a tally of all the NPCs in town, who would survive and who wouldn't. Kind of grim, but yeah.

It's true. I mean, there was so much going on here. We had Scarlet's death.

We had our first Living World season coming to its conclusion. We have the hub. I mean, we have this place where all of the races come together that no longer existed.

I was the original level designer for GW1 LA, so that city means a lot to me. I think it means a lot to all Guild Wars players and inhabitants of Tyria too. But to actually show something that Scarlet does to the player that causes them to have an emotional reaction, to really hate her.

Up until then, she kind of popped in and out, did things. But to really hurt or affect you, something that you loved was now destroyed or under battle.

Yeah, your army has destroyed our city.

Yeah. We wanted to give players a lot of agency in this. Feel like they're the ones who are going to retake the city, battle back, come together and fight.

That thing where I always like to give players a lot of sense of purpose. So just things came together. We were able to choose a map and close it down for a little while and send everyone in to help save citizens.

It was a fun time.

I have a question. One of the things that made a big emotional impact on me was this little missing persons board off in a little corner somewhere. Whose idea was that?

Do you remember that?

Yeah. Internally, we're telling where everybody was going. There are images of pictures and people wanted to find each other and things like that.

But we also wanted to give players, see the effect it was on the citizens of Lion's Arch and their next-door neighbors in Kandarin Fields. It was just trying to make it a little bit more real. I know John Ryan was one of the writers there.

He totally gave it a nice, somber feel.

It really did. Drew, there was so much going on. This was like a whole new playground for you.

Yeah. We kind of thickened up the air. We had the battle for LA.

We had miasma. The pressure that was a little more base and hissy, poisonous. A different kind of air.

It was thick. You had to get out of there in a certain amount of time. I have this cabin that's got a big wood stove and I got it really hot.

I was pouring water on it to get this really hissy, gaseous type of stuff. I used it for that. I think it's really interesting when you know there's this arc for a city and that it's going to change, that you can start playing with the biomes and things like that.

We started removing wildlife. The whole ecosystem changed. Yeah, of course.

We started taking out birds. Then we kind of nuked everything and we brought in some cicadas that would endure and be kind of hardier and they were a little crustier. Then after it got the dust settled a little bit we started bringing in a new set of birds and some of the old birds.

What were the new birds? How were they different?

How were they different? That's a good question.

I rephrased my question because I didn't want to be like name species.

Yeah, that I couldn't do.

But what were you after?

Just something new that was maybe flying through that didn't before. Just to give it some new life like it was a new beginning instead of it's the same LA. I didn't want it to be sonically similar.

It definitely was a transformation and something shifted. So even if it's just in the back of your mind it's kind of psychoacoustic. Totally added layers to the attack and the evacuation.

There's all the screams. The chaos of the floating embers that you could hear crackling. Fires.

The sound of the miasma of course coming in and out at different times. It was quite chaotic and totally felt different from a different zone. It was a zone under distress.

Yeah, and it changes over time. The miasma gets thicker and thicker and thicker and I wanted you to feel that as a player. So yeah, it was interesting.

We love Drew and the audio team because we'll give them a very simple goal. Make it feel like a battle zone. Make it feel like people are trying to escape and then they'll just rub their hands together and come up with the most brilliant audio for it.

Our sound guys need more kudos. I'm thankful to work on this team. We have an amazing team.

It really is. It's just things you don't think about. Like you said, you've got, again, the whole ecosystem is changing.

It's not just put in some fire effects and some crackly fire noises.

You hear the drill. There's the lasers.

Oh yeah, the drill.

There's even the leyline fissure in the bottom of the water. You can go in there and start to hear kind of a foreshadowing of leyline.

That's one of my strongest memories of Lion's Arch when it was under attack is the sound of that drill coming down. It's a very, very strong audio memory for me. Good job on that one.

That was a big cinematic at the end too.

Speaking of that, let's talk about Scarlet's death. Because this was, I mean, again, there were some big expectations. You're bringing this entire season to a close.

The big bad is going down.

We wanted to make sure that the player had a lot of agency in defeating Scarlet. Can I feel that visceral cathartic, you know, I did this. To let the player finish her felt good.

Oh yeah, you did the PvP finisher.

And actually be able to show your finisher sometimes a little hilariously. That felt good. You worked on that instance.

Yeah, I mean, the thing we were going for is one, to give the player the spotlight. No one's going to steal your moment. The other thing we were going for though is while Scarlet is in a position where she's in danger, we wanted to show she's still a threat.

She's like a wild animal you've cornered. You're in as much danger as she is. And she gets some good licks in on you.

She blows up the Dragon's Watch. Almost kills Marjorie. Breaks Bram's leg.

And the fight to finish her off feels like this epic struggle.

I believe and it's something we all like we all poured our hearts and souls into From like a story like a character POV it was a really satisfying thing for me because Casimir is actually one of my favorite characters and She's one of my favorite characters because she when she originally appeared on set people just assumed She was like kind of the weak ditzy blonde Character and as you see the story progress you find out that no, she's actually like quite intelligent as the strong queer woman and as as a story progresses It hits the finale and she steps up to like to stand up with you to like to face this threat She stands on her own and it was a really satisfying character arc.

Yeah You mentioned she almost killed Marjorie. Yeah, let's talk just for a minute about That little that turn that we took with character.

So I mean players found the audio recording for the original like Marjorie's death, so it's not a huge surprise, but the fact that there are audio recordings shows how close we came to doing it because By the point we record audio. We're almost completely set in stone, but it was a really satisfying moment because We got to a point where we were gonna do it and then we were looking at the story and just asking ourselves Should we like is this really the way we want our story is this worth it? Yeah, like does this actually take the story in a meaningful direction and you know There's a lot of baggage with killing queer characters.

I mean fridging LGBT characters is just a very common thing and You know, that was not the main discussion the main discussion was what's the best story we can tell right and we decided not to do it and We had to we had to change directions in a hurry Like we had to build like new instances in like I mean I think we like I built one of the instances that replaced that in like eight hours and the writers like did writing for it like in After work and it was just it was a really satisfying moment to see everyone come together to basically say Marjorie to tell a better

Story. Yeah All right, we got Scarlet killed and this is the moment this is the moment where we are Openly, okay Here's the cinematic that you were talking about and this ley line energy comes through me see this dragon I open and you had fun with that one, didn't you?

James Ackley did the cinematic and he does all the cinematics the audio for cinematics and He has a he has a lot of fun kind of masterminds new sounds which was the ley line I played with a newer plug-in at the pet at the time called pad shop and It just has this really aggressive tearing ripping electrified energy and So it's like it was awesome you get to see water moth at the end and you're like, oh my and so We started using ley line energy a lot more. And so I took that sound and I kind of broke it into elements or like a little base here a little higher energy and we started doing some Procedural stuff with it.

So as a player as you're running around the world and you come across these ley lines or you're you know using them They would evolve and they wouldn't be this consistent drone So, you know, it's just it's fatiguing and it makes it really interesting. And if it's this energy that is kind of Mystical and and very I mean, it's this new thing It should be It should evolve and be it be very

Different you know, my concept is actually really old I mean our clan had it pre-launch that there was the network of ley lines that you know empowered all the Way points and so like this is just revealing stuff that we have like a back Lower about you know, this is like finally

That's that's really satisfying. It's something that we've talked about on previous live streams where we have we're laying we're laying the groundwork for these stories Literally years in advance and It feels really good to get to do that stuff like, you know Ley lines have been around since pre-launch and we're finally getting to do something with those

Yeah, even like the attack on lines arch is something we hinted at and seeded months earlier, right and Like players theorized about it for a long long time

If you look at like some of the art, you know You introduced the name of scarlet and right at the end of sky pirates. You see your attack during Queen's Jubilee We see her building up air ships in the aether path Twilight assault and then she brings them and she you know Plays with the marionette as a taxpayer ends up becoming the assault Knights and it brings them all three, you know Mixed alliances together to attack lines are so there's definitely a build-up and a lot of planning

I mean, it's it's one of those things that's really satisfying As a developer that works on an MMO you can tell these slow burn kind of stories and let players like Speculate on where it's going Like I mean another example of this is like marjorie and casimir's relationship Like the the final battle scarlet concluded with like their first kiss. Yeah, and like it was this It's a huge moment because like it's just we we usually we don't even show characters holding hands So this this one was a huge moment and Like a lot of people came together to work on that like animation writing audio Directors.

Yeah, even the director's involved

I think like you know my favorite moment from like that whole series of releases is just how players banded together like you'd be running out of lines are just miasmas rising and You know, maybe you just come a little bit early but someone stops to help you and that's that's totally cool And then even if you didn't make it to the to the exit you end up in you know Right outside and you know players are reviving each other.

There's like a mass Resonance a huge.

Yeah, it was just this huge clump of people rezzing

Miasma spills out of the portal Yeah, we were affecting the region around it and

And you know for me I like you know what we tried to do and I think we accomplished it to a certain extent is we're trying to create ways for players of all different sizes and groups and Focuses to help out, you know, if you were, you know a solo player you could go in and help, you know Save a refugee, you know, if you're you know, you and your friend were there maybe you could help take over one of the side You know defense points that you were rallying at, you know If you're with a group you could take out one of the miasma canisters and they're the bosses with it If you're in a real large group, you could coordinate, you know, the triple salt night attack, you know as a guild so There's definitely levels and you know trying to build content that you know appeals widely.

I think yeah is really effective and And Rewarding it was it was a satisfying end to living world season one I feel like we brought we brought everything together. We brought we finished it with a bang That was absolutely not in question And I got my spinal blades and you got your spinal blades, which was really the goal of the whole thing It was so Steve could get a spot.

Yeah. Well, you know, dude, I got mine.

I'm not judging.

I still wear mine I do too, but you know, I have something invested in that Yeah It was the first time, you know, he was like, yeah, it'd be cool you we saw it actually first in Halloween the first Halloween where you got the Backpack of the book and the flaming version. It's like well, we should actually have more upgradable versions and so, you know, we went to prop artists and you know Barry attached the spinal blades to the assault Knights and made different versions of it and We had this upgrade path and you know, Matt Pennebaker's like we should make those go up in rarity We can really make this you should be able to color them and everything and turned out to be this, you know thing that Grew up the price of power cores

This is all plot to corner the market and power cores

so that was season one and That took us into season two Which led us up to heart of thorns.

So let's take a quick break and talk a little bit about season two Thank you We'll be right back Okay They won't let me leave We won't let you back in but So yeah, Peter has cut his way back into the room And we're gonna talk about season two. This was a change of pace from season Somebody yesterday while we were talking about this made the pun that we wanted to start season two off with a bang and we literally Did I mean we we fix those zephyrites good? Why didn't we call it that?

What do we fix those zephyrites good? We did we should have no Alright do you guys want to talk about how you kicked off season two from a design and story point of view So at a high level one of the things that we were trying to do is we looked at season one There were really awesome moments.

We now had journal tech that was coming online and Yeah, we also wanted to go back and play all this really cool content. That was mysteriously disappearing And so we started it was a it was interesting design challenge for us to come up with this new episodic content that would always be there and This is kind of where we started going with from a technology standpoint This is also around the same time that we were launching in China So we were introducing the game to a whole new player base who had no concept of what had happened for season one So we actually started with a brand new Kind of little mini festival Hugh stop laughing offstage and so we basically had to reintroduce all of the cool characters and moments from season one with the recap video and kind of these You know little mini story dialogue scenes between the characters and then that led us into kind of the start of season two

I'll also say season two was much more Like a much more tight story than season one was and that is largely reflective of the fact we did so much planning on season two

We added we started adding new maps here, too.

Yes, this is very much Well at a much faster pace.

I'll say cuz we had South Sun and then we didn't do anything Yeah, I wasn't like the first map ever. Yeah a lot of ambitions in season two and I think it really shows Well, we there were a lot of story steps and we talked about glint's lair as one of the areas that you worked on Which I think was a huge favorite because it was just a callback to Gilders one.

So glint's lair was actually built by Byron Miller My colleague on raids now and for my super venture box and Peters best friend I yeah, he I feel so sorry for him because it was like one of Byron's first projects and it was like Yeah And I've done Byron for 12 years. So like there are many nights where he's basically crying on my shoulder He did good. The thing is like whenever we touch something that's Our call back to old content.

We have to be really careful that we do it exactly, right? And blintz there was definitely that we really needed to pay off Flint's legacy basically and like let's not even forget This is the first time you go into a German priority like secret archives and like that was also Yeah, I mean Byron just really knocked out of the park you go look at all the little little things that are hidden in there Between the Abaddon statue.

I mean even some of the the quests that took place in there Well, you were actually reliving some of the GW one moments like he was really doing a strong job of okay Let's pay homage to what happened in GW one, but put the GW to spin on it So it's not like okay I've done this before but now it feels cool that you're doing something new that is tied back to something that players from GW one Will be like I remember that that was really cool like dancing with Abaddon statue.

Yes.

Yes. I can't remember whose idea was that I I want to say was Byron.

I'm not a hundred cent. Thank you Byron.

It sounds right Yeah, that was an incredibly incredibly fun callback That was well and so was glint Slayer. I mean you guys knocked it out of the park it was absolutely perfect and I think players who remember that fondly from Guild Wars one really felt good when they went in there and Even as we were incredibly lost and could not find a way around That was also the Guild Wars one feeling I couldn't find my way around glint Slayer Guild Wars one feeling that Guild Wars one feeling of Boston glint Slayer.

It's a grain of sand How hard can it be to find my way around it? So by this time, I mean we absolutely knew you know hot is coming here's here's our game plan What was the balance between building up to that and not just spoiling the entire story? How did how did you even get to that point?

Um, well season one like about midway through we were we really had, you know, the ending and killing Scarlet in mind That's when we started really playing with that How do we how do we tease things and get people invested in you know, this coming to an end? So we're doing that more and more where we're always thinking ahead to you know This is gonna lead into the next thing and then the next thing and the next thing I mean the real answer is we had infinite meetings.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's recursive meeting Z and I were and like Peter and a lot a lot of folks were on the the planning team for Season two and like we would meet literally every day for like For like two months running.

We also to remember that this was now two teams going because while we were working on season two There was another team that was spinning up that was just starting the development on hot And so we knew what the end point was And even that shifted a little bit in terms of where we actually wanted to leave the story off But that's why we had to constantly make sure. Okay. This is the story that we're telling.

These are the key Epic beats that we want to have And much more with season two than we did with season one is every episode We kind of wanted to leave it as a cliffhanger We really wanted to have that television feel of cool come back two weeks or whatever It is it's gonna be to see the next thing, you know thrilling conclusion to the story So it really changed how we plan the story But also kind of how we told it through like either through the open world as we expanded the new maps At the same time while I'm giving these high-level direction of the team about like cool for this Four story are four episode arc these this is what I want us to see where we're You know evolving in the open world and making sure that we are still continuing to have that kind of gdw2 Iterative development cycle and still continue to push the balance We're not just adding new maps for the sake of new maps, but adding new mechanics adding new things for players to explore Putting you know, what eventually became, you know, the llama that was hiding out all over dry top

Evolved through the episodes and those types of things and the maps were physically getting you closer to the right in the jungle, too Which was always the plan, you know right from the beginning We're calling it like the gates of Maguma and we're sort of letting you know

This is where we're going and the development is on like every level like we had extensive discussions about character arcs and development and Even like the player characters development as like basically the hero.

Cheerio So Let's talk about the new maps a little bit because this is the first time I mean we really started digging in on The map wide metas at this point. I mean we were really expanding that we had this whole Dolyak escort world vs. World thing going on in a PvE map

Yeah

You can

It has sandcastles, yeah so when we came to season two People really loved the movement skills of zephyrites and so we knew we wanted to kind of okay We're the story was about the crash of them So what if we littered the round there was kind of broken versions of these crystals they give you small Versions of it you didn't have the infinite time that maybe you in the labyrinthine cliffs But you can still jump around between the map And explore and get to places you couldn't normally get to And we started unveiling the map little by little so each episode added another little section to it and this added more events to This kind of map wide meta, which was the the sandstorms and so you know Lisa and Sarah were just Always come up with these crazy ideas of how we can get players to spread out to look at Events differently to talk about coordination in a different way I mean this is one of the first times you actually had an entire map that was pulling together That like okay for the next 30 seconds.

We need people over here doing this event, okay? Then there's another one coming up and make sure we're splitting in this direction and every two weeks We were changing that dynamic because there'd be a new place that was adding on with more events And allow you to actually get higher and higher on that track, and then well we took a small break we came back with With silver waste and we kind of did that a little bit where we opened most of the map But then added smaller sections along the sides as we were expanding into it And that was much more about like from a high level you know world versus world was is a really iconic Aspect of Gilbert's to play we wanted to see could we actually bring some of those dynamics in terms of can we have a PVE? Version of it.

Can you actually do that against you know Mordremoth forces? They're coming back to the towers And you know escorting Doliak's get supplies getting siege equipment out there and actually seeing what you could do in the open world with that And we knew we couldn't do that in like the traditional maps because there's much more about exploration much more about that aspect of it So we built a new environment for it and tried to really kind of capture the essence of that style combat in a new location

We've got so we've got all this going on I mean this this is like a huge thing happening in the map But we don't just want it to be this static dead thing Otherwise, so we had little NPCs around here to populate the map and make it feel make it feel good

Yeah, there were these maps as they're popping in we were developing them sort of like Timelines the way that we were Developing things in streams of content that would keep flattening down to replace the previous content We had when we introduced our first gates of Maguuma we had this town prosperity that was right on the edge of everything and it was a mining town and We knew in only two weeks We were gonna bring a new version of prosperity into the world where everything was wrecked and that's where you first get the idea Well, here's Mordremoth like you never really heard about Mordremoth before that and all of a sudden, you know, here it is it's attacking and In that first the two weeks where the first episode was live The Mordrem that appeared around there were still called like jungle creatures or something and they didn't even like the nameplate do you reflect reflect that they were Mordrem until the two weeks later and and the town had like this, you know little ecosystem going with people walking around and everything and talking to each other and and we knew like when we were responding this town that certain characters were gonna die and I thought this would be a fun place to put a little experiment So I put in this character that was panhandling for for gold he'll just take whatever you give him and give you nothing in return and that's where the drewbert came from and And then two weeks later, he was, you know hanging from that vine and that's where he's gonna be forever. And that's that's awesome But prosperity only existed for two weeks and drewbert was only alive for two weeks in the game And then he was just gone and dead forever. Just like that.

I feel like That my gold should be falling out of his pockets no went away Peter is in fact an evil man We love him for it.

We love him for it.

No, we did. That's that's not just you.

It's everybody What was the goal of your experiment I Was just curious like if you just set this guy out here and he asked you for money, you know Just the same as if you saw somebody panhandling on the sidewalk that you don't you're not gonna get anything for giving him money Will you give him your gold? will you get what we give him and I let people give him whatever they wanted to give him and There were people that gave him a lot.

I will point out in the real world.

He doesn't end up dead I can guarantee that if a quaggan was panhandling on the side of the road in the real world. That'd be cool Well, but I would definitely not just like casually give him some money and walk away Well, there's something about charity and goodwill Peter like right, you know, I've just given up on trying to get him to Because Peter's dirty secret is that he's actually a very nice person.

No But he's ashamed of it. So he pretends to be terrible That's probably not something we're gonna do a whole lot in the future though is have like A version of a map that only exists for two weeks That was a real nightmare.

So now that we know about drew bird, those things will probably not come back.

Yeah Yeah, the beauty of that is that no one knew I was doing it So, you know just think of a new more creative way to mess with players, right?

But the funny thing is drew bird that's like you said drew bird was actually only around for two weeks Yeah, and he has lived. I mean he's in Halloween now Tormented ghost. Yeah, he's like the Mad King sidekick now, right?

No, Mac King doesn't even like I'm like he yells at me.

It's it's in a very loving. I don't know be a little tipler It is it's it's funny to me though how this just little random side experience turned into This quaggan that everybody just loves except for you jokes. Don't die around here.

No, they don't know they really never do So let's talk it where we're getting into like super long livestream here But I want to talk a little bit about character development because we have Marjorie sister.

Oh, yeah Belinda so Belinda was So this just goes back to like the whole like there's more planning and like just a long game in terms of like the slow burn story we want to tell Belinda had this unique sword. It was a katana and If You notice Marjorie who's a necromancer starts using that katana after Belinda dies and Mart and that that's kind of that was our tease of the the Reaper specialization Like if you actually watch her during the progression of episodes She starts with like only one attack and then as that's so it's grass She gets more and more attacks with it to reflect the fact that she's learning Basically learning how to be this new specialization. Yeah, and there's like that that katana was super popular I mean if you run around game everybody's got a katana because of course they do And that would actually stem from Jason Wiggin was artists for that and We were talking about sword I'm like well, I know I should say this but my literal quote was well Jason nerds love katanas and I say that being a nerd cuz I cuz I literally brought in my katanas from home for Jason to model Belinda's greatsword off of so that that was That's a really satisfying moment on a lot of levels because also was a strong character development moment for Marjorie Especially like when she sees her sister's ghost and goes into the sword Which I've mentioned on other livestreams before that was actually almost cut like that instance started off as like the beginning of Season two and then it was gonna be at like the end and that was gonna be the middle And then was back in the middle and then it finally landed and we got it. Yeah. Yeah I mean like I feel like it's really important to follow through Even with side plots and and make sure they have some closure So that was when there was definitely a lot of talk about whether or not it was appropriate to have yeah and One more part.

This is where we brought down the Zephyrites We have this group that we've been made to care about because we've been spending time with them and then Mordremoth The short version is that Mordremoth killed them

But the important thing is that no The Master of Peace got away and then you are chasing him What is it that he's trying to get away for and what does he got with him and what is it that leads you further on the story and it turns out he's There's a spoiler. He's carrying this egg and the egg is important, right?

And why was he carrying this egg?

And why was there a sylvari that was on the airship that wanted to bring it down and things start things start You know building to reading his journals and you can see like he's slowly slipping into madness Like it's not just like a oh, I'm just gonna take this thing down. It's like He's hearing voices and we basically were laying out all the plotline that was going to help set up. Okay now Okay.

Yes, there is this distrust of sylvari and there's Mordremoth and there's the Questioning of its relation to the Pale Tree and kind of all this aspect And this was something we seeded and started even before launch so this was something that years in the making to kind of be able to pay that off and build up to kind of the release of heart of thorns and

To the release of heart of thorns actually in the middle of all this too, we were preparing to launch in China.

Yes Let's let's leave it at that.

I think we need all look at the time we gotta go No, you sit down Mike is huge in China at the end You Worked a lot of people worked very very hard on that, but you were a big part of our China launch Uh, I mean not as much as that you were making out to be We spun up a large team that was dedicated like Byron was originally part of that team as well Trying to you know, how do you? We were already an international game But we weren't necessarily a global game Because we hadn't kind of tried to break into the Chinese market and there's a lot of things you have to take into to consider We tried this with Guild Wars 1 and we got this list of here's I think it was like 7,000 types of animals Species including various insects that we're not allowed to kill because the Chinese government would be upset with us Yeah, like the common ones like the pandas right? We'll know but then there's also like there's certain cicadas and certain other various Respected animals were there the secret is you add as many skeletons to the game as possible No, that's not what you do. That's absolutely not what you do but like basically we started doing like we were forking some of the The art right because we had, you know skull versions and non-skulled versions of you know, various art props and resources So it was a large aspect and this kind of tied into the beginning of season 2 where we actually wanted to You know, we were launching in there and I think season 2 was supposed to start like a month or two later So that's where we had that kind of preamble

Well, let's bring the zephyrites in and that aspect so it was all leading up towards this Yeah, so I mean it was Again going back to you. We're sometimes a little bit more ambitious than We can Physically take on but then we will always push ourselves to make sure that we can do it and do it in the best possible way To to some people actually ending up in the hospital

Hospital during live and wear world season 2 I'll have you know That's very Some releases later, but not that's a bullet point

That seems like a good coda to season 2 and Teddy did not go to the hospital, right? Thank you for that We all greatly appreciate it. All right.

We have a little bit more to talk about and we will be right back

His beard is a legendary weapon Asura are actually polite to him He always gets what he wants from the Mystic Forge To quaddle waits for him to show up the norm Sing songs about the songs That he saw the pale tree grew just to give him Shade the Asura have a college which studies him Dolyak's heard to avoid wasting his time his shadow is Here you got world completion He is the most interesting no

Interior holidays and the living world aren't the only things that keep the face of Guild Wars 2 changing and growing We've released so many updates over the years that we couldn't possibly go into all of them today so we're gonna hit a few of the highlights of Laurels and Chancu Von Snuffles most importantly guild missions fractals and then even more fractals and more guild missions The election shenanigans of cutthroat politics PvP reward tracks came to the game Edge of the mists came to world versus world.

The wardrobe system was added I could go on and on but we're gonna talk to some of the devs on these highlights At this point I'm just looking at Peter to see what he does when the camera comes back I was wondering about the shenanigans but you Okay, I thought you knew words Or do you just want to know what specific shenanigans we had?

Yeah I want to know what those shenanigans were that you just referenced.

Let's talk about cutthroat politics.

Okay.

All right, go for it I I didn't work on that I'm at this point. I'm really just kind of enjoying Peters deer and headlights. Thanks every time the camera comes on

Here cutthroat politics was one of those where again we had different teams working on different or different releases And we want to try something new and this is where we're actually doing a voting system and we're gonna collect tallies and we were Trying to actually see if we have it reflected real-time in game But it was one of those things that like we just got ahead of ourselves from our ambition and so we had to wait until after All the tallies for keel and Evan Ash blade were kind of You know applied and then we could you know query other logs and figure out who had donated the most and those types of things But it was a pirate election. So the first thing you do is well, you make it unfair and you make it unbalanced It's about who's got the most gold, right?

That's what pirates are about and then you get people like Isaiah, you know campaigning for one faction and Illegally yes Ethically Well, it's pirates, right? There's nothing illegal about it. He did not make the vote in any way shape or form In fact, I think he lost more money on it than he would like to admit, but that's good But yeah, I mean is again all these these big updates we talked about are our feature sets of things that we wanted to do I Mean the very very first one was the fractals That was at the from the what just we launched the game.

We spun up about four or five teams We had lost shores going we had the fractals of the misty that was going We had another team that was actually our first real delve into living world Which was just they were just adding events to the the game like the modus solaris kind of NPCs faction that showed up around They also added like a couple mini dungeons The script burglar was part of that team as well so all this was going on at the same time as we were trying to figure out like well like we want to keep Updating the game and then figure out our path to continuing it. So going back to features was the fractals team That was something that Teddy worked with and it was a relatively small team at first and we just wanted idea of how do you?

Build kind of the core five-man dungeon experience. That's scalable That's has a lot more replayability than some of the the core dungeon runs that we originally had but it was also designed originally to be Let's do a little bit of randomization, but how about 15 minute chunks?

So it's like it wasn't like a huge dedicated time to get through this but it was something that it became kind of our initial attempt at Challenging endgame content before we even started discussing rates and by its very nature fractals, I guess which we're segwaying into Fractals allowed us to explore both time periods and locales around Tyria that We wouldn't get to otherwise. I mean you get to see like You get to see Ascalon like in the old days. You get to see well the mountain man fractal and We Call it see hmm.

There was one with the JT.

Yeah.

Yeah JT.

I Came in in the mists Yes in the mist. I'm suddenly having like this giant. Oh my gosh.

All of these fractals are so much fun and we've added so many of them in there and Everything has this, you know, they're in the miz and everything has this overlaying story of Dessa, right tying it together

So that's a story was It was me and John who like worked a lot on Dessa story Okay, didn't want to steal Peter's credit Don't never find my body Dessa story Started off we we wanted to play the idea play with the whole idea of like the fractals being this Chunk in time that doesn't really change. It's like something that's that's trapped in time and in the Thaumann over fractal, which I did you actually realized that Dessa who you originally thought was researching the fractals is in fact in a fractal and in fact trapped as you are and doesn't Remember anything beyond what you do and Thaumann over itself was a bit experimental in that Whenever you go at a higher difficulty level you would arrive at the fractal at an earlier point in time So you would see more and more of what happened and have a little bit more agency in like affecting things in that it's in that one cycle of the fractal and There's actually different endings with Dessa depending on Depending on how well you do in that fractal

Really? I know I mean, I know that you talked to her at one point and she realizes well She doesn't realize but you realize because she resets and suddenly boom. She's back where she started She doesn't know what so far you are.

Yeah, that's that that's that moment when you realize that she's trapped and it's this realization That was really well crafted It was done extremely extremely well and after like that We released the Thaumann over fractal to kind of help set up the storyline and again This is where we were we were having this overarching story that kind of bled through the various different types of content. Like you saw Bram and timey that were in edge of the mess when we were initially launching that for world versus world but this is now an aspect like we're we kind of put it on hold for a little bit like as we were getting hot out the door and Now we actually have a team coming back and dedicated to it They were cleaned up some of them. So like the swamp fractal has changed quite a bit They released their first chaos isles fractal and they're still working on some brand new cool stuff that hopefully we'll be talking about soon So this is just kind of one of those things where it's like we created the foundation for a new system And now we're actually being able to pay off some of the cool Avenues that this actually leads us to

Why don't we talk about speaking of payoffs Why don't we talk about the achievement system and laurels and the cool creatures that you can buy with laurels?

So I was a writer assigned at one point to the team that was coming up with the achievements and all those systems and the And that were full who was heading up that team Wanted to have some items that you could get for using all your laurels that you collected and The lore items he wanted to sort of build up in the world So we had this we had this whole idea where he wanted to build up this this possible laurel award item Chauncey von snuffles as a mini pet and there was gonna be a cat show that that happened in divinity's reach and I wrote all this vo for this cat show and Chauncey's Tragic tragic story and we didn't actually get to implement it because there was to any design there wasn't a design resource available to work on it at the time and That was right. It came I think right between some of the living world releases so it was supposed to have happened just before the return to South Sun and I got I got shifted on to that team and Farron makes reference when he first arrives on South Sun shore He makes reference to how he had fled a mob an angry mob and in LA I mean in divinity's reach and the reason for that was the cat show and Some people data mined and found that vo and they they brought it back out So that you got to hear at least some of it. Although they they didn't find the Lord Farron singing the the cat show theme that was kind of like the there.

She is miss universe kind of a thing Yeah It was pretty great but yeah that was that was actually some vo that really cracked me up that I got to work on where the people in three's reach were reacting to the news that the Chauncey had lost and there was gonna be a little more story to that and who was the who was the rival cat and I didn't get to ever come back to it until we got into living world season 2 and we went to a niece's party and Chauncey actually showed up at the Reference to it. So that was yet another story that never actually happened in the game that gets referenced all over the place Have you solved the mystery of who the fanciest cat was?

Yeah, can I say that on this? I'm asking if you have said it publicly before I'm pretty sure it's Yeah, the the winning cat is with stereo, Wiskington and that is an amazing name. Yeah There was there was a model that that an animator had started working on for me.

That was pretty great She was kind of the the irony of it was she was like this Persian cat with like a snaggle tooth and everything but She was wearing a tiara and we never actually got to put her in the game. And so you never saw her So I just want a cat with a tiara. It doesn't be a game But the question is how did she end up winning over Chauncey who was obviously so so very fancy.

He's incredibly fancy. I'm

Maybe I hope I only hope someday we'll find out the answer to that me too

The thing about this is though, I mean we have this hilarious we have this fun story We have all of this backstory that's become like this little Tyrion urban legend But it ties in with actual rewards that we a whole system that we put in the game And that's something that I love that we've done I mean we added daily login rewards right over time and we kept making this we kept making a better and better experience for players

Yeah, that was That was also a subsystem that we were working on trying to find a a good blend of daily achievements and we started adding more and more things and people felt like I Spent a lot of time doing the daily achievements. I don't have enough time to really play the game and I was like cool That sucks.

How do we change this? That's why we started editing and like cool now just do any three and we'll tie the rewards mostly to kind of the style of Achievements that you're doing like if you're logging we'll give you wood as the reward and it came back to just We wanted to encourage people to play the game at the pace they wanted to and go experience other aspects of it and not feel Like the ten achievement points associated with the dailies was really the thing that was driving them to you know to log in every day and so that's also kind of reason why we put like the daily achievement point cap and the monthly achievement point cap at the same time was It felt like it was always something goes out of reach if you weren't doing it every single day Then you felt like you were falling behind and that's not the the point of the systems And so we really just wanted to find ways that encourage players to log in and have fun But just remind them that there's there's cool things that they can do within the game And so that's why like they cycle now, and we've been making modifications to the system And that same tech that we used for The daily achievement system rotation is also what controls Some aspects of like the new rotations for the fractal islands and so whenever we add new islands or new Miss lock instabilities It's kind of all using a very similar system that allowed us to kind of have more control over you know a randomization That's a little bit more controlled, but still has that kind of cool unique feel when you log in yeah

It is it's a testimony to how much we've kept improving the game and how much Better we've made the made it for the players on a regular basis.

It's because we love you Peter I mean, I love you most of all that's true A lot of like a lot of what we're doing is because we want to make quality life improvements You want the game to be better? And if you've seen some of the major releases that we've done this year already We've already added some of those cool quality features. We're not done yet.

There's more things that we want to do There's you know Spoiler we're all coming back to work to on Monday, so yes, and so there's Anyway so yeah like I said, there's there's always new things that we want to do And and you were listening. We're watching the forums. We're paying attention on reddit We're watching you know the comments that on the twitch streams And you know thanks to you know Ruby and the rest of your team like we're always You know picking up the information to figure out like where are the pain points?

What are the things that players really want and there's a balance right? I mean obviously we would love to have give you know everything that the players want to them But there's a there's a balance of resources right we want to continue building cool and exciting content We want to give quite a lot of features. We want to give new You know new exciting things for players to to enthrall themselves in or to speculate about what's coming next and so there's a balancing act And that's kind of if you see something that you really want.

We haven't done it yet. We're listening We just haven't gotten to it yet. I hate to use the old adage that Of things being on a certain table But it is something we're paying attention to and you know we we love playing this game as much as we love working on it and some of us play the game probably more than we should in the evenings, but don't judge me I Am not throwing any stones at that one, but that's the thing is like you know we want it We know we can do more We know we can give greater experiences and that's what we're going to continue to strive to do if for no other reason because it's fun and also because it's what the

Players really want so yeah, so please be kind because we are reading Don't be that person that goes. This is a slap in the face.

Don't be that guy We have a bingo unless it is a slap in the face All right, we have a few more things to talk about But we are starting to wrap up so I want to thank you three Sincerely for the past four years and here's to a whole lot more.

Yeah, we're not done yet.

Yeah, we're not all right We'll be right back Oh So security dragged Peter away again All right, hey you guys Since everybody else is gone back. I can say that we saved the best for last because they're not in the room to hear All right, I want to talk about a couple more systems that we added to the game specifically PVP reward tracks and Edge of the mists we had a lot going on an edge of the mists.

Let's talk about that first Do you want to talk about the world versus world segment or the story segment? We can do both so a story I just want to talk about guilt mission so the story of edge of the mist it landed right at a time when We were leading up to the Battle for LA. So a lot of the story segments there were both dealing with more characterization of Dragon's Watch but also There was a study in Scarlet the instance where you do an investigation with Kasmeer Marjorie and Vorp To try and figure out what Scarlet's plan is and that was actually hugely successful instance like players most players Really enjoy really enjoyed that one because It's one of the times when we really successfully pulled off an engaging non-combat instance And I talked a lot about like game game succeeding when they can get the narrative and the gameplay to align and that was one of those moments that really worked because here are these detective characters and you're helping them figure out a mystery and you're You're literally going through clues and trying to figure out how they all connect together in that instance.

So that one was a lot of fun There was also story moments in edge of the mist which I'd love to cred for But those were done by by link Hughes again.

Nobody else is in here.

They were done by me. I did everything good They're truly everything we watched I was like, wow I did like no joke. I did literally build a study in Scarlet in eight hours Yeah That was the thing that that was the thing that you in fact did also points you get the reference You don't get the reference try reading a book Reading a book Well, you were you were busy single-handedly adding edge of the mist to the game, oh, yeah You know, I'm kind of tired I'm just throwing out credit.

Yeah Definitely wasn't the world be world team as I had just moved. You are the world.

I was Programming and arting and for my purposes you are the entire competitive team right now.

Wow. I don't want that hate on me So, sorry, it's also all your fault. It's exactly right.

It's not all my fault um, so yeah, well the world the world edge of the missus was in Was our solution to a problem we had in movie world where we had such a high population That wanted to play world be world, but there was cues. There's cues everywhere We would see cues up to 300 people 200 people on you know for hours and hours and hours And so people wanted the we wanted to create a way where players could get into overworld be enjoying world be world and Then stay in the cube would be able to participate more at the same time So I did miss was that was our was our answer to that and you know We took some things and we wanted to do a different version because we had learned some things about world be world that we wanted to adjust in edge of the miss Some of them were really good.

Some of them were not so good right and we did a couple things To adjust those problems those pain points that we had but overall, I mean it was still just a Secondary kind of function of world be world because the initial core version of world be world was still there and we wanted to make Sure, that was very distinct. This was coral world and this is edge of the missus to the secondary

But it was just putting that entire huge system in there was such an undertaking

Yeah, I mean, I mean, I will not lie Well, the world was put together with hopes dreams bubblegum and shoestrings back at launch through the course of the existence of go worse to our team the teams of world be world have just Done so much back-end work to make things work and make it more sustainable better. Like I Like right now. I know one of the updates we just did was adding the desert borderlands back as one of the maps In conjunction with the Alpine maps like that it was impossible Literally impossible to do with the old system, but with the help of programmers and design and everything on that team they made it The impossible possible like literally when I first went on the team because that's where I started was in world be world as a designer I remember them breaking down all the systems and all how everything was set up and I was like it It works. Really?

Wow, that's impressive. Great. So keep moving forward.

Yeah, no, but you know what? Like I said, the team was a very dedicated to making sure they could make this system and everything better and even to the day, I mean they're constantly working with you know, they have a bunch of They're doing was it polls and everything like that to talk to the community like they're always trying to make it better Right, and that's I commend that team. I love that team I do so much I sit with them every day and get to listen to them and have fun It's weird when you talk about yourself in the third person.

I do. Yeah, it is. I try He was awesome Yeah, no, this is really interesting really cool.

Yeah. All right Let's talk about some content that I play on a really regular basis. So I'm kind of biased Thank you for guild missions again.

Everybody else is gone.

You did it single-handedly Some of it I did single-handedly.

Yeah, it's a huge system that we've added to the game.

Yeah, so I was back on the team way back When we first put it in the game which was I think right after lost shores or fractals Yeah, the next thing that kind of happened and then we added The core like set of missions that are in the game and then I stayed on the team by myself with a map artist and I think a programmer and we added another set of Bounties a guild. I think one extra guild mission and a puzzle So yeah, I'm responsible for some of the nastier for example for example, I did the drunk Asura in Yeah, I did big my Anna the frog that eats you I did To molt the weather golem. Oh Never stop spinning.

I did I did the one the ogre with the rats Yeah Every time we fire I did not do pooh, but you but you know food is He's just you know, he's just doing his thing.

Yeah, he wants to lick you. Yeah, it doesn't get much better than that I was happy. Yeah, so when you added when we started talking about adding guild missions and what was the overall goal for the team?

You know guild missions were supposed to be A coordination based content, you know for groups in the open world, right? so we had the system in the game to scale content up right which kind of To some people felt like there was no content in the game where you needed a group, right? And so we were actually trying to deliberately make stuff that acquired people to actually work together, right?

and so and then that in of itself scaled up and down a little bit right so You can't do the puzzle like by yourself, right? That's just one of the things about it, right? You can't do the bounties by yourself I don't know Maybe somebody has but that's kind of the idea is that it takes group we weren't really married yet to the idea of doing raids and so the The guild missions were kind of the early answer to that And then you know, I I've always wanted to go back and extend them.

But yeah, there's always there's always something else to work on so But yeah, that was kind of the idea that it would just be this extendable system and then every you know Every time we did updates we would ship, you know a new pack of missions or whatever

So, yeah, it's still there they are they are still there you've added some more over time here and there

Yeah, I haven't added anything But I know I know they kind of went Yeah, I don't know

We as a group I'm taking I'm gonna take credit for this Go for it as long as we're all Ruby's fault. They are Welcome It's always the fault they are a good time they are a fun system that we added to the game Yeah, it's been a good time.

Absolutely Alright, we have one more system that and it's just one of many We're not we don't have time to cover them all because I cannot live here but I want to talk about PvP reward tracks because that was a System put in game that allowed these PvP players to partake in some of the other rewards as well Yeah, it's it's funny because that was again.

That was the first thing I worked on when I went to the PvP team So I went from world to world to PvP and they're like, all right, we need to reward PvP players. I'm like give them salt Done problem solves give them salt. Just give them salt.

They'll love that But no, there was plenty of that to go around. So I went to this next best thing You know, we wanted to we wanted to make to simulate The experience of a PvE player essentially of like I want to go for I want to go get this item I want to go farm this material for crafting. I want to go do these things, right?

And so I was like, you know, how do we do that? How do we how do we simulate that in a PvP environment in any way? Right, it's the team Well all of us got together and we thought of like, you know What if you could simulate being in Kryta and farming in Kryta or you know killing things in Kryta?

So we came up with the idea of like reward tracks. What if there's the Kryta reward track? What if there's the dungeon reward track?

What if there's this and that and it started it was really interesting because then I had to go to a program and I was like So you can't kill anything I can't go kill a bear in PvE but what if I opened a box and there was like dead bears in the box that I could loot and they were like Okay, I think I can make that but I want to make sure there's a lot of dead bears in that box Like I want to have I want to make sure like, you know, just killing one bear

So what you're saying is is you enabled PvP players to farm dead bears from the corpses of noobs?

Yes Yeah So, you know, but we had to stuff a lot of things in there. I like I don't want just bears I want to be able to put anything in this box, right? So then we got like a skull and I put deer and then everything else so the best part was was I had to go ask somebody that and they're like that's impossible and then they're like Well, maybe not and so then I had to go and make You know every single creature Possible into a box.

I'm just stuffing stuff into boxes pushing it off. It was rough It was rough, but it was interesting because you know, then you know, we decided like, okay What what goes in Kryta? What goes in the wetlands?

What goes in the Alpines? What goes on and I create all these things and then I wound up going, you know, there's like 500 boxes

External links[edit]

Guild Chat episode 42, the Guild Wars 2 Fourth Anniversary Livestream! on ArenaNet's official channel on YouTube

Guild Chat - Episode 42

Contents

Summary[edit]

Transcription[edit]

Halloween and Wintersday (0:25)[edit]

Super Adventure Box (11:55)[edit]

Festival of the Four Winds (23:32)[edit]

Dragon Bash (34:55)[edit]

Living World Season 1 (43:23)[edit]

Flame and Frost and The Secret of Southsun (52:09)[edit]

Living World Season 1 (Part 2) (1:02:57)[edit]

Clockwork Chaos and Queen's Jubilee (1:13:35)[edit]

External links[edit]

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