Guild Chat - Episode 9
Guild Chat - Episode 9
- Title
- @TwitchCon, Heart of Thorns maps
- Host
- Rubi Bayer
- Guests
- Byron Miller
Mike Zadorojny - Date
- October 2, 2015
- Official video
- YouTube
The 9th episode of Guild Chat aired on October 2, 2015. Host Rubi Bayer interviews Mike Z and Byron Miller and talk about the philosophy of map design in the then-forthcoming Heart of Thorns maps.
Transcription[edit]
At TwitchCon[edit]
Warning: No reason provided! Rubi Bayer: Hi guys, welcome back to Guild Chat. I am back with Byron and Mike, and we'll gonna talk a little bit about Heart of Thorns maps. That's been a huge question with Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns, what's coming, and... there's the question for a long time—how many maps? How many maps? But, what's more important how they work, so we gonna kinda go into that. I'm going to look at you first because we've.. this has been a thing since launch about all of the different regions that we have in Guild Wars 2 and how Tyria changes, the maps change dramatically. You have all of these great different climates for variety as you go across.
Mike Zadorojny: Yeah. Comparing the Shiverpeaks going over more into the plains of Kryta against the Fields of Ruin in Ascalon and stuff like that. There definitely is a huge dynamic shift as you go from one region to the next in terms of what types of environments and weather conditions you'll see as you're wandering through.
Rubi: Yeah you have this in Ascalon this blasted landscape that's just starting to come back and it kinda gets really beautiful and there's trees up north and then you go into the Shiverpeaks. You've got the snow, the mountains, all of that and we've done a lot of work. We've been super proud of how we did that and we wanted to continue that in Heart of Thorns once we went in to heart of Maguuma. But, we had this vertical space to work in.
Mike: Yeah
Rubi: And we got these different biomes.
Mike: Yeah so we actually started with looking at how we horizontally blocked out the space and figured out the play areas and things like that and we just kinda swapped it sideways. Now we're doing in a more vertical space. So it's taking a look at ok when you go to the jungle you have various different, even in just natural rain forests in terms of the tree tops, to the ground cover to what even goes below. And so we started playing a lot more with that vertical space and we just started the same design process of 'ok these are the types of stories that we want to tell. Here's where our natural hubs are going to be. Here's the general flow we want for players as they are going through the maps.' And just had more of that verticality space to play with and then you start adding in gliding and the mastery system and it just becomes and it starts opening even more modes of transportation. Even with the jump mushrooms and stuff like that, so we started just doing all kinds of crazy things in terms of how you get from one corner of the map to the other and now you have a three dimensional space that you're playing with that even more.
Rubi: There is so much more to work with. I think when it really started to hit home for me, when I went to the Itzel tree village, the Itzel hub. You have like these rope bridges and all these places. I am not just going back and forth, but there is also. I can look up and see that there is something going up there, but I need to go back and up and back around again and. It was just, it was not just side to side, but there was so much more going on that it looked like at first.
Byron Miller: I think for me. I play a lot of the content, especially in the Verdant Brink map. I find myself, often times getting either knocked back by an enemy and then falling, being like uh. This is not going to end up.
Rubi: This is not okay.
Byron: I need to be caught by a net or something. So a lot of the times, you will discover things even by accident, even by falling off or getting knocked off or even by jumping. I know a lot of folks like jumping off of things. So the gliders really brought and opened up those areas for us in a way we were, we were super.
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uh we just anticipate until we actually got in there and started playing with it like we had a general idea but until you like prototype it out and you kind of see how it's going to react you don't know for sure or what's going to happen and especially like the craziness that you designers like have when you're like building out all those individual pieces of content like and by that he means thank you oh yes thank you for being crazy of course you know I think as we talk it's easier if we show while we tell so we do have a couple of videos just that really show off well the depth and width of the map so we can look at those while we're talking um but you have I'm just going to pick on you now that's fine because we talked so much about Adventures yesterday and again the jumping mushrooms and gliding is making a huge difference in that how did you how did you get all of that in there how did you start working was it weird getting into that vertical space you know I think um I mean I I worked on the silver was jumping puzzle uh before this and so I it sort of came a little bit more naturally thinking about that space I was really prepared for it was you what it was me and Josh yeah I did a lot of the content design and he did all all Josh has taken all the heat yours you can blame you can blame Josh for that one um but I think when when we when I started transitioning onto the uh expansion team um it really became one of those things like oh man the maps are sort of we've got a lot of that we've already had the gliding stuff uh locked down we had a lot of that space already starting to develop so it was really fun for me to go to these different map artists and say give me a space to play with what do you think is cool about what do you want to show me we've got a cool gliding um Adventure that goes through an ILO Village that's sort of suspended along the sides of a cliff and all these places where places that were sort of like hey can we make use of this it's really awesome to be able to fly through and and see all these things and actually there's sort of a Funny Story with uh with one of the adventures the floor is lava actually it actually started out in ver and Brink and uh we discovered that we we actually had it in a cave and the ceilings were too low so some of the feedback we got was when we do those jumps we want to we want to I really want to be able to like have my camera far out I don't want to hit the ceiling I don't want to feel like I'm I'm like sort of claustrophobic about it right but we were in a cave and uh and so when we tried to raise the ceiling we realized there was content up there and we were like you know oh no it doesn't really make a lot of sense to try to carve out this space why don't we actually find a space that's really good for this for this content and actually moved deeper into the jungle and so it's had a lot of homes in in its incarnations oh my gosh so I have to know do you remember what you ran into when you raed that up uh I oh man I want to say so it's it's in it was in an area with a lot of it and I think they had a Village above we didn't want to displace them they've been through a lot it's difficult yeah with Moro and and all of that stuff we just we felt like maybe they should have some peace and quiet yeah it's it's fair going back to kind of the the approach to how we've been looking at from an artistic standpoint and things like that like blending that content in to just the environments that would have been created and you go back to like one of the initial trailers and you hear Daniel talking about how we wanted to have the kind of this artisanal craftsmanship of having character and personality which just the the level environment and we we still have that today and so it's being able to take those and tell interesting stories on top of that but again going back to gliding and with masteries and things like that we can actually look at okay let's try and Traverse this in ways that we've never been able to do before how do we make it so you can actually you know use mushrooms to get up the sides of these Cliffs or use gliding to get to locations on the far side of a Chasm that before was never something we even considered and then you start layering on updrafts you know lay line gliding that kind of stuff and now we just start having even more more uh ways that we can just diversely create this content for for players to enjoy yeah so you mentioned layline gliding can you kind of give a little description that's one of the things that we haven't shown publicly uh the short version is there's lay Line energy that is all throughout the Muma jungle and it's it's you know connecting various locations whether it's you know floating platforms whether it's getting you across giant uh you know caverns and things like that um but your normal gliding is just not good enough to be able to to make the the the jump and use that kind of uh loose energy and so that's one of those that as you're leveling up your tiers um you know so you'll be able to use updrafts and use those to kind of get up into higher locations uh and then towards the end of the of the that track is when you're going to be actually able to use those lay lines and get to locations you know bumping you across letting you almost like uh water skipping uh really quickly across uh uh these lay line energies to get to other locations yeah um you know what we have a second gliding video that we can take a look at while we into gliding a little bit because that's such a big part of how these Maps work and I made the I actually this was my character and I'm kind of flying around just seeing what I can see oh man yeah I think let's see is this yeah okay so yeah there's updraft this was in ver Brink yep yep but you've got the updrafts that one of the biggest things I noticed was learning to navigate those because I did get into a couple of tricky situations yeah where I I was like I have nowhere I'm losing altitude I have no to go but something that I didn't realize we put in there was that you can you have these updrafts at different heights Y and a part of the skill of gliding is learning to navigate those and learning okay if I go up here and then I Glide a little bit more then I can get all the way up here because there are things at every level literally down further than you can see to some extent we look at this as kind of like you know the jumping puzzles you're always trying to get up to some crazy location right now well now with updrafts it gives you an even more tools uh for us to kind of play with and figure out okay how do you get from one location to the other we saw this a little bit in yesterday when we were talking about the adventures and showing how you use the jump mushrooms in the The Masks area to kind of get to various locations and you know they don't always send you to the same height some of them will go up a little bit higher some will go a little bit lower and you can see right now that you know this just gives us the environment artist more uh you know tools for us to play with and trying to figure out how you actually Traverse these Maps Plus at the same time we can do new styles of content with this that we could never could have done before yeah I think it also gives us an opportunity in a lot of cases to show off um you get a lot of different angles we you know we we had the first person camera coming in a while back and now we have another opportunity for these cinematic moments where you're where you're where you're no longer sort of like looking up at the mountain but now you're looking down at or you're know you're flying alongside it really quick or gliding around alongside it really closely and I think that provides a different a very unique and different experience that we haven't experienced before yeah there have been it's afforded so many opportunities I know if you're keeping up with the story you know that the packed airships have just and smash a bits and I am so sad I didn't get this this was after we were recording I was just still kind of learning just looking around and seeing what I could see and I saw one of the packed airships in the distance you got a little look at it earlier and I'm gliding around and I got to thinking I wonder so kind of headed over that way and found out that I can land on that packed Airship and run around on top of it and just in look at the wreckage I got inside and I was it was so cool and it was so unexpected that I was a little worried and I instant messaged Aaron one of our map artists and I was like hey Aaron um so I'm inside this packed Airship I mean I'm like literally running around inside the wreckage is this right am I supposed to be able to do that and I could like just about see how smug he was from across the building he was like yep yep that is correct ma'am have fun and I think I mean like going back to the whole idea of the verticality of these Maps I think uh you know from a lore perspective and from a sort of a story standpoint you also have this very interesting tension like you know when with that with that packed video at the end of uh at the end of season two where you know we we attack the jungle we trying to fight off morath I think that the the way that we've introduced and we sort of the way we Traverse through these Maps is definitely a feeling like of of coming in from above and really entering moront ler right like you know the the the the plants coming up from the ground and you're sort of coming in to meet meet them um sort of reminded me of when I you about the story of the Titans where you know it was the gods versus the Titans and if you could pull them out you know off of their Earthly fo you could defeat them and I feel we sort of get a similar feeling where we're sort of we're fighting more drat we're coming in from above and we really have the power behind us in that regard not that by the way is that Airship that I went back and checked out later I am just that really drove it home for me the fact that we watched last year in that cinematic that these Vines came up literally ripped the things out of the air and they're still way up there they're just kind of hanging out and we now have access because of what we've done yeah we're sort of we're falling right into the heartest and this allows us to hide even more things for players to explore I mean we we've talked previously about like hey look we have fans who have thousands of hours in the game and they're now still discovering little you know secrets that we put in since launch this just gives us even more places and you know combining all the the ways that you can now Traverse Through the Jungle M so I think you're going to be able to see this in a minute just off to the right hand side as I was gliding through I just the explorers in the game those of you who like to look around and find all of the little hidden things you have so much to do yeah you can see it off to the right here that is a jumping puzzle on the side of a cliff oh yeah that you can only get to by gliding so I've headed over later and again I didn't capture all of this amazing stuff until after we were done and I was still exploring um you finish this jumping puzzle you go up and around and I found a little cave and went through this tunnel and found some content that I would not have seen and I'm not going to give it away because I don't want to ruin it and everybody would completely freak out 27 days 27 days you guys look for that look for that jumping puzzle and do it and go through the little tunnel at the end yeah there's more than one though I mean we have those hidden all over the map I'm going to say two words burrowing chickens mhm this is new I haven't found this that's all I can say that's all I can say oh you guys doesn't he need to tell me where can you can you like once we're back at work can you like at least point and guide me that I don't want to spoil it you he gave you two words yeah I gave you the two words I can give you Brewing chickens just sounds like a thing you made up it's like hey what are the weirdest words I can put together mhm all right I'm going to have to take a look and try to find this yeah and that's this is exactly it's killing me now but there is content just hidden everywhere and the only way you can get to it is by gliding you will also notice there are some little hovering they almost look like hot air balloons as far as their silhouette have you guys seen these oh yeah did you do them I did I didn't uh uh personally do them but uh it's sort of part of the things that we you know we we learned a lot from drytop we learned a lot from Silver waste it's about um how to sort of cohesively build a map so that the the the way the players participated feels very uh Push Pull feels very um engaging and so that is actually is a is a big part of it those those Silhouettes that you're seeing is a is a part of our uh of the story of ver Brink yeah so I was flying past these and I I kept seeing them and you know then something else would catch my eye and I would get distracted this is like Colin talked about ear you go in with a goal but then there's so much else going on that you wind up doing 10 other things and I finally about the fourth or fifth time I finally passed one and thought I'm going to go over there and see what's what's going on there are just these little things hovering in the air and I got up to it and you know you had the interact option I hit F to interact and it said you require a key to open this chest I was like this is a loot chest this is a loot chest they're just hovering everywhere in midair and it's like pieces of packed wreckage right mhm yeah that's just hanging out there uh you can look at it as kind of similar what we did in the the silver waste with like the berry chest and stuff like that like uh it's more content Evolution from what we learned from the lessons from living world and what we brought into the jungle um you see that even in terms of like the kind of map wide events that we started uh with the silver waste where everyone was building up the packed Readiness so you could actually go into the the uh Caverns down below to beat the bosses and then go and fight like the vine tendrils and stuff like that um we have that in now in these the each of these four MS as well where there is some uh kind of unique uh meta or you know overall objective that the entire map is is playing together they trying to accomplish um we had kind of the day night cycle that you've seen in virgin Brink but each of the other three Maps has their own one mechanic and some of them are leading up to some giant bosses that we haven't really talked about yet um and some unfortunately that we won't be talking about until you get a chance to see them in live but we are bringing back some of like or not bringing back but we've made some brand new world bosses that you'll see in the in the same veins that you saw like uh TA quaddle or like the the evolved jungle worm that kind of stuff so we're actually bringing in some new uh encounters and new huge bosses for players to come and overcome yeah it's interesting to look back and see like in drytop and silver waste I wanted to say in dry top and Brink but we're not technically there yet um the ways that we started using that verticality like with the crystals in drytop just to see the progression and how we started making this work and how we started exploring that vertical space m i I think a lot a lot should be said about the the work and the and the evolution of what our our environment artists have done I I you know Josh did really amazing work on on dry top and silver waste and I think now that we had you know we have these other Maps coming in they the the folks that were watching that really took that to heart and really just made some incredible stuff I I really got to give a shout out to those to those guys oh yeah no we couldn't do our jobs without them like uh and they're always pushing us too like it's goes both ways like we try and build some crazy new content that no one you know like nobody foresee coming and then they'll try and one up us and be like hey well now we've got this new tech and we're going to do this thing and now you have to populate it with your content and so you know it's it's this nice little not rivalry but it's like we feed off each other in terms of trying to see how more how much more we can put in how much more um you know creativity and in some cases Insanity we can put into the maps for the players to enjoy it's good Insanity it's very very fun Insanity we talked yesterday I think about how there's so much going on in the game that you just need to constantly be looking and pay attention to your surroundings you're not just seeing okay here's there's a heart on this part of the map I'm going to aim straight for it but you need to keep an eye out and with these Maps there's so much more I mean you're needing to look up down left right everywhere because there's going to be something going on it's the same it's the same process but just exponentially bigger I mean you talk about the the like we had the Renown regions uh in and ceria and now as we move into the jungle like we actually took that as an evolution in terms of the style of content where you actually have these hubs that are opening up um the more events the more you help out these individual uh you know groups of of NPCs who are either trapped or who are helping explore or helping uh agid you in the fight against more drous forces um you know you see we're evolving those outposts and then opening things like Adventures jumping puzzles access to new content and then opening up even more content on top of that like we wanted to create each one of these locations as here's kind of a central Battleground you know Point here's where you know you can find those things think what like a base renown and then layering more and more content on top of it so you can actually build out the environment and build out the story associated with it as well yeah oh you mentioned something uh just just now about how um you know you get into these maps and you start seeing all these things that are going on it's it's actually I've run into a couple of times where like I played these B Le past beta weekends and I'm all over the place with my content my content and all these all these different Maps so a lot of the time I spend just sort of like teleporting around like cuz I get to be a little Chey Dev right and so I got into the day of the week and I and I was I was playing with one of the designers um who actually did a lot of the work on Veron Brink and uh thank thank goodness that she was there because I I needed like a a chapero I was falling off a Cliffs I didn't know how to get to you know from one point A to point B and like I I stopped and I thought about it for a second I was like oh man I love this feeling it's all new to me and it's all fun isn't it great it's super great it's kind of funny right like when you when we first started playing gild Wars 2 okay we have we now have the concept of Dodge rolling you know have something that's new and you know casting abilities on the move move and things like that and you just get so used to it that you go play you know other styles of games it's like you can't do that well then we started going in the jungle we started doing gliding and then we went back to queria like on live before the the expansion's ready and we don't have that and so intrinsically we're like okay deploy glider wait and we're created oh yeah oh no and we're de the falling damage trait doesn't even help yes exactly so like it's it's nice to have that kind of um that newness in terms of of exploration and understanding of uh you know where we're going with not just the pacing of of the game but also the content the story and everything else like there is an element of this that is going to feel very new the first time you step into the jungle in some ways that you felt when you first walked into the world of teror for gilber St absolutely well did you see I don't know if you guys watched The Guild Halls live stream I did with link a while back it was the first time and we were making use of that space in Guild Halls too I mean the guild Halls were just I was gliding all over the place but that first time I hadn't really had a lot of experience with gliders did this day I maintained something bugged but I was like okay you know link like glided down he was going to show me something else and this is all live so I jump off the edge and my glider deployed and then I hit space I have no idea how it deployed on its own but then I was just yep you cratered yeah there's I was an enormous crater and there is a certain learning curve there even though that was not my fault it was definitely not me it was totally not your fault no I'm pretty sure link just reached over while I wasn't looking fix that so so this just just going back into that this vertical space gives us so much more content to play with and you can't say burrowing chickens but you can I want to know what your what the best part is for you what are you most looking forward to Once Heart Of Thorns is alive man uh I want to talk about Ms we haven't talked about and I can't I don't can't I got to hold back so ver and Brink uh so if it was up to me you could but sure there is a I believe one of our designers uh uh Lisa actually put in or or got an animation for the its of him uh like whittling a sharp stick and it's like an it's not like an idol animation we very consciously chose to put him in a place where you got to find him and he's like he's just sort of this this calm you know they have their every day they do their things they play their little they play little loots and they they exactly so there there are a lot of actually like subtle things that we've placed in a lot of places like I said those hidden things that are just the unique flavors of like everyday life is with the Y and I think that they're those are my favorite things that I'm looking forward to and bring all right you play a lot like I do all over the place MH yeah uh you know you have to pick one it's I know it's awful no it it's ultimately coming down to I'm looking forward to the the challenging content that now that we can do even more with like um we can play a lot more with movement um and so like one of the bosses that we're you know we're putting out there for the on those epic scales it forces you to move around a lot more and forces you to think about like how do you uh Traverse locations and the fastest way to get from point A to point B to avoid either massive attacks to do damage to these creatures or things like that so that that becomes more fun for me because like it's again like I was saying like you learn to dodge roll you learn to Glide you learn you what's next and being able to use these these masteries and um you know make more meaningful choices to your character and the evolution of your character uh I think is going to be really exciting not just for me but I'm going to love watching how the players overcome this you know what order are they going to choose uh to unlock their masteries uh I saw some people posting that based on the conversation we had U yesterday like I was totally recommending lighting is the max the one you need to do first but it doesn't have to be that way right like there's all these other ones that are really good and are going to unlock more styles of content that um you know you can unlock content for people around you it's not just about like um everything about the individual it's about how we as a as a community are going to go through these uh all these maps and unlock all this content um and ultimately take the fight to morm off yeah well the awesome thing about masteries is that you don't have a time limit you can unlock them all and you have lots of game to play yeah yeah so all right you guys keep your eyes open find somebody find me those burrowing chickens seriously you know I'm going to drive you up the wall about that right until I find out where they are what this is about keep your eyes peeled in all directions and just enjoy gliding something else one more thing that I was going to mention we had talked about I think it's G first of all that like rears up this big attack and everybody has to Glide or you're just dead right mhm yeah we have we have put these things everywhere so keep your eyes open and enjoy all of the parts of the maps of Heart Of Thorns we'll see you guys later bye for
