Guild Chat - Episode 6
Guild Chat - Episode 6
- Title
- @TwitchCon, Adventures
- Host
- Rubi Bayer
- Guests
- Mike Zadorojny
Byron Miller - Date
- October 1, 2015
- Official video
- YouTube
The 6th episode of Guild Chat aired on October 1, 2015. Listen to Byron, Mike Z and Rubi live at TwitchCon on September 25-26 2015 to show a bit more of the adventures you'll be able to play in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns.
Summary[edit]
Transcription[edit]
Introduction (0:23)[edit]
Rubi Bayer: Hi guys. Welcome to back to Guild cast.
Mike Zadorojny: Use your mike.
Rubi: Hi guys. Welcome to back to Guild Cast. I am used to a earmike. I am your host Rubi Bayer from ArenaNet's communication team and back with us is design lead?
Mike: Mike Zadorojny.
Rubi: And game designer?
Byron Miller: Byron Miller.
Rubi: Byron, welcome for the very first time today.
Byron: Thank you.
Rubi: Ah, so Byron has been doing work on adventures for Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns expansion. So we are going to talk a little bit about those today. I am going to let you two fight it out about who gets to talk about what adventures are for our new players and what they, what they do in Heart of Thorns, what they are for.
What are adventures (0:58)[edit]
Byron: Well, adventures are sort of repeatable, repeatable single player content, where you have control over starting and stopping this content. So you can really aim to get your best high score. We've incorporated leaderboards in these things, so that you have something to compete against. You are fighting against your friendlist and your guild, guildlists. So when you, when you start your adventure, you are like, I don't know, trying to collect as many fallen spores as possible. You can go through as fast as you can, get your best score, find your thing. And then you can say hey so and so in my guild, I am way better than you at this, come at me. And, and they can go and respond and a little bit of a leaderboard chase. So it's really single player content in the open world that you can see and interact with your friends as you are playing it. But you are really the master of your own destiny.
Rubi: Nice, so we saw these a while back. Right there in Verdant Brink we saw the first adventures.
Byron: Yeah.
Rubi: That we've been working on. So if you've been around for a while, you have seen the one with the flamethrower and the tentacles.
Byron: Yeah, the tentacle torcher is in the, in the brink.
Rubi: Brink.
Byron: And the, we also had the pit salvage one and the bug in the branches. Those three were all in the beta weekend.
Rubi: That's right. Yeah, those came out with the beta weekend. So today we are going to show off two that you've never seen before. Because Byron has been doing a lot.
Mike: Before we are going into this, Byron.
Rubi: Oh, no, no, no.
Mike: If I am a brand new player and I am playing through these adventures, what kind of rewards am I looking at?
Byron: So there are two different rewards that we have with the adventure system. There is a daily reward and that is a bronze, a silver and a gold tier. Like so, for example if there is a threshold and you need to collect ten of these objects for silver and then forty for gold. You can actually do that every day. You can earn experience, you can earn items for the map. And then there is also a lifetime leaderboard, that is like who is the best of all time in your friendlist and in your guildlists and from those you can get mastery points. There's some unique collection items that are, that are part of our, some broader reward structures that we've got going on. But there is really a lot going on that you can get out of these things every day and then also those one time really sweet, really big chunky rewards.
Rubi: That sounds delicious.
Byron: It does sound delicious, doesn't it?
Rubi: It does not.
Preview of The floor is lava? (3:13)[edit]
Rubi: All right, so we are already in the first one. I am going to steal your thunder.
Byron: Sure.
Rubi: And say the title, just because I like it so much.
Byron: Yeah.
Rubi: This one is Byron's and is called The floor is lava. Pretty much.
Byron: Actually it is called The floor is lava? with a question mark.
Rubi: The floor is most assuredly lava.
Byron: Most assuredly lava.
Rubi: There is no, there is no doubt about it. I saw you fall in.
Byron: That is true.
Rubi: Yeah, so.
Byron: Yes, so all right, basically the concept behind this. So I was basically thinking when I started designing some of these things. What did I love and I thought back to my childhood, when it's you know how you throw the pillow on the ground and you say I can jump there now.
Rubi: Correct.
Byron: There, you are safe. And you break all your furniture and your parents get super mad at you. That was.
Rubi: That was just you.
Byron: That was just me. Nobody else ever did that. But this is sort of a similar thing where you are running around in this area where the floor is very dangerous. And you are kicking this fruit and the fruit fly over on the ground where they explode and where they explode they leave a safe zone and if you jump onto there and you grab the spores, the seeds, it launches you up in the air and you can go to the next one. Here is a look at some of our leaderboard stuff. You can see the rewards right off the bat and this is a run that I did. So this is a strategy that I think might be a really solid one, where you kick all the fruit into the center and then you collect them all.
Rubi: You kick it, kick it and pick it up.
Byron: Here am I jumping and all that stuff, but it is sort of a mix of jumping puzzle and action-adventure really. You'll see the seeds are falling down and that is a spore that is left there. Using your glider to land on these mushrooms. Make sure you don't fall into the lava. At a certain point in time, I am sure I mess up big time and I eat it into the lava here in a couple of seconds.
Mike: So one of the important things in here is like. As Byron is going around doing this. If there are two players doing this at the same time, each player is going to have their own spores. It's not like I am going to be competing against him directly in this. It's, what we are competing against is our, our overall score that we get from our individual times.
Rubi: Right, it is not like: you get this fruit and he gets that fruit and that's it. The fruit is gone. You need to get your own rounds.
Byron: Right.
Mike: In fact you need to, you can see running around in the video occasionally as I am challenging him on this one.
Byron: So I have landed on the safe zones that I am launching myself from point to point. You can see my score in the top right corner is going up as the timer is counting down. I am using gliding, I am using some speed mushrooms that we saw earlier when I was at the starting point to give that extra speed. And then some jump mushrooms that are kinda just like, if I messed up and I land in the lava and I really need to be out of the lava. I can hop on those things and fly up.
Rubi: So if you fall in the lava, you are not just completely screwed.
Byron: Right.
Rubi: You can get out.
Byron: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so the way that it works is that every time, every second that you are in the lava, you get in this physical lava, the spores, you get this debuff on you that takes away one percent of your health and it stacks up to 10 times. So if you stay in the lava for too long, you are going to start losing a lot of health.
Rubi: Yeah.
Byron: I think, I think I, right here is a really bad deal for me. Let's take a look.
Rubi: I think this is where you started yelling: Ow my skin.
Byron: Yeah, my skin. Remember kids, don't be like me and mess up these jumps.
Rubi: Be like Z, who is just of camera playing.
Byron: Yeah, there it is. Oh, I got a stack of the debuff, so I am taking some damage.
Rubi: Oh, oh, oh.
Byron: Then I decided, I decided at that point my run was over. I hit the restart button, which on the bar all the way on the right. There is a button that says I wanna cancel this adventure and start over. You can do that really quickly, which is really nice. Especially when you are trying that perfect run.
Inspiration and experience (6:34)[edit]
Byron: A lot of these have been sort of inspired by the games I watched being speedrun. I watched the Awesome Games Done Quick and the Summer Games Done Quick. I follow a lot of speedrunners and even in the Guild Wars 2 community, you see a lot of in our social media things, like Reddit. You see these videos of someone doing a jumping puzzle in 15 seconds.
Rubi: Right.
Byron: That guy is really good. I want to make something so that that person has a challenge. And that is really a lot of what I got out of this. What I went and put into the design for it.
Rubi: So here is my question. Who is better at this?
Byron: Uh, it is actually sort of painful for me to say that Z is better. I think maybe I am too closely involved in the content. But really he smoked me when we played this together like, he was like I got gold again. Then I was like uh.
Rubi: Yeah, I really wanted to just make you both relive that. So when we were recording this, the trashtalking and gloating was epic.
Mike: Oh yeah.
Rubi: So that was super, super fun. This could be you.
Byron: Yeah. The wounds are still fresh, Z. I just want you to know that.
Mike: The, the thing I really enjoy about. This was my first chance. We started out, this was really my first chance really getting into adventures and kind of seeing what Byron did, what Byron had put together. It's very, it's one of those things where it is very easy to get into. You can kind of see the mechanics, you can play with that a little bit. But it is really difficult to master. So it's not going to be like one of those one or two run things. Oh, I am done with this. No, there is actually a.
Rubi: I got this.
Mike: Serious amount of challenge. And the thing that I really enjoyed was very easy to understand what the objective was and what I needed to do. And so, like I said, it was really quick to pick up and then when the trashtalk started coming my way, I was like okay, let's see what's going on with it.
Rubi: They were both laughing. There wasn't like a fistfight in the green room or anything. It was all good. But yeah, I mean, I've gone through one twice just to see what it was all about and it is, it is very easy to understand, figure out exactly what you need to do. I appreciated your trick of kick all the fruit down and then go get them.
Byron: Yeah.
Rubi: Not just kick and jump and come back up. Because it is an enormous time waster. But there is a learning curve. There is real learning curve there.
Byron: Yeah.
Mike: Yeah. But it also comes in, like there is a bunch of different strategies. This is what I really like about it.
Time stamp: 8:35
