Guild Chat - Episode 99
Guild Chat - Episode 99
- Title
- Guild Wars Anniversary
- Host
- Rubi Bayer
- Guests
- Joe Kimmes
Matthew Medina
Andrew Gray - Date
- April 28, 2020
- Official video
- YouTube
The 99th episode of Guild Chat aired on April 28, 2020. Members of the Guild Wars 1 development team are on stream to talk about some of their favorite memories. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, participants joined via video conferencing.
Transcription[edit]
Guild Wars 1 development memories (6:55)[edit]
Rubi Bayer: Hi Tyria, and welcome to Guild Chat. I'm your host, Rubi. It is good to be back in our, in our own home, such as it were. Thanks to everybody who worked really hard to bring us back to you guys on livestream behind the scenes. We hope you're all staying safe and having fun in-game. We have a lot happening in-game starting today that I want to make sure you're all aware of.
We have items in the gem store for you. Free Living World episodes, an in-game boost to Magic Find XP, World Versus World, and PvP Reward Tracks. Progress on those. Path of Fire is half price and a lot more. Guild Wars articles on guildwars2.com for all of the details on those because we are celebrating Guild Wars' 15th anniversary both in Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2, and we've got Guild Wars 2 Welcome Back for players who are coming back and wanting to catch up. So, really you guys have lots to do and have lots of fun.
Today we're talking about Guild Wars' 15th anniversary. It has been 15 years since we launched the game. So, we're talking to some of the Guild Wars' developers who were there way back when and are still working on Tyria today. We want to thank you all for spending all of those years with us, and talk about those years bringing Tyria to you. So, why don't we have the guys introduce themselves? Joe?
Joe Kimmes: Oh Good, I wasn't stripping. Yeah, I'm Joe Kimmes. I was a content programmer on Guild Wars 1, and the content designer on Guild Wars 2.
Rubi: Matthew?
Matthew Medina: Yeah, hi. I'm Matthew Medina. For Guild Wars 1, I was senior 3D artist, and then I transitioned in the design for Guild Wars 2, and I'm senior content designer on Guild Wars 2.
Rubi: Awesome. Andrew?
Andrew Gray: I'm Andrew Gray. I actually started out doing the screenshots on the pack of the box for Guild Wars Prophecies, and then I made a transition into the design, and now I'm the content designer for Guild Wars 2.
Rubi: And you also share a birthday with Guild Wars.
Andrew: I do.
Rubi: That is incredibly extra. I mean, that is really above and beyond, but you do you.
Andrew: Yeah, it was nice because there is always a really special celebration in the office on my birthday. So, that worked out.
Rubi: Happy birthday.
Andrew: Taking everything. Thank you.
Rubi: Yeah. Yeah.
Joe: I forgot that you did the picture for the box.
Rubi: Yeah, that's so cool.
Andrew: Yeah, yeah.
Rubi: Thank you. All right, well, why don't we start by talking, why don't I have you guys talking about some of your early memories. I'm gonna read, what was it like way back in the beginning? And I don't care who goes first.
Matthew: I'll start.
Rubi: Andrew. No, go ahead.
Matthew: All right. All right. All right, we can go ahead.
Andrew: No, no, I think Matthew is the furthest one back. Let him start.
Matthew: Yeah, I'm the dinosaur one.
Rubi: Okay.
Matthew: Yeah, I mean, I will say seeing the genesis of this franchise from the beginning, it was incredibly special time in my career for a very small sort of scrappy studio. When I started I believe I was the 12th employee from that big first hiring push. And we were, there were about 20 of us at the start, all packed into two rooms together. Mo, Jeff, and Pat were all sitting with us, the founders of ArenaNet.
You know, we had sort of art in one room and programming and design were in another room. And so, it was just this very small, very ambitious sort of start to the company. We had the walls even at that time filled with artwork, maps, creature designs. Everything was sort of in our minds and on paper, but we just didn't really have it all together yet. We were still on the very early process of putting it all together. So, it was just very small, you know, really agile group of developers.
And we constantly talked to each other. We constantly played the game twice a week at seven o'clock every, you know, I think, Wednesday and Friday, I believe. We just, we stayed after and we all just loved playing the game together. It was just how we started. We just continued to iterate on that, you know, whatever we discovered in the play sessions during those first, call them all calls. We would then go and work on for that week and just continue, from the very beginning, iterating on a very constant basis.
And then we just kept growing and growing, and we outgrew that. From original space we moved into another larger space within the same office park, but then we quickly grew out of that, and we ended up in the big building that we're in now. But yeah, just seeing how big it's gotten from those early days is truly humbling to think about how much because of the incredible support and love we've gotten from players in our community. Because without you guys, we wouldn't have had a game.
You know, whenever you build a game, you're taking a risk whether somebody else is going to like what you're creating, and thank our players who enjoy the world of Tyria, and hopefully we'll be here for another 15 at least.
Rubi: Can I ask about some of the specifics? Do you remember what art was on the walls? That's always interesting to me.
Matthew: Yeah, we had-
Rubi: Is there any that stands out in particular?
Matthew: There was one mission that we had very early on that we all were sort of gravitating towards [?] we didn't really have what we call the Vertical Slice yet, but we had at least a prototype of the mission that we thought was the one that had the most legs, and it was called The Iron Witch. It was just a chop into the mountains to deal with this witch who was causing trouble.
And your party was sent up there to eliminate her. Back then we didn't have a whole lot of story development yet, really missions with goals. And so, that was the one that we had a huge map plot about. We had all kinds of concepts for her. I wish I had some of them. I don't know what happened to some of those things. I have some of the original napkin sketches but I don't think they'd be worth sharing. So yeah, I don't know, you were looking for something more specific for ...?
Rubi: Totally curiosity apart, I was wondering what stood out. But I will ask you about those napkin sketches later.
Matthew: All right. Cool.
Rubi: Because those are always more fascinating than you would think. I don't know.
Matthew: All right.
Rubi: Andrew, Joe, what about you guys?
Andrew: Well, yeah, I mean-
Rubi: Not napkin sketches. What were some of your early memories?
Andrew: Yeah, you do not want to see any of my art, trust me. So, like, kind of going off of what Matthew was saying, one of my earlier memories was also those 7 pm all calls that we had. Was it every day or two days a week? I can't remember, but, like, I was actually an alpha tester before I started working on that. On my 18th birthday I was like, "Okay, guys, let me in now."
So like, I definitely remember those early days. It is funny because for like, for the longest time even working on the game, I didn't even necessarily know the order that the missions went in. It was sort of later on that the sort of like flow of the actual golden path became apparent with the actual main storyline. And there are some things that ended up in the game that were in totally different places. Something like Rotscale, the Bone Dragon.
The dragon was in the Shiverpeaks at one point. It was down in the swamp in another point. It sort of bounced around, but that one creature pretty much from the earliest days I can remember. But then I remember some of the earlier things. I actually got into the alpha test shortly before we had the major revamp to our artwork, so I don't know if people had seen the early, early screenshots of Guild Wars 1.
It looks significantly different than the game that shipped. And so, seeing those early days with the bone armor and the stuff like that, it was a little bit more like cartoony graphics. And then seeing that slow evolution to the, sort of like more realistic slightly grittier look, that really sticks out as a great really memory. One of the biggest things that sticks out from working on Guild Wars 1 is just the pre-Searing area in general.
I don't know, I've talked about it but pre-Searing Ascalon was added pretty late in the development. Previously, you just sort of started the game in post-Searing Ascalon and you had a bunch of NPCs talking to you about how beautiful this place used to be, and you could tell they missed the beauty of their older homeland, but you never experienced it, you never saw it yourself.
And we added that pretty late, and it sort of helped get people invested in the world. We made you love the place, and then we lit it on fire because that's what we do, I guess. And I just remember the difference between the early parts of the game then and now are a kind of night and day. And then just seeing how people sort of like gravitated towards that area in general, the whole Legendary Defender of Ascalon title got added because people found a way to get to be level 20 in the tutorials basically.
At one point I even added missions or quests to let people level up a little bit more naturally in that area. So, I guess just like the evolution of the game is the thing that really sticks out in mind. And to think about how even late in the development significant change can be made like that, that changes the tone of the whole franchise even.
Rubi: Yeah, I did not know about pre-Searing being added late in the game. In retrospect [?] that, I'm so glad that that happened because that sounds thinking about that without pre-Searing sounds almost cruel like, "Oh man, there was this beautiful place you can't see it but it's gorgeous. You should've seen it. We burned it down before you got here." Thanks for getting that in there. Much appreciated.
How about you, Joe?
Joe: Yeah. I was just thinking about pre-Searing. I was hired right after Factions shipped, and I played the game, right when it came out, and so I experienced that firsthand where I didn't know there was going to be a Searing. Just doing my quests and moved forward and hanging out with Prince Rurik. Things were going great, and then things stopped going great.
I'm like, "Oh, we're in the post apocalypse now. All right." That would be really memorable. Let's say, so right when I was hired, Factions had gone out, everything had been fixed up with that more or less I think by the time I was being onboarded. So, we were diving onto Nightfall. I think, shout if I'm wrong, anyone else, Factions had been developed and came out about a year after the original launch. Nightfall was the first expansion that had the ... We'll make this expansion in six months.
And so, right when I was hired, we were hitting the ground running, and they were like, "All right. Here's the client. Let's get you set up. Start making some quests." And I remember jumping in and being in those new zones as they were coming together, and I had just played through Factions, and I was really excited to check out the new stuff. I go in the Vabbi areas where coming together you had these majestic cityscapes and floating gardens that they have.
Heh. Except at the time it's like 100% populated by these water buffaloes. They were a placeholder for almost every NPC. And at the time I was like, "Is this a thing? All the characters are buffaloes?" "No, we just don't have all the art yet."
Rubi: Just like placeholders, and what have we've got? We have water buffaloes. Just put them in there.
Joe: Yeah, I know there were, Emperor Kisu was also a lot of characters in the early Nightfall development.
Rubi: Well... okay...
Joe: The funniest thing for me was early on in Nightfall development, so little more back story. I started playing Prophecies, I got stuck in post-Sear because I didn't have a very good build, full-disclosure playing elementalist sub-warrior wielding a sword and a shield. And I think I had several pointblank AoEs, shield skills and whatever the warrior running skill is. So, that I will sprint in a combat, shield skills, start dropping pointblank AoEs, right? It will be fine. I had three points in every attribute.
Rubi: That's diverse.
Joe: So, I wasn't doing really well.
Rubi: Okay.
Joe: I wasn't optimized yet. I was figuring the game out.
Rubi: Excuse me.
Joe: I ended up focusing on college, fell out of it a little, got back into it with Factions. The point is, I never made it past the Shiverpeaks in Prophecies the first time. So, I had not seen the latter half of the campaign. So, during Nightfall development, all the Kournans, the Kournan army, they were placeholdered as White Mantle units. I was like, "These guys are cool looking."
Rubi: I know.
Joe: That must be the final work, right? Because they're not an Emperor Kisu. I was right. So, they changed later.
Rubi: So, you just kept getting all of these completely unfamiliar things, and going, "Well, I guess this sure is the thing that they're doing. It's probably fine."
Andrew: Yeah, buffalo expansion confirmed.
Joe: Yeah. Yeah.
Rubi: Okay, one of you needs to get a water buffalo somewhere in some upcoming content. I don't care what it is, but make it happen please. Just as a little shout out to Joe's water buffalo pun. I'd very much like that to happen, please.
Joe: Yeah. One other thing I remember was when I was running around for the first time, and like, "Oh, this is the next expansion, right?" And there was primitive loot that was dropping, and I killed something that dropped a spear. I'm like, "All right, a spear." I pick it up and it's a spiked shield. It's says it's a spear, but the art asset is one of those circular spiked shields. I'm like-
Rubi: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Joe: ... "All right." I can't remember if it will let you throw it at people, but it wasn't all quite in at the same time.
Rubi: I guess if you throw it straight and it impales itself on your enemy.
Joe: You can get like-
Rubi: ... right there, to me it's a little bit of a spear.
Joe: You'll get a spiral.
Rubi: Yeah, there you go. I'm trying to help you here, man. I like all your encounters with the placeholder art, and I worry that at some point people were just putting things in to mess with you.
Joe: Could've been. Could've been.
Rubi: "Let's see if he thinks this is real." I don't know.
Matthew: Well, you know, it's before we learned the hard lesson of don't put placeholder art that's somewhat finished because it will ship. We've probably shipped a few accidental ... Like, "Oh, yeah, that was supposed to be a placeholder." And then we finally got into the habit of putting pink squares everywhere. So, it's like that is an obvious mistake. We cannot ship with the big pink square. But yeah, it took us a little while to figure that one out.
Joe: [?] much later.
Andrew: Super Adventure NPCs also, they've become our go-to because Super Adventure NPCs tend to also make little beeping noises and everything like that. So, it is very, very apparent when one is in here, otherwise normal world.
Rubi: Oh, so, the Bee Dog.
Andrew: Yep, that's why in all the play sessions there's Bee Dogs everywhere. Yep.
Rubi: Okay.
Joe: Yeah, I remember-
Rubi: That explains why you come across that.
Joe: ... one that made it into the game that I worked on in Eye of the North, there's a part where ... Let's see, I think this is in Oola's story mission. You have to fight an invulnerable golem, and it's stated a couple times that this golem is invulnerable, because a couple players in all call like fought the invulnerable Golem for a while, right? It doesn't take damage, so the NPCs are now very behemoth about how invulnerable the Golem is.
To beat it, you've got to pick up these energy cores or something rather and drop them at its feet and it explodes and it does damage to it, right? It's implementing that whole section, and it's like, all right, the designer specified that there are these energy cores. You've got to take them here, bring them over to the Golem, drop them at its feet, they explode. All the design says is that the Golem cores can damage a Golem. I'm like, "Okay, how much damage?" I go, "All right, placeholder number. They do 1,337 damage." That's obvious placeholder, right?
Rubi: Yes.
Joe: I forget about it. I forget about it. Later at lunch I go over and up a Golem core, and it does 1,337 damage. I'm like, "Oh, they adjusted the Golem's hit points to make it take exactly two or three hits from these."
Rubi: Oh, no. I like that one. Okay, so Andrew, I have, you had left a note for me that I was interested in about some your memories about E3 in 2005-ish. Can I ask to remember it?
Andrew: Which one? The one ...
Rubi: The after party.
Andrew: Ah, yes. Yes.
Rubi: I want to hear your stories.
Andrew: Yes, so it's either 2005 or 2006. We were down at E3, and we had sort of after party thing where they had drinks that were deemed based on all the six professions. Five being alcoholic beverages, the sixth one, the monk, being the only non-alcoholic beverage. We wait for a while-
Rubi: Only have that one.
Andrew: ... and then at some point somebody realized that just like in Guild Wars 1, you could cross-class the drinks. Now, I don't know if this was intended for some drunk person just went up there and was like, "I want to be a ranger." And the bartender also was like, "Sure, buddy." And just mixed [?] a vodka ginger or whatever.
But needless to say, towards the later hours of this party. People were feeling pretty good, and at some point, I'm recalling who had the bright idea of throwing Jeff Strain into the pool as you do. Unbeknownst to any of us, Jeff and the other founders had gotten us all tickets to see Revenge of the Sith which was really new. This is how old I am by the way.
Rubi: Oh, no.
Andrew: And threw him into the pool with all of the tickets in his pocket. So, we all show up at the theater pretty drunk with doggy movie ticket and a soaking wet founder with us, and somehow they still let us in and watch that movie.
Rubi: Did you thank him?
Joe: That was the same night.
Rubi: That was, was he mad or-?
Andrew: He took it in good humor. Yes.
Rubi: I feel like, I'm picturing this go down in my head, and he's trying to stuff the Revenge of the Sith tickets in his pocket, and you're like, "Yeah, sure," and just in he goes. And he said, "No, here they are."
Andrew: I have to imagine, because this is well before the days that most cellphones were waterproof, so I'm assuming that this person had any forethought, they were like, "I have to find someway to make sure he doesn't have his phone in his pocket." They probably accomplished that not realizing that there were other potential things you don't want thrown in the pool.
Rubi: That were valuable.
Andrew: I would think your boss would be one of those things but, you know, for Ranger Warriors, who knows?
Joe: That was what I was going to say.
Rubi: Go ahead.
Joe: At some point when they're trying out a bunch of different professions then yeah, it all seems like a great idea.
Rubi: You say this person, but everything you're saying is remarkably specific, and I'm curious to who this person was.
Andrew: It was not me. I legitimately don't remember, because I was also cross-classing all night. I don't want to throw someone else under the business. I have a few suspicions-
Rubi: It's okay.
Andrew: ... just based on that behavior of who it might have been, but I don't want to-
Rubi: It's okay.
Andrew: ... just go around blaming people.
Rubi: That is completely fair. So, as long as we're on the subject for E3, I love your cross-classing story, and I feel like cross-classing is like a metaphor for partying now. At some point I'm just going to hang onto that. As long as we're on E3, will you tell your E3 for everyone's story too?
Andrew: Yeah, this one is shorter. Just that we have an event-
Rubi: [?].
Andrew: I think this is actually the E3 before that, that we did something that people hadn't really done before, I don't think, which is basically let everybody play our game during E3, so even people who couldn't go to E3 got the opportunity that people at E3 got to do, which was play new games that hadn't come out yet.
So, at the end of that event, we wanted to do something as a finale, but what we settled was summonning a bunch of giant worms in Lion's Arch and slaughtering everybody and then a nice firework show.
Rubi: [?].
Andrew: But that was one of my earlier memories because I actually took a video of that that we could probably find somewhere now that I think about, but yeah-
Rubi: Oh, man.
Andrew: ... and it was like right when we started getting some of the music in from Jeremy Soule, so it had some of his tracks in there and everything. It's really awesome.
Rubi: So, it sounded magnificent but it just ended in death.
Andrew: Yeah, pretty much.
Rubi: I like it.
Andrew: I feel like a lot of our earlier beta things it did that way. Like Guild Wars 2, in some of the earlier betas we basically turned what I think it's Blazeridge Steppes into open world PvP where we branded people, and then they were branded, and they were [?].
Joe: Oh yeah.
Rubi: Yes. I was-
Matthew: Yeah, one of my favorites-
Rubi: I was there for that. That was super fun.
Joe: Yeah, I remember-
Matthew: One of my favorites from Guild Wars 2 was-
Joe: ... holding out for the last minute.
Rubi: Joe, go.
Joe: I had practically said my whole thing but I will say a little more. I remember, this is Guild Wars 2 thing but in that beta event where we had the branded invading Blazeridge, and if you got killed by them you turned into a branded. It became like right as the beta servers were turning off, I think my character was like running from this giant pack of branded. And I'm like, "All right. There's no time left. The rest of you run or hold them off."
And I think I'm charging into this park because I was playing a norn guardian in that beta because I wanted to try out their cool form, right? So, I turned into a bear and I do the bear charging in and the servers shut down. It was very dramatic. I think that's like ...
Rubi: That's a good way to go out.
Joe: Who knows what, right? Yeah, it's that cut to black, and we rejoined the rest of the part, and they're like, "Oh, no."
Rubi: What happened? Did he die the way he would have wanted to?
Joe: Right.
Rubi: So, what were you saying, what was yours, Matthew?
Matthew: I was just saying similar to Andrew's story, one of the early beta events, I believe, had that sort of same ending but in this one we spawned in a number of ... So, if you're familiar with pre-Searing, if you're familiar with the character Gwen when she's a little girl.
Rubi: Yeah.
Matthew: In pre-Searing she was just following you around, and she skipped around. She's this cute little character just a really sort of vivacious little child.
Rubi: Yeah, I loved her.
Matthew: And so, at the end of one of the beta, the city just started filling up with Gwens popping up everywhere. And she would skip through the town and do her little dance. She'd play her flute and all the things that Gwen did. And then at some point she just started turning to players and said, "And now you die." She points them and they just started dying, and it would start raining fireballs down and everybody in. It was another one of those ha-ha-ha, we get to have a little bit of fun because we know that none of this is permanent, and we can do kind of a little bit of trickery from us devs to the players who made ...
Because really it was also a way for us to stress-test the server, but like what happens if we fill the city up with a bunch of effects? We want to see what kind of load that will cause us and get some metrics on it. We understand what we can and can't do from a technical standpoint, but I know there is a video clip out there of, in particular that I often watch actually still of this ...
There was a guild that was doing ... The necromancer in Guild Wars 1, their dance was the Thriller dance. And so, they had done these synced up Thriller performance where they are doing the whole thing, and Gwen started showing up while they were doing their performance and started nuking everybody while they were dancing and they were recording it for posterity and unbeknownst to them ended up getting something even more wonderful than just a dance performance.
Rubi: That's fantastic.
Matthew: A little piece of Guild Wars' history. Yeah.
Rubi: But to what you were saying, it's great that you got to do these cool things and have fun, and Gwen got significantly less adorable when she started murdering everybody, but you also got-
Rubi: Gwen the goremonger.
Joe: ... to get some testing in there. Gwen the goremonger. I heard of it. It was kind of prophetic. But you also got to get some testing in it, and it was practical, and it was kind of two fold. So, that was cool that you got to do that. Yeah. Do you guys want to talk a little bit about some of these things you worked on, especially if they're still in-game today? Because one of the cool things is seeing it, how they've changed over the past 15 years, or 250, 300, however many you're counting?
Matthew: Well, yeah, this is sort of following up on something that we talked about for 2, pre-Searing and how that did come in fairly late. I remember because of one of the projects that was on my plate as a prop artist in Guild Wars 1 was the Great Northern Wall of Ascalon. I built the entire prop set and we built it ... Guild Wars 1 didn't have the highest system requirements because we wanted it to be as accessible to as many different players as we could make it. So, we didn't have like super high-end requirements.
And so, our prop sets were built very judiciously with lots of considerations for mid range machines. They didn't have large, huge texture sets, and we had to get really cautious about our polygon counts. And so, it was a very deliberate piece to build that big of a set of props because how do you depict a giant wall with mid range set of textures? That was an interesting challenge. And I was pretty proud of what we ended up shipping, and towards the end of the development they were like, "And now you need to build a perfectly intact version of it using no more textures."
And almost like, "Well, okay, how do I do that?" And so, that was a fun challenge to have to be given in the 11th hour. But in the end I ended up refactoring a bunch of stuff, and it made both sets even better. But that's one of the things that now I still enjoy seeing in Guild Wars 2 is the ruins of the wall, and climbing up on that wall. They were able to do it in a way that I could only have dreamed to be able to do it. Now, it actually looks like the Great Northern Wall that I think we had initially wanted it to be in it.
And I'm not slamming the way that it looked in Guild Wars 1. I think it was fine, but when you take a huge leap in technology from Guild Wars 1 to Guild Wars 2, you can definitely revise it especially the way that we had amazing concept artists who were constantly pushing the envelop of what he could and couldn't depict in a game like this. And so, seeing the Guild Wars 2 version of that wall is also a nice humbling thing for me to see that that's still a huge landmark in our game.
Rubi: Yeah, the fact that it is the cornerstone to so many things. Yeah, the difference in what we could create in 2005 versus what we can create now has got to be enormous, and just looking at it, I think humbling is a good word, and-
Matthew: Yeah.
Rubi: ... you should be super proud of that. So, how did you guys-
Joe: Yeah, I always go back to that.
Rubi: Joe? Yeah.
Joe: Is it the first mission in post-Searing is the Northern Wall mission, go scout the charr and then run back to the wall as they're all chasing you?
Matthew: Yeah.
Rubi: Yes, my gosh.
Joe: That's like the iconic mission for me. We added a thing with the 10th anniversary to encourage players to go back and play some of those old missions during the anniversary event. That's what I go to do, for the Ascalon area.
Rubi: That one has, that mission has really strong memories for me. I remember that, and it seems like not a huge deal now because we've done so much as players since then, but I remember that heart pounding, am I going to make it? That was a fantastic mission. It's really, really good. So, what about you, Joe and Andrew? What were some of the things that you worked on back then?
Joe: Let's see. So-
Rubi: Andrew? Oh.
Joe: It's too late [?].
Rubi: Too late, you go.
Joe: Yeah. One of the things I know I was talking about before was the Hall of Monuments was one of the big projects that I worked on during development of Eye of the North where we had the Eye of the North, and you walk into the hall proper where you can set up all of your statues and make the revisions to your various deeds and display all of your most expensive weapons and armor sets.
On the programming team, we were building all of that, and we had put so much effort into it to ... There was new technology to display your statue so that you were modeling your armor sets and having all that traps that will be imported into Guild Wars 2. At the time we were kind of like, "Yeah, there will be a thing for it, right? We've got a plan for ... This will all get sent up to the servers and they'll pass the data and work somehow."
Over time, that came more and more together where we have the Hall of Monuments website that shows you how many points you have and what you're getting for each point. At the time I think I kind of just thought, "You'll all have Guild Wars and you'll get all this stuff." And then on the Guild Wars 2 site it actually became that you go back to the hall and it's all, not in ruins, but nobody has been there for 100 years sort of atmosphere.
It's overgrown and it's starting to fall apart, and it's all very empty except for ghosts of Guild Wars 1 characters. Going in there during the Guild Wars 2 launch and seeing that the area that I spent so much time zoning back into and testing things and checking the statues over and over and over again, it was really incredible seeing it [?] collecting the rewards that I'd earned. It really gave me that perspective of being in this same world hundreds of years later.
Rubi: Yeah. As a player, I feel like I'm like the baby of the group here, but I started playing Guild Wars 2, Joe, about when you started working on it. As a player at that point, the Hall of Monuments was a really exciting place to me, like filling it up and working so hard on it and seeing it in Guild Wars 2 was an emotional thing for me. I imagine it's 10 times more so with all of the work you're putting on it. So, A, thank you. Can I ask you to talk about the NPCs and the Hall of Monuments?
Joe: We'll see-
Rubi: Not just that one, but all of them. That-
Joe: There was kind of a tradition in the Eye of the North and across all of Guild Wars 1. There were a whole lot of NPCs named after various developers. Eye of the North is kind of the hotbed of them just because we started knowing that Guild Wars 2 is next, we were like, "Let's make sure everybody's got NPC somewhere."
Something I really, really appreciate to this day is that while we're working on updates to the Hall of Monuments to make it a while after, I don't know, ship we had to go back in as we started clarifying some of the details on here is how the calculator will work. Here is the items that you're going to get in Guild Wars 2. And we had to fix up some stuff like, "Okay, we now know that it's going to [?] all our stuff together just sent it to Guild Wars 2, right?"
But some players still want to have the individual character view of it to track like, "Hey, how far is my assassin on all this stuff? My assassin has these armors. My warrior doesn't." You're going to be able to see what's my full composited state, right? I added a way to toggle back and forth between here is your account view and here is your character view.
So, the time I made a NPC who is just named like Joe, because I was like, "I'm not a designer. I'm just going to placeholder something." When our designer went through later, they were like, "All right, we'll just rename this Kimmes The Historian." I was like, "Hey, cool. I finally got an NPC." So that was the character [?] some of the little Hall of Monuments. He hails stuff on your account.
And then my favorite thing was in Guild Wars 2, the designer who was working on that side was like, "All right, we're going to have these ghosts." Kimmes The Historian is again the character who was hanging on the hall and he dispenses your rewards as a ghost in Guild Wars 2. I think that's kind of unique having [?] named NPC across those two games.
Rubi: I like that he's there. That's extremely cool. Well, let's see. Solely on the-
Joe: I got to work on-
Rubi: Excuse me. Go ahead.
Joe: Okay. I got to work on Visions of the Past episode recently on Guild Wars 2, and we visit the hall again. Set up the Eye of the North NPCs again, and move all those characters around and try to remove the atmosphere of the hall the way it was. That was also really fun. Yeah, I-
Rubi: Yeah, all that is really nice.
Joe: ... worked on a couple of iterations of it now.
Rubi: Yeah, it's nice that it's persistent all of this time. Excuse me. Eye of the North and the Hall of Monuments, that all of those, so many of those are developers is a cool thing that it's good to see persist that long and hanging there. So, thank you for your work on that. Speaking of Eye of the North, Andrew, I'll ask you to talk a little bit about Logan Thackeray and his ancestry?
Andrew: Yeah, so actually me and Joe and Lindsey, who wasn't able to make it today, we all worked on some of the Guild Wars Beyond Content and sort of planted the seeds for Gwen and Keiran Thackeray's romance that eventually led to Logan Thackeray existing. So that was cool. I worked on the Hearts of the North content. So did Joe. That really cemented them.
I spawned their wedding. Joe did all the [?] for them. Yeah, that's definitely something cool that's persisted. I'd say beyond that, probably my favorite thing that's persisted across game is the Palawa Joko-King Thorn rivalry. I kind of took that to 11 with some of the Guild Wars Beyond Halloween content that we did. So when Palawa Joko came back as a character in Guild Wars 2, it was great to see that actually Joe who works on the festival concept for Guild Wars 2 sort of kept that bad blood between the two of them going, which is great.
Rubi: That's fantastic.
Joe: It's one of the oldest stories, right? Apparently dating back to, far before the player characters were saving the world, these two were bitter enemies. I think on Guild Wars 1 that was just a, we were like, "All right, let's add some more Halloween quests this year, or like what do we get? Do we want to do some stuff that's kind of Nightfall related?" And we were just like, "You know what? I guess if there's two undead kings, they must hate each other, right?
Andrew: Sure. Like [?].
Joe: And this all span out of that. It's like what does Palawa Joko think about Mad King Thorn? It's like they must really get on each other's nerves.
Andrew: Yeah. But I remember making a piece of content that took place in one of the underworld maps, because this is a while after we actually had map support on Guild Wars 1. So, we just like [?]
Joe: What map? Can ...
Andrew: And they just hurled insults back and forth to each other. It was pretty great.
Joe: Yeah, that is a classic map. What is it? I can't remember the name of it.
Andrew: Scarred Psyche is the name of it.
Joe: Scarred Psyche. There we go. I knew it was something good.
Andrew: Yeah, it's pretty great.
Joe: We put a lot of effort into that for-
Andrew: You did.
Joe: ... random holiday quest.
Andrew: Yes.
Joe: So, here's one of my favorite random stories about the game that happened because of that. So, Mad King Thorn in that mission in Scarred Psyche had credible skill bar, where because he's the king, he's running eight elite skills.
Rubi: Hey!
Joe: He doesn't care. There's no rules. He has all custom skills. Maybe he's got like giant stomp in there just for ... I don't know, but ...
So, one thing he does which I love is his heal that he'll ... Your goal in the mission is to protect him. So, if he dies, you lose. He has a self-heal that is a really large AoE steal. He will take half of your health to keep himself alive.
Andrew: It's a confused life, but involuntary.
Joe: Yeah. Yeah. You don't want him to die, so really he's just keeping up, but the thing I love the most is we had this running story in Halloween quests about making Mad King Thorn as an invisible crony, Mr. Gumdrops. In a much earlier quest point where one of his retainers is like, "All right, I'm sending you to go to this quest because I have to go groom the Mad King's invisible pony."
And you're like, "Yes, he certainly is mad. He's telling you he has an invisible pony." In the next year, at some we were like, "Yeah, let's have a quest where you have to go save the invisible pony. I know, it's canonical now. There is an invisible pony. It's not a figment of his imagination." And so, as things do, that kind of spiraled out of control. Eventually in Scarred Psyche, the Mad King has a skill to summon his invisible pony to aid him in combat.
And so, in effect, you cannot see the invisible pony. It's invisible. This triggered in-player discussions, like some of the strangest thought [?] such as invisible pony doesn't seem to have a model. Is this a bug? We were reading these reports, and they were like, the just... Maybe we're too subtle calling it the invisible pony? There was also our incredible, incredible player wiki.
It was a very brief frustrating discovery about how do we properly document the invisible pony? Because somebody posts a screenshot, and they're like here's a screenshot of the invisible pony in-game. And somebody is like, "This is a screenshot of a rock." No, well, you can't see the invisible pony. They're like, "All right, it's name plate in there so you can tell the invisible pony is there."
Well, normally for screenshots we don't have the name plates. They eventually figured out a plan for properly documenting the creature. But yeah, so that was quite an adventure building all of that.
Rubi: ...
Andrew: I don't know if it's working.
Matthew: I don't know.
Joe: All right. Yeah, it sounds like Rubi is having some [?] and so she's going to work on that. I don't know, Matthew, you want to talk about something for a bit?
Matthew: Yeah, sure. I will say I don't remember [?] on Guild Wars 1 I was really not super keen on story narrative as much as I became once I moved into design, but I definitely got into the weeds on a number of [?] being alphabets, languages. We initially didn't have any sort of plan to have a readable or a translatable language. We had a bunch of [?] and there were these symbols that were put on through various reasons just to make it look like there was writing in the world, but we didn't actually make an attempt to do anything about it.
And then eventually after talking to Jeff Grubb and Sean Sharpe and a couple of other folks, they were like, "Well, if somebody on the art team wants to take a stab at making an alphabet, we'll support it." So, I was like, "Well, yeah, I'm a huge language nerd on some levels." I was very enthused about the possibility, and I put together ... I actually took one of the languages that was already in the game, and I just adapted it.
So, instead of being [?] started to actually mold it into a simple, you know, one for one translation of English to what we ended just calling Common Language, and then eventually became Krytan once we moved it into Guild Wars 2. But for Guild Wars 1, we basically just had a couple different alphabets that we used for various things. And with Eye of the North, I think it was the first time we started using Asuran. So, they'd come in over time but I was super enthused about that.
It's one of those things that it's a pet project. That's another thing that I'm happy to see continue to be supported, and I don't know, maybe I'll put another language in if I can convince enough folks that we want to do that.
Rubi: Okay. I think we actually fixed our audio issues. Thank you, Matthew for covering me.
Matthew: Awesome. Yeah.
Rubi: Welcome to trying to figure all of this out [?] right?
Matthew: Yeah.
Rubi: So. All right, we are getting a little bit to the end of our hour, but I would like to ask if each of you guys could give one more memory about early things that you worked on in Guild Wars 1 that are still in the game today. Place or a thing or a person. Place thinking is still hard.
Andrew: Yeah. This is kind of-
Rubi: [?].
Andrew: ... a reverse. This is probably one of the only situation where something in Guild Wars 2 led to something in Guild Wars 1. We had the April Fool's fake announcement of the commando profession. After we announced that for Guild Wars 2 Horia Dociu is like, "Hey, you could import the commando model to Guild Wars 1 if you guys think you could do anything. Wait for it."
So, we ended up making a time travel quest, where you go back in time with a time traveling commando who [?] son's mother, Sarah, from a time traveling robot. That may sound familiar to you, but-
Rubi: But not too familiar.
Andrew: ... we continued that ... Yes, not too familiar. No. That was the annihilator quest, and then layer two was added the next year. And then years later, when we were working on Jahai Bluffs, which was a map where the very fabric of reality was falling apart due to Kralkatorrik shenanigans. There is a very, very low chance that probably it ended being a higher than it should've been chance. For a commando-
Rubi: It's fine.
Andrew: ... to pop out of a mist rift, say, "We're in the wrong place," and then pop into another rift, and rapidly disappear.
Rubi: That's fantastic. That is so good. So, I ...
Joe: The annihilator quest was really like the apex of Guild Wars 1 quest design. We had a lot of specialized technology to make that quest work. We don't really have as much of like transforming the character or having the character [?] much less higher than the character throw grenades. There were a lot of experimental things that we think to make that happen.
Rubi: It seems you've worked out well.
Joe: We got careers, right? [?] out of it.
Rubi: No, that's good. So, the commander popping through Guild Wars 1 on April Fool's day with helicopter showing up, I was not here yet. I was still on the, I was working on the press side, and I remember watching Joe yelling in map chat of that. So, Joe you made a huge impression. Thank you. That was awesome. How about you too?
Joe: See, I was trying to think of something as early as I could, but I'll probably talk a little more here about Palawa Joko because when we were working on Nightfall, I think his quests and [?] involving him out in the ... Is it the Desolation? No? It's Crystal Desert and the Desolation. Anyway that was one of the later things we were working on. I was initially working on a quest we were doing, I think Bobby and then Conner.
And he wasn't a super pivotal character in the game's storyline. He's important but being the evil overlord, he's not actually the main villain, and setting all of his quests and stuff up in Nightfall was just ... It was such a strange experience because I kept asking the designers, "So, are we going to fight this guy?" You work together with him and he kind of helps you out because the fate of the world is at stake and he lives there too.
And it ended up being such an interesting and funny character where you work with him out of necessity. So, he's telling you pretty much the whole time like, "Yeah, I'm probably going to go back to conquering the world after this, but I know that you are on this god slaying adventure, and if I actually provoked you into fighting me that'd probably end up bad for me, so I'm just going to hang out here and give you quests."
He was a very canny character that way, and I like seeing both that he made it, that plan worked for him. He made it all the way to Guild Wars 2, and then kind of the payoff where the people of Guild Wars 2 have to live with some of those consequences.
Rubi: Yeah, that's not always great, but we try.
Andrew: I hear you [?] too.
Rubi: You, Matthew?
Matthew: Yes, so the only other one that I know is really special to me is I was able to work on the Temple of Ascension at the end Guild Wars ... Not [?] but at the point in which you are moving to another level, you get to level 20 and you have to ascent to be able to see spirits and move on to battle the titans later but there's that pivotal moment you have to fight your doppelganger inside the Temple ofAascension.
That was the biggest prop with the most assets I've been asked to build in Prophecies. I had to work directly ... Not had to but I was given the assignment and worked really hand in hand with Daniel Dociu, our art director on the look, and we got really into what this would look like and how would the gods have built architecture or how architecture inspired by the gods look.
We were still not quite there at building some of the Mist maps, so this was first sort of [?] prototype for that stuff to look like. So, I worked directly with him on the stuff. We got really into the weeds in terms of I was always a super nerd on anything I did, and so I was sending him links of you know, about [?] and how everything in nature and art is using this sequence of numbers that I won't bore you with here, but if you want to you can look it up, Fibonacci sequence.
It's a big thing in art, where a lot of the old masters try to represent that. And so, we put a lot of that into the design of that prop set. And so then obviously we didn't have Elonian Noble until we got to Path of Fire in Guild Wars 2. But being able to see that resurrected and that we got to go inside again and see how the artists had reinterpreted it and re-envisioned it and how close it [?] to hte design was another thing that we were just like, "My gosh, I can't believe that we're still here and we get to see this incredible place."
Of course, it's all branded up now and walled off, but when that does open up, and you get to explore inside the Ascension I just love hanging out in there, and love that the designers ended up hooking up that really amazing collection of the flames you throw, prophecy, and spend a lot of time in there. It's open.
Rubi: That's awesome. Thank you, Matthew.
Matthew: Yeah.
Rubi: Thanks all of you for the past 15 years. This has been fantastic. And Matthew, I think you set the best to another at least 15.
Matthew: Yeah.
Rubi: And hopefully more. Thanks all of you. Happy birthday, Andrew. Happy birthday, Guild Wars.
Andrew: Thank you.
Matthew: Happy.
Rubi: Thanks all of you guys for hanging out with us. What words for G3 you'd like to leave with us?
Joe: Yeah, well, thanks everyone for watching. I hope everyone has the chance to go check out the 15th anniversary content in Guild Wars 1 and Guild Wars 2. Yeah.
Rubi: Yeah.
Andrew: Yeah, thanks for playing. Make sure to go get your pre-cape and stay safe.
Joe: Oh yeah.
Rubi: Yeah.
Matthew: Yeah, I will just say thank you guys for amazing 15 years support and you know, this game and all of us wouldn't be doing what we do without all of you guys playing game with us and giving us your feedback and telling us what you love, what you don't. It's an amazing experience to be able to work on this and build this world with you guys. So, thank you very much for that. Happy birthday, Guild Wars. Hopefully you'll all enjoy your free stuff in-game, and we'll see you some other time.
Rubi: Yeah. Thanks very much. Stay safe. We appreciate you so much, and we will see you next time. Bye.
