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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