Guild Chat - Episode 96
Guild Chat - Episode 96
- Title
- “Shadow in the Ice” Preview
- Host
- Rubi Bayer
- Guests
- Nick Hernandez
Lee Bledsoe
Connor Fallon - Date
- January 24, 2020
- Official video
- YouTube
The 96th episode of Guild Chat aired on January 24, 2020.
Transcription[edit]
Introductions (8:25)[edit]
Rubi Bayer: Hi Tyria, and welcome to Guild Chat. I'm your host Rubi and we are back after a really long break. We haven't been around since November. We had holiday break and all that good stuff so we are back and ready to talk about episode 2, Shadow in the Ice, which is coming to you guys next week. We are going to give you a little sneak peek though through talking to some of the people who worked on it. We're not going to spoil things for you, but we are going tor give you a little preview of what to expect and what to get ready for. So let's jump in and talk to some of the developers behind the episode. Why don't you guys— Should we come back to you? Are you two...
Nick Hernandez: Shh, she's sleeping.
Rubi: So, we don't want to wake the quaggan. This is gonna be our show, man. I don't know if you weren't expecting...
Connor Fallon: How to put to sleep your plush quaggan.
Rubi I don't know if you weren't expecting silliness but you have been here before.
Connor: No, I've been in these before.
Nick: You chose the wrong people if you didn't want silliness.
Rubi: I chose exactly the right people. So why don't we have you all introduce yourselves: talk about what you do here at ArenaNet, what team you're on, and what that team does.
Nick: Starting with me, I'm guessing?
Rubi: Starting with Nick!
Nick: Okay.
Rubi: And you have to introduce the quaggan now too.
Nick: Alright. Hi, I'm Nick and we actually— Do we have a name for this quaggan?
Connor: Steve.
Nick: Okay, well...
Connor: Wait, that name has baggage.
Nick: Hi, I'm Nick and I'm a game designer here at ArenaNet. I'm on the episode 2 team and what I worked on was a lot of the open world content with a primary focus on the Trials of Koda, which I touch a little bit today, and the Raven mastery stuff / some open world puzzles. All that jazz.
Rubi: Good.
Nick: What?
Rubi: What did you say?
Nick: And all that jazz.
Rubi: I thought you said I apologize and I was like no! Oh my gosh!
Nick: No, I'm not sorry for the things I did.
Lee Bledsoe: Hi, I'm Lee, the visual effects lead on Guild Wars 2 and my team was responsible for all the cool visual effects that you see or will see in this coming episode.
Rubi: Awesome.
Connor: For now, imagine them.
Lee: For now, yeah.
Connor: Yeah. Wait. Some of them were in the trailer. I'm Connor. I was the team lead on this episode. That meant I had a hand in basically a lot of different things: figuring out how everything should feel tonally and what our overall goals were and making sure we were meeting them. So yeah.
Rubi: Awesome. Well, I've seen a whole bunch of the stuff. You all have seen it through the trailers and some of the stuff that we've showed off between the past couple weeks and now. And also it is national compliment day so I will tell you now that everything looks amazing. You guys are doing fantastic work and you're wonderful and thank you for joining us today.
Connor: Thank you.
Nick: Thank you.
Lee: Thank you.
Connor: You're amazing as well.
Rubi: Happy national compliment day.
Nick: Yay!
Rubi: We are going to be taking questions at the end of today's show so if you have questions - we're not going to spoil the stuff that we're not talking about - but if you have questions about some of the work that the guys are doing that we talked about today, feel free to put them in chat and we will try to get to some of them at the end of today's show. So. Alright! why don't we go ahead and just start with— you mentioned the Trials of Koda.
Nick: Yeah.
Rubi: Let's not spoil those too much, but I know that you want to make sure people give some feedback on that once they're in there.
Nick: Yeah, so you know we are trying something new with the Trials of Koda where— should I talk a little bit about like, how like, what they are?
Rubi: A little bit.
Nick: Okay. So the Trials of Koda are these kind of additional optional objectives that are going to be showing up around a lot of the events in the map. And when you complete them, if you succeed that event, you will actually get a chance to kick off another more difficult and higher scaling style of event that are themed around kind of a continuation of whatever event they were attached to.
Connor: A sequel event.
Nick: Yeah, like a sequel event.
Connor: Yeah.
Nick: Yeah.
Rubi: Okay, so maybe keep an eye out for those. And those are random, right?
Nick: Yes.
Rubi: It's not "do ABC" and you...
Nick: Yeah, no. So the way that they... they will show up on different types of events and random parts of the map and there will only ever be one up on a map at a time.
Rubi: Okay.
Nick: Yeah.
Rubi: Alright, does sound like they're gonna be fun. I'm kind of looking forward to trying this.
Nick: Hope so, yeah. We definitely are hoping that everybody likes them and we're looking forward to y'all's feedback: both positive and negative.
Rubi: Okay. Constructive criticism.
Nick: Is important, yeah.
Rubi: Okay. Do you want to talk a little bit about the Raven masteries?
Nick: Yeah. So as you all have probably seen in episode 1, we have the catalyst mastery system and also the Raven mastery system and since we are extending the map of Bjora Marches in episode 2 we also wanted to take some time to be able to extend those masteries. So, as you've seen in the trailer, we have this new thing called Raven gates and what those are are basically they're a type of like in world portal that, when you have the mastery trained, you can use to get to different parts of the map that you usually wouldn't be able to reach otherwise and or more easily access those areas that you wouldn't be able to otherwise. And what's really cool about episode 2 specifically is that a lot of these ones actually take you to a bunch of new puzzle areas that we've designed as a kind of like continuation / extension / evolution of the light puzzles that you saw in episode 1. So definitely, you know, we wanted to reward people who take the time to explore and look at every single nook and cranny of the episode so we're looking forward to seeing what everybody thinks about these new things.
Connor: Yeah.
Nick: Yeah.
Connor: No, it's just worth noting that like one of the things that's kind of neat about this episode is it's an extension of a map that we released, right? So we were able to go and add like new events, new achievements, the Trials of Koda to events that existed before and also these puzzles that are - some of them are hated on the episode 1 side of the map - so it's not just releasing new content, it also was an opportunity to go back and update some of the content that existed and add new neat things to find—
Rubi: In the first half of it.
Connor: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Rubi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you did mention the map extension and do you want to talk a little bit about that, Connor?
Connor: Sure. I mean, so, in the first half of the map— Sorry, in episode 1, for— meaning it was like two months ago, but clearly... and things happened, but you have not actually solved the main problem.
Rubi: I'm going to go ahead and open the spoiler doors for episode 1.
Nick: Spoilers!
Connor: Okay.
- SPOILER ALERT!: [klaxon sound effect]
Rubi: Spoilers, episode 1. You've had two months. If you haven't, by the way, if you haven't gotten to play episode 1, go ahead and log in and get it free.
Connor: Yeah. Yeah, yeah that's a good point. You have like 4 days left to get for free.
Rubi: You only have 4 days! Ahh!
Connor: Yeah. So basically what happens is in our episode people are pushing west to try to hunt down the source of the whispers because what you thought was the source of the whispers didn't pan out. They're still happening. And so our map is really about like you're getting really close to whatever is actually causing these. Things are kind of escalating in that area. You're also going from— the first half was kind of more Vigil oriented. This is where all the kodan live, so a lot of how kodan are living and, you know, what are they getting up to? How are they coping with existing in this area that is... let's say, a little contaminated... Just a little. And then finally we showed in the trailer there's also some old Norn shrines and like Spirits of the Wild that haven't been seen in a while and like what are they up to? What have they been up to? Those are kind of the three main elements that make up the cocktail of our episode and I think it makes something that's really interesting tonally and I really like a lot of stuff that we've done. Yeah.
Rubi: I'm looking forward to playing the extended map and going back and seeing what's new on the map that we have now. You mentioned the catalyst chests; do you want to talk about that a little bit?
Nick: Yeah so I don't know if that was actually in the trailer, but hey, previews! We have coming with the episode always an extension of the cow's mastery, as well each of them will have a new two-three version that you can unlock through the mastery system. And what they will grant you is you know, a bit more power within your course catalyst skills. And on top of that, our awards team really wanted to take the time and this opportunity to be able to try out something new around the actual reward side of the catalyst chests. So we're gonna be adding a new t3 chest that we're kind of using as an endcap reward across a lot of the content both in Episode two and also we're going to be retrofitted some of it in episode one content as well. And basically what happens with the two-three chests is that it doesn't matter what tier of the mastery you have, as long as you have at least tier 1 unlocked you'll be able to open the tier three chests; but the way that it works out is that the chests actually will give you different rewards depending on what tier you have. So the higher of the tier that you have in that mastery the better rewards you're gonna get for it. But also if you only have tier one you can still look at t3 chests and be like "I can open that"!
Connor: It's still something for you.
Nick: Yeah it's still something for you.
Rubi: So nobody's just completely left out as they're working towards that.
Nick: Yes. Except if you do not have at least tier one of the mastery trained, cuz you know, you have—there's this magic barrier around it and you still need to break the barrier to some capacity.
Rubi: We're hoping you do.
Nick: Yeah.
Rubi: If not, you should get that.
Nick: Yes.
Drakkar and Visual Effects Team (18:35)[edit]
Rubi:Alright, so, Lee I want to talk about—we showed off Drakkar in the trailer and it looks kind of awesome. It was not easy to do that.
Lee: It was not. The entire Drakkar encounter was a challenge from many angles.
Rubi: Yeah. So why don't you start-can you talk a little bit about what your team does and the work that they're responsible for to give us a little background?
Lee: Sure. Yes. Visual effects team; we're kind of known as like the smoke and mirrors team. We take the sort of abstract design—
Connor: Or make the effects for smokes and mirrors.
Nick: [Unintelligble mumbling]
Connor: Literally and metaphorically.
Lee: We take the abstract requests that we get from design and we have to come up with some really cool visual that achieves the design requirement. And the Drakkar encounter had a lot of various design requirements; some easy and straightforward and others, on the surface, looked easy and straightforward but ended up being incredibly complicated taking three of our guys basically six or eight weeks full-on figure out.
Rubi: (softly) Jeez. (Normally) So why don't we take a quick look at the other Drakkar video so we can kind of get some context for what you're talking about?
Lee: Totally.
Rubi: Okay. Let's take a peek.
- Drakkar preview video plays: [19:52]
Rubi: Okay. Simple shadow, no big deal.
Lee: Yeah. Yeah. That shadow looks great, right? And it looks really simple to shadow behind some ice. The reality is that that simple request from design was our big challenge for this episode; that remained a big challenge. So how do we get a shadow that is supposed to convey the depth of the creature to show up behind this wall of ice? And that took some really tricky shader logic from one of my VFX artists Nick Adger to come up and develop a new ice shader that supported—that simulated complex depth and complex animation while at the same time giving us the flexibility to control the shadow based on the needs of gameplay. So there's a lot of—
Rubi: So wait, you made a whole new shader for this?
Lee: We made several new shaders, but yes. We made one new shader specifically for the ice that you see. The walls that you see throughout the episode, and it looks on the surface like traditional ice but there's a lot of complex shader logic and math and a bunch of trial and error that went into developing it to make the shadow look as convincing as it does.
Rubi: Really?
Lee: Yes. When we originally planned this—or were pitching this, we weren't entirely certain how detailed we would be able to get with the shadow. Our first efforts were—we tried to set the—an expectation that this is going to be good, but we aren't fully sure how we're going to get there yet. And so over the course of the development of the shader, we went from a sort of smokey spherical shadow shape that had the ability to scale up and scale down and become more opaque or more transparent to sort of simulate Drakkar moving forward and backwards through the depth of the walls. But that wasn't quite enough to sell it for us so we went back to the drawing board to figure out "how do we really encapsulate the silhouette of Drakkar behind this ice?" We only spent maybe four weeks just on that one aspect alone of going from a simple sphere shadow to the final shadow that you see, and it took up a number of tricks that we use in the game world and that we sort of leveraged from the cinema world.
Nick: Yeah.
Rubi: I love that you say "We only spent four weeks on that shadow," and that sounds like so much to me for what comes—Because something that I've noticed is that if you're not familiar with this sort of work, like—and I've learned a lot more talking to you—but if you're not familiar with that sort of work there's a tendency for the brain to want to equate it to a real-world thing. And you're like "well yeah, it's—"
Lee: Yeah, you just cast a shadow on the wall.
Rubi:It's—or like it's just this shadow coming behind ice, how could that take four weeks? And that sounds wildly complicated to me, like what do you mean only?
Lee: Well shadows are complicated things to mimic in real life. There's a lot of play with light and atmospherics; and in this case, we had parallax and depth to deal with as well. So we knew we had to have a shadow eventually that captured this essence of depth so that it looked like it was not only just scrolling across the wall but it felt like a three-dimensional shadow was being cast on this wall. And that had a lifelike movement that you would expect to see a big creature to have. And that was a challenge, but it ultimately turned out really really well.
Connor: Yeah, I mean. We were throwing around a bunch of names for this episode at the time when they were working on this—
Rubi: Oh yeah!
Connor: And then, I think the first footage of Drakkar, like, swimming through ice came through and we're like: "We should call it Shadow in the Ice." Like, because it's a really cool visual that's really distinct for this episode.
Nick: I remember when I first looked at it, I was mostly just dumbfounded at the fact that like if you take a close look at it, depending—like, you know, different visual depth to the ice because of the way it's actually laid out. Like, it will—certain parts of the shadow will fade out as you get closer to like the thicker parts of the ice. And I was just like, holy junk! That is insane.
Lee: Yeah.
Rubi: Yeah. That wavering as it goes through.
Lee: Yeah. That's that complex shader logic that we're talking about that's really selling that. If you were to look at the raw animation that we developed for the shadow, that animation that is drawing the shadow on the wall is really simple and really basic. If an animator saw it they'd be like, "Wow! That's stupidly simple." But you get a lot of flow and movement because we're projecting it against a surface that A: has depth built into the geometry and then we're simulating further depth and play with how that shadow would interact with simulated depth on top of the physical depth that is modeled into it. It is a really fun challenge that really combined all the unique talents of my visual effects team.
Rubi: Wow. They did a really good job. It's interesting to hear about the complexity behind it.
Lee: Yeah.
Rubi: Are you able to talk a little bit about that trial-and-error? Like, what were some of the things that you bumped into that maybe you were gonna work that didn't quite turn out right?
Lee: Ooh. Yeah, well as soon as we started showing the early conceptualizations for this material like I was saying earlier, we set the expectations kind of low, and that we weren't sure if we'd get the final shadow to look the way they wanted. So the first thing we ran into showing this—the first iteration to the dev team was with the simple sphere that we had made.
Rubi: Yeah.
Lee: Even though it was a sphere it still had smoky, tendril-y, moving elements and we were really inspired by a couple of ghost-like movies that drove that look. But it wasn't hitting that visual bar that we had hoped we'd see. And so, it took us going back to kinda relook at what-how we were developing the shader and what new controls we may have needed to add to it to get us that flexibility. This is a shader that is based on flipbooks. And we only have a certain number of frames to use in a flipbook. And how do we get a shadow that can do everything we needed it to do gameplay-wise but only have about 64 frames of animation to do it in?
Connor: Interesting.
Lee: That was a big trial-and-error effort, and that's where we started leveraging some of the—at that point we realized we could leverage some cinema techniques and take the simple animation we made for Drakkar and render out depth maps. That then—with those depth maps—they're sort of grayscale type images and the more white something is on this image the closer it is to the camera, and the more it trails off to gray or black the further it is away from the camera.
Rubi: Okay.
Lee: And so once we realized we could leverage this depth-map rendering technique to generate the shadow that looks like Drakkar, that was the moment where everything clicked and we realized holy crap! This is actually going to be the thing that sells this moment.
Rubi: Nice!
Lee: Yeah.
Nick: People are smart.
[Laughter]
Lee: Yeah. There's a lot—
Connor: I knew that—
Lee: My team is incredibly smart. And a lot of this math is even above my head a bit, so it's great to have a team that is diverse in skills. our strong shader guy—
Connor: Because they come and work different things and—
Lee: Yeah. Like if it was just up to me making the shader it'd—yeah, it's a good thing we have a diverse team.
Rubi: [laughs] Well you're part of that team so good work on that.
Lee: Yes, well. My primary responsibility is to ensure that we're on the right track and that the visual bar is being maintained and you know I make sure that I build our team that has the talents that we need to achieve the goals that you guys have.
Funko Pop! promotion (27:46)[edit]
Rubi: And you have Joko.
Lee: Joko, yes. Praise Joko.
Rubi: Thank you.
Connor: [Holds up Funko Pop] Were we gonna talk about these at some point?
Rubi: I honestly just—I got to playing with it and yeah, we have our Funko Pop!s and we're all very excited about it.
Connor: I mean, Rytlock speaks to me sometimes.
Nick: Do we wanna do a closeup of each one or something like that?
Rubi: we can if we want to; sure!
Nick: Just hand each one to Rubi and be like; this is Aurene!
Rubi: Is this what we're doing? I'm sorry, I'm unprepared.
Nick: This is the Aurene POP! As you can see, she is adorable and nice.
Rubi: We're taking a Funko Pop! break. So, I'm comfortable with this.
Lee: I'm sure Joko feels differently.
Nick: Probably.
Connor: Mm. He does.
Rubi: Does this work? Here she is!
Nick: I think it does, yeah.
Rubi: [Turns the POP! around] And her—there's the back of her head.
Connor: I really like these. They're kinda- they're insanely detailed.
Rubi: I do too. We're just doing this now.
Nick: I mean why not, right? I'm sure people want to see them.
Rubi: Okay, sure, what the heck. Who do we have next?
Lee: Joko.
Nick: Alright up next is Joko.
Rubi: I will be corrupted. I actually kind of dig how we did Joko. Okay, there. I'm positioning them over the Guild Chat logo.
Lee: Joko's very shiny, which I think makes a huge difference.
Nick: Yeah.
Connor: Yeah.
Rubi: I don't—okay, there's the back.
Lee: His animations in-game are also—
Nick: Rubi, don't forget to praise him.
Rubi: Praise Joko! Yay! Raise Joko.
'Connor:Did you show them his backside?
Nick: Raise Joko.
Rubi: Or A-Z-E. I did!
Lee: The weight of Rytlock in your hand.
Rubi: His little headscarf is great. Leave me alone.
Nick: Last but not least.
Rubi: Oh no, I just knocked him over.
Connor: You murdered him! You killed Joko!
Rubi: I'm so—again.
Nick: You put him too close to Aurene, and she was very hungry again.
Rubi: I'm going to need—Yeah I put him next to Aurene, now he's being—alright Connor, I'm going to need you to voice this for me?
Connor: I'm Rytlock. I have a sword. I do sword things.
Nick:: That was excellent.
Rubi: This is the back of Rytlock.
Connor: Logan why, why, why do you run away?
Rubi: Okay, thank you. Thank you.
Connor: I hate you.
Rubi: Wow!
Connor: Maybe... nevermind.
Rubi: That was a lot all the sudden. But yes. I don't remember who had this.
Connor: Sorry, Snargle Goldclaw novels are not canon.
Lee: Aww, Joko.
Rubi: Yeah, these are our Funko Pops which we've sitting here playing with and I just forgot because I was fidgeting. Yeah, these are our Funko Pops, anywhere you get your Funko Pops, and they come with the—all of them come with the code for the little in-game version of the Funko Pop. Which looks amazing.
Connor: They all have great animations.
Rubi: They did a really good job on those, so.
Connor: I need to get little Joko for my Joko character.
Lee: Totally.
Rubi:
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Note: The text below hasn't yet been converted from raw subtitle text into pretty print like above.https://youtu.be/-ZRYHgdaYa4?t=1811 |
oh that's right you have yeah okay that was I I forgot which of you said we should talk about these but now we did so yeah yeah yeah back to the episode jacquard back to dzhokhar sure yes so also that was our Funko pop break so I wanted to actually talk of two about the animation of jacquard bursting out of the ice okay because that looked fantastic also was that as much of a challenge or was that just a different kind of a challenge there was a different kind of challenge this one we had a little bit of a head start on from the effect standpoint because we were able to leverage a foundation of effects that we built for episode 1 as the burst out effect and then modify it and tweak it and recolor it a bit and to include more Drakkar elements and themes to it so it gets a little bit more GUI and a little bit more magical and and a lot more snow and icy but the the challenge was timing that effect to the animation so that they played seamlessly together and looked like one fluid event and that took careful communication back and forth with not only the animators but also the designers hooking it up okay I'm thinking about you talking about how it's your job to take the abstract requests don't turn them should I can you make it more dewy yeah well and that came out as the creature model evolved because we the first time we saw her car was in Guild Wars one from a far away distance right like you saw him frozen in the ice so what we had to challenge or the creature team had the challenge of sort of reimagining what your car looks like now and and one of the things that they leveraged was goo and decay and and and sort of play into that so from the visual effects standpoint we latched onto that as a way to help our overall ice theme effects stand out against a nice boss in a nice world with ice skills so that goo really helped give us some contrast and life yeah we need that in a world that is it is an interesting combination because you have this death and decay and I'm gonna have to say GUI because there's really nowhere no better way in the in this whole frozen in a world in the in the frozen ice boss world and that is that is a kind of a weird combination that you had to work with it was really weird and and that was a challenge because we're as artists we're trained to think about color theory and color balance and and and usually we're not gonna just try to make a scenario where everything is going to be blue and white because when everything looks the same nothing stands out and so that was a sort of our secondary challenge with this episode was for some stupid reason I thought of some twisted version of syndrome being when everything's I see nothing it also doesn't make sense still I see but whatever it's a great analogy but it doesn't pop right yeah you don't see you don't notice that if it just maintain that look and that goo well goos kind of fun to play with anyways it's gross and it gives it a fun unique texture and and that that that gave us the the darks and the black contrast that we needed to have the effects really pop off against that blue and white background yeah and it really really does yes so yeah your car's your car's got this oh yeah it's it's a fun encounter and it is a visual spectacle that took really all of the art teams and all the design teams working together from like the very first kickoff meeting we realized the importance that that we have to collaborate and we have to be able to respond dynamically in real time to to how this event was unfolding in front of us as we develop it this is this is the first time we've done a world boss in a while like we did the shatter but that was kind of a remix of the death Brandon cheddar but that was a remix of one we'd done so we weren't really working from scratch and the process of doing that and building that out and and and it's it's going to be an exciting chunk of content it is it's only because everyone worked together super super closely it's got a really nice flow to the entire experience from the end the moment you see the first shadow to the the final moment of that episode it's just it flows really well together and it's because of all the hard work of the artists and the designers coming together to yeah we should probably Cameron rich is the main designer yeah yeah Cameron this is gonna be out we're gonna talk about the episode a lot more in-depth on Gil chat next Friday with it's actually out and yes yes and we don't have to sit here and be like okay I can't I saw the things that happen there need yeah there's some stuff with Conan they do things there's ice oh yeah there's ice well can we say that though is there ice there's no ice actually I shouldn't let them know that this side of the map is like a lava field where there's and it's actually all cotton cane look so so we're gonna take go ahead and we'll take a few questions we have some time while we're getting that set why don't you get is there anything else that you guys want to let people know about next Tuesday without spoiling too much don't talk about the lava field oh if you you do not need to also own episode one to experience this map if I'm correct yeah so don't worry if you didn't get a chance to unlock episode one before it releases as long as you come in during episode two you'll still have access to the map usually you just will not have access to the storyline that's something to point out you know also please make sure to turn your audio on because my audio team Park definitely all absolutely amazing and beautiful and just like yeah the ambience that's going on around you is in the same yeah it is so so good yeah I mean at eyes the visuals and the gameplay together yeah just key without it okay alright um I will let you guys if you see a question you can answer I will let you guys jump on that just make sure you read the questions because they can't see that I can answer are we continuing the spooky themes the answer is yes I'm not gonna say much more about that but there's some I think we did some fun iteration on that we definitely had we had fun with it and we I'm trying to figure out the right words to say without giving things away we hope we think people are going to like it and it's gonna create some fun experiences when people are playing together yeah yeah is this retard boss the same dragon we saw under the ice until verse one yes does look different and there is some mild like there's some explanation for that yes but yeah it's same it's the same creature that has been around for forever do we want to touch on the raven armor set stuff which one the second-to-last yeah is the armor set based on achievements or orangie it's both right there yeah it's spread out throughout all the content yeah so there are some that can be unlocked through displaying through the game and some of them are drop chances from specific parts of the content within this episode yeah I mean one of the things that's kind of nice as we talked about because we had an opportunity to update all the episode 1 stuff we can really like there's just a lot of content to hope good - yeah Oh get your car swim in the frozen lake yeah that's a great question yeah how can you get your car to swim in a frozen lake which which have also frozen tunnels in it and is the lake fully frozen is how is he doing this Oh a really great question on answering any of that but smoke and mirrors yeah car is actually a cat because it's both liquid and us all at the same time you're not like I have two cats and you're not wrong so what does that mean I can get your car to show up in my home instance if I like so many of the dead birds that show up in your that's not true that is a lie yeah distance to the character relative size relative size compared to the shadow effect was a shadow showing distance to the character in the trailer the shadow is showing distance from the edge of the wall so you might see that the shadow looks maybe a little bit smaller than your car does sticking out and that is because when you play with the idea of how close we want your car to be to that edge of that wall and we decided to have when he's moving through the the walls we wanted to have a bit of distance so that way we can show off the full silhouette of his shadow if he was any larger you would only see maybe half of at any given time the the third and fourth questions are spoilers and we cannot answer those yeah I can I can answer the fifth though how map completion is gonna work for players who already explored the current version of the map which is we've got another thing near all of the interact points so if you've already gotten map completion you can there's basically another thing that's equivalent that that you can do both of them yeah yeah what a lot onto that is that it will still be an equal amount of investment for both people who have already done map complete and then go to those things and for people who are doing it all the same yes yeah yeah you're not gonna be working any harder if you haven't done it then you would forgetting normal map completion and these additional content I'm not really a question but I loved your Meg whispering to the player and joram arches map yeah it's pretty fun I love it and hate it it's so dear our community has definitely had a lot of fun with it then I think that's going to escalate with this episode but yeah the fourth question Connor you touched on that a little bit yeah the new I so the question is the new episode will expand the map but will it also improve alter already existing content we added we added achievements to some sub content that wasn't that - I'll just say we had so much in fences strike missions we did some other things we added again the trials of Kota fire off of existing events then some of those are in the episode 1 so like there's there's going to there are a number of things that we've touched we didn't touch everything but it was an opportunity for us to go back and look at some of those things I'm going to take the third question how hard is the Drakkar encounter I am so excited to hear your answer to that question because if you ask we've all played it if you ask each of us that question you're going to get a different answer from all four of us so let me know after you play it because I want to hear what you think to touch on the Raven gates question yeah read it out yeah it was in between the ribbon and like Chicago gates which actually I'm not really it's supposed to be jackal gates jackal because shackling I'm like because I thought maybe that was a question you can answer and I was like well I'm not going to put him on this [Music] the difference between the Raven and the jackal gates is that jackal gates are more so meant to kind of get you from point A to point B throughout the map like the decorator yeah yeah like shortcutting ley lines for example and you also need to be on your mouth yes and you also need to be on your mount the raven gates are more of a like lock and key sort of content type where you can use them to get to other places but they're also used to enter into places you wouldn't have naturally been able to go to along with that the raven gates will actually buff the character for a little bit time when they're utilized so when you run through one you're going to be getting like a movement speed boost and i think possibly some other yeah other additional things going a big thing that differentially different differentiates them from other you know get from point A to point B things that we've done in the past is when you open them you open them for everyone yes for a period of time so there's the thing where you can help out other players in the map right like especially when they're like a key moment right you could be like hey I open up this portal and everyone can go through and you get to be that person and - Thank You Conan for actually making that yeah there's not earlier another thing to touch on is that like for the rooms that they take you into that you wouldn't usually be able to access there are special Raven gates that are always turned on because they just have ever-flowing power and those were built so that way players who go into those rooms that do not have the mastery have a way back out yeah they don't forever yeah yeah I was just imagine going in there and there's like 50 people begging your guild mates don't like save you 50 silver can anybody does anybody have that last question because as a Jay Guild Wars one nerd I love that question it's like if you look at the map I think it's like the edge of the giant okay is the frozen lake the same leg that Jorah and spa near went to when they got cursed I honestly cannot I don't want to have narrative like kick in the door and tell me that I'm wrong I it is your car lake and your car is inside that lake yeah it seems it seems to require yeah I am pretty sure okay sorry for calling it out then I'm sorry like not like each of us has our our wheelhouse and not all I am 90% sure but also like I don't know forever like this is the exact same link okay like it's like actually cuts off over there on this imaginary line that we draw on the map it's nice to make fun of our narrative team I'm sorry narrative we love you doing okay are we good I think so yeah there any more questions yep if there are any more questions speak now forever which piece because we are wrapping up because we don't want to give too much away there are so many things we want to tell you guys this is hard but three and a half more days we're so close and everybody gets to play the stuff that you guys have been working on so hard and all of your teams and we definitely tried a bunch of new fun things with this episode and you know just because this is a continuation of another map doesn't mean that it's like just super super small like we have tried our best to include as much content as we can to make it feel like a full episodic experience and we hope that you know we nailed that for our players you guys have been working super hard we're excited to get you all in and play it play it let us know what you think and we will talk about a whole bunch more on next week's guild chat so thank you all good luck next Tuesday you all have fun next Tuesday if you have not unlocked episode one yet log in do that before next Tuesday and we will see you in-game thanks for hanging out with us babe thank you everybody [Music] you [Music] you you
