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Transcription Chaos Space

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https://youtu.be/HE1C9t8dHIA?t=1967 Guild Chat - Episode 85

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that was something that I think a lot of players were really interested to know more about how we decided okay arenas gonna have her own voice this is how she's going to communicate with us what were those conversations like well I mean the first thing is our dragons have spoken frequently right and particularly glint and blast both of who are relatives of yeah Vereen spoke thank you for breaking my heart with Flast by the way I appreciate you hurting me I know suzune and and so it seemed but we hadn't yet had Irene talk I don't know that that was even necessarily a conscious positive act of choice we just hadn't done it yeah we were trying to figure out when it should happen and under what circumstances and the thing that's always true with Irene is she is and I hope this gives some context also to why we made the choice to bring her back the that Irene is utterly unique in the world of Guild Wars - right she is a dragon like has never existed before she's been raised from an egg by people by mortals she understands mortals and the value of mortals in a way that I think it's safe to say the other Elder Dragons that we've seen do not and even flint and glass to some degree I think don't have the same glow sorry the blasters are blasts blasts I don't necessarily have this the same sort of degree of understanding and and empathy with them that that Irene does well I think last address that a little bit yeah that's right he never got the advantage of that connection yep and and so for us that's a key part of why Irene can be who she is and do what she's going to do and speaking directly to the to the factor of reviving her Irene is a very very important character in our story now and moving forward I can't I'm not gonna say more than that but important enough that Irene was not a character we could allow to stay dead we weren't going to do that and so so then the question was okay well you know what what is the right time for her to gain the ability to speak right and and we figured I think that it could be that it could be a bit of a gradual process which is why we had her brand cave in Episode four and and become you know gained the ability to speak foreign basically what she's doing sort of taking ourian's motion alone pression x' and she's putting them into words and some players have wondered why we didn't sort of stick with that for longer and that's a legitimate thing to wonder about because I think at the time we probably assumed we would but what we came to realize when we started planning episode six was oh wait we're gonna have this long sequence where you're chasing Crockett or writing or een and Kate's not gonna be there and we did not want to have you unable to communicate in any way or habitat more to the point to have our een unable to communicate with you that didn't make any sense at all and so the story that part of the story sort of forced us to move more quickly I think otherwise we might have waited until after she ascends to do it but but but we needed her to be able to do it for this episode so we said okay she's gonna come back with that ability and it is a little too bad because I would have liked to see Kate be her her voice for a little longer perhaps you know but sometimes your hand is forced and it doesn't necessarily mean that she won't still you know sir that kind no that's absolutely true that connection she has with with Arrhenius very specific and clear that's true and I don't think I mean I think the the the crystal bloom coming back to cave at the being the episode shows that that's not gone away and her brand didn't go away right she kept the brand was still there even when was it yeah in the epilogue we actually made a point to mention that Kate still has this connection to or eans you know directly to or eans emotions and feelings yep persist yeah so speaking of flying with Irene for 15 minutes that kind of takes us on farther into the story and I want to talk a little bit about that and just the just the impact of getting up there with Orion flying along and trying to take out her own grandfather was there was there was a lot to there was a lot to unpack there for sure um starting with the fact that she calls him grandfather yes which a lot of people reacted to I don't remember who that was but I yeah I don't know whose idea was exactly but I know that the moment it was suggested the room got very excited about it it was we were trying to come up with something for her to say yeah when she attacks Crockett or ik and you know slaps him across the face knowledge and was that was an impactful moment I think that's right and and we were always aware of that I mean we I mean I think maybe glint doesn't say it specifically but but she certainly refers obviously to Irene as as her child and so there's I mean you all you have to do is do the math right and and and it's possible that it was actually the writing of the last chapter that may have been fluence that because when we decided and we can well we can talk more about this in a while but when we get to that part but but when we decided that Crockett or equation not just a rabid shark and that we wanted him to be a person are one of our sort of slow changes to the to the the world over this season has been dragons are not crazed wild animals with no rationality they are they are actual people and Arion has our window into that that's how we that's how the commander and ever but he else knows it because now they know our een they know a dragon away they never knew one before and so when we realized we wanted to pardon the term humanized croc at work a little bit that clearly was awaited to begin to do that and that was a that decision to humanized Crockett or ik and we can speak to that a little bit more later on because that was a question that a lot of players have was how did how did you come to that decision and it is it is part of a larger part of the stories yes that takes us to knocking Crockett or out of the mists and dragon fall which the map we're going to address in a little bit here with a couple of our other deaf guests so hang out of that one I do want to talk you had mentioned talking about reiterating this Crockett orc fight and how this could have felt like episode 5 all over again and something that I do want to address because Kevin you worked on that final instance and one of the things you mentioned seriously one of the things that you mentioned as a designer was wanting to make this feel as impactful as epic as awesome as the episode 5 Crockett org fight but not rehashing yeah that was a big concern that was a big concern when we realized that we would actually be not just fighting Krakatoa but killing Krakatoa in this episode it's like well and we just kind of did that and lost and it was an amazing fight like that fight with Krakatoa in episode 5 was it's fantastic it's so good and so I oh yes I was sitting there the same thing oh this is so amazing yeah what are we gonna do so it was very important to create to create a fight that did not even that did not attempt to overshadow in chapter 5 a totally different kind of fight completely different a fight how do you have the idea for the aspects of the of the other gods and Dragons and so that kind of went in a number of different directions through the course of iteration and originally we wanted to show we only want to use them just as pure mechanics of fighting but here are these things that are just inside of them and you just need to deal with use it against him just do the magic as more of the as more of the narrative started to come together with crack fighting with himself then suddenly it became what if these are also pieces that are fighting amongst themselves within him so that's really elegant I hadn't thought of it that way that's cool it kind of grew out of a collaboration with with a neo a lot it was the big crock writer yes yeah yeah that final instance was his yeah his big is big but he was he was the the lead on the project and so you know it was a phenomenal sort of collaborative environment not just between him and Lily and the rest of the narrative team but with design as well every single gameplay moment had you know that's sort of that sort of marriage of design and narrative that we wanted to that we wanted to hit which is really important to us like it's it's we we love narrative that's divorced from gameplay or vice versa that when they're integrated thoroughly and they're supporting each other it's it's just so much of a better experience so we work hard to try to do that yeah something that you didn't necessarily have we have we have this luxury of good narrative throughout our game which I absolutely love not that Tom does anything impaired but you had you had less of that to work with and that you had a lot to convey with not a ton of dialogue did you even start it it started with it started with the the pillar that it was going to be inside of Craig and it was going to be it needed to feel like that this is a metaphysical space that was both in reality but not in reality at the same time and we needed to we needed to come we needed to have game play that really played on this bizarro world that you found that the player finds himself in and as interesting as that may sound being handed a cult a nearly completely blank canvas like that and just do it it's terrifying it is it was it was very terrifying and as a matter of fact the final instance was the was the last one to get approved because it went through so many iterations yeah many many different versions of that final instance went through the ringer before we finally landed on what we did the other thing too though I mean the choice of setting it inside Krell Couture which leads to that both real and and abstract space thing which is which I love which is so trippy but which created problems before is that the at the end of it like that's born to of what you were talking about before in the sense of in order to make it different from Episode five you know what what is different about Crouch is in Episode five he's he's you know he's got a lot of strength and power until he gets his head stuck in the key basically right but in this we knew from the beginning that you know midway through or at the end of the first instance basically I mean he's he's down pinned down chunks of islands pulled from the myths and all that stuff and and and he's definitely down for the count we've got a we've got to finish it but he's we've at that point we've accomplished a lot of what we needed to write and so I can imagine the the challenge that it you know presented you guys with okay what do I do to make that interesting a dragon couldn't really fight back that were right right yeah yeah and it was almost like a counterintuitive because you would think as crowd as he would be spending more and more energy to fight you off what little energy he has logically that might seem that then the deeper into it you get the easier it wouldn't but that's not that's so that's not good gameplay no and I think the solution is really brilliant and I don't remember when we all decided that it did need to be a space that wasn't exactly representational of reality but maybe just goes along with I'm going into an elder dragon who's as big as Manhattan right and and and we sort of I think we all sort of liked the idea there was a lot of discussion frankly of at least you know in our room in the writers room about 2001 and everything that happens from from the when Dave goes into this to the Stargate basically to the end of the movie where he ends up in that weird Luca tours French hotel room with the mind right like like we and I think that that sort I think that that was a big influence on our thinking just in the sense of it doesn't have to be a thing that you totally understand and it doesn't have to be a thing that's that's naturalistic it can be it can be imagistic and representational and evocative of mood and tone and which is why you can get to what we call Crockett orcs heart and it's a big glowing ball it's nothing that actually looks like a heart or it just doesn't seem to be functioning exactly that way but it is as they say in the in the episode the the core of his power right yeah yeah the heartbeat you commented that the heartbeat was something that you could use to contextualize oh yeah there was there was a lot of at one point there was a lot of dialogue in that beginning sequence in the instance where we are explaining lots of exposition right explaining explaining explaining suddenly we were like you know there's just there are too many words how can you get the same message across with fewer words yes and I'm this happened in the writers room so I wasn't there for this so I don't know who originally came up with the idea but the this idea of the heartbeat being this conveying this information of he's not only is he still alive but we can see how hurt hurt he is by the by the how fast and slow it is we can give that momentary feeling of oh we won by it's stopping and then having it start up again spontaneously and having everyone react to it and so with the heartbeat and a few gasps we managed to convey the same as we were trying to do with like 15 minutes of dialogue yep it could have been audio could have been could have been Kristin and Jason that may have been their idea but but I mean one of the things that that from our point of view that motivated that is and this is a thing for anybody who is you know aspires to be a game writer or screenwriter for that matter because it's a it's a guideline that comes from a screenwriting but something that we talk about all the time on our team is unless you're Quentin Tarantino or Aaron Sorkin fewer words are better just are there's no way around it I hate it because I overwrite like crazy and and I love writing dialogue too and you know hearing people talk and it's especially if it's exposition it's like I mean you may as well just cut your head off it's it's it's a hard and fast rule and and so we're always pushing to try to call and and make things more concise and boil stuff down so that every word is doing a lot of work and and carrying a lot of information on its own and is not in any way superfluous that's a just a general rule we aim for so all right so I want to get to the grand finale huh of the finale yeah this is this the end of the beginning because we also we have a couple more things to talk about and then we have a lot of questions and then we have another segment this show is never going to add it's gonna feel chap marathon marathon we're gonna be like rivaling we were talking about endgame we're gonna be like rivaling it so let's talk about the Ascension we need a new room every time does it just crashes through so is that is that the is that the end that you always knew was coming for this season yes probably I mean I certainly certainly by episode three we knew that would yeah arena Sims yes in general yes we knew what that was what we wanted yep the actual how it would happen now yes that that was more like we had stuff to plot out but we knew that that's how we wanted the season to end we wanted to end it on an uplifting note but also there are these little these little these little moments that maybe you know maybe pull that back a little bit like no dragons meant to contain that much that much right well there's a mystery there there is mystery about what she's become and what our relationship is going to be with her moving forward right and and there's an arc that this season especially has largely been about for both the commander and caithe of n for een of of Irene's adolescence and her going from being a baby through the process of being a teenager to finally becoming an adult and her parents the commander and Kate have to come come to peace with letting her go and I know for Neil and and for me and and Armand I think we're the three of the people I can't think of anybody else who goes Oh Bobby um who has kids but for those of us who have children none of us have grown children yet but but we can see that day on the horizon and I think we related to that for sure and and so we knew that was sort of our eanes arc for the season we knew by the time we were into episode three the very bare bones of the story we wanted to tell beyond this season we weren't sure exactly then what form it was gonna take we didn't you know we hadn't we hadn't necessarily figured out exactly what our content model was gonna be post season for might be an expansion pack might be we didn't you know we didn't know we didn't know that stuff then we those things are still to be decided but but we have a sense I'll just say we have a sense of where this story is going for quite some time and we are Julia said last week nothing we no choice we make is by accident I don't how many people caught her saying that but I loved that she said it because it's really true yeah we are planting seeds for stuff that won't get paid off until be are lucky enough to have the time for a while and hopefully as they do pay off that that the fact of their having been planted so long ago and come to fruition over a longer period of time will be something that's really gratifying to people that's that's what we angle yeah and that's that's something that I've enjoyed watching us too in the past and that I'm enjoy watching in process now we plant these story seeds that get paid off over it is such a long game the whole way and it it feels amazing to just sit back and watch sorry I mean you know just just just to pick one detail out the people that we I was surprised so many people like latched on to because frankly I expected it to go Shh yes just before he dies crowd Catholic says mother what does that mean yeah I'm laughing because so much of what you guys are all saying I'm like oh there's a question for that yeah yeah yeah and and like we were saying for if you you know if you go if you go that he doesn't say that for no reason and if you listen to that part and listen to what's going on orally yeah you know you might be able to pick up some clues yeah alright so i Kevin you have some bugs that you worked through that I wouldn't talk about because they're a fun room and the best yeah and simultaneously the one I hate oh it's so good all right give us context all right so picture it Cecily [Laughter] so I come into work one morning and is crying Napoleon's army is wreaking havoc across Europe and I fire up our tools to start the day's work and I am greeted with with this bug and it made it absolutely unbearable to just could not work that day it was it at least not with headphones on so with that let's go to the tape I don't know about you two but I feel like I could outrun a center for some reason there was an audio bug that caused the first line of every dialogue to continue to play over and over and over it didn't stop anything else replaying what the whole rest of the dialogue would still play sometimes it was contextual but the first line would definitely repeat over and over and over stacked on top of the next one stacked on top of the next one and then even though the automatic ones like the the sprint response I can't run a centaur just over and over and over couldn't stop it Oh uh-huh everyone in the others like new in that line especially I love everyone who does our PC human female but that line to my ear frequently plays in context where it really isn't appropriate and and so to hear it that sort of taken all the way to the extreme in that bug like freaked me so what it's it's obviously not still there correct although I do feel like I hear that light as often and I like that we had we had Alex noticed I think we had the special little robot voice we had robo voices yeah her voice is really good actor yes what pronoun it pronounces croc toric is crop a lyric which is rights that feature a lot of our names in path of fire the alonein names were just oh that's right connect yep I have said this before but way back when we had like the echo my defenses are in lionsearch there's and you were arguing with like Balthasar's and he had one line where his line was just and here he met a robo voice was one of the joys of my life it likes to spell Joe sometimes sometimes it will try to do that but sometimes it'll just be like pp8 PPF yeah yeah I mean what yes really yeah in my instance where the where you walk into the ley line room and you see all three ley lines and luck is like oh here's ley line oh and another and another well with Robo voice he goes and another a and D another what is he drawing it out it's yes if it's connected to an ellipsis that's exactly what it is Oh ellipsis he spells it out we need like a best-of Robo voice oh my gosh it would be an excruciating just bugs but just factors of the development of this episode like temporary textures on Krakatoa in yeah in the flying chapter oh yeah before he got final chapters before he got his skin he had you know this you know this this rainbow sort of pattern on him with little numbers and everything for the final for the final texture and so you're just flying find this you know fight this like you know five mile giant you know Raymond dragon though it looked like a paint-by-numbers book it was it was fantastic majestic if you will what I want that screenshot later I'll give it yeah there's a screenshot if people have never seen you know stages in the game development process that kind of polish comes in really late looks like crap yeah we've showed some of the development stuff here on the show and I mean it goes all the way from like crummy whiteboard drawings so like really terrible paint messes oh shoot I know that's what you wanted I could have sent you a bunch of mark is giving like huge thumbs up behind by this table yes we wouldn't if you have if you like scrolled something crappy and paint I will give it to me this is what I want yeah there were there were little bugs for the conversations in the open world where when you go speak to the the head of a camp these little contextual boxes will open up and depending on which step of the meta you're on they will have different responses for you but I had to script them myself for reasons don't you do it wasn't so much what I did it's what I didn't do I didn't have conditions for all of them which meant that when you would talk to a character every single one of the meta avid like one of those conversation pads would be there simultaneously so you'd go talk to a character and just be like can I help can I help can I help you look like a very overeager commander and you know I think the first book I guys like there are all these options to help but I'm like yeah I know I scripted them and then I saw the bug like I didn't script I will find out who did that immediately yeah so what was what was the highlight working on Episode six for you and you guys have this question coming so be thinking okay oh my goodness I think the highlight the highlight was in watching all of the streamers played through on opening day i sat through a lot of I had a couple of windows open and watching different streamers play through it and seeing their expressions as they as they did everything it was that that was that's the payoff you put in all months of hard work and then to see the joy on people's faces as they expected to experience it for the first time that's it is it it feels amazing and that's what we've talked about before and I've said that before when I'm when we've had you know something is delayed or something is we have to pause something for a second or we have to kill switch something and like we are that is all we want we are dying to get this in front of you all this is this is why we're here is to get this in front of you so seeing all of you I mean we're all sitting around watching streamers we're watching people play it and we're listening to reactions and something that I have done a couple of times is share around with the teams all of like the the various social media and forum reactions and stuff and because it is an absolute joy to see to finally get it in front of everybody yeah so yeah that's a huge highlight for me too I had a brief online chat with her or PG on Tuesday yeah and and and she said oh it's it's it's so it's such a blast to to know that the devs are watching my stream and I said well listen believe me it's at least as we a blast for us to be able to watch people react to what we've done because you don't get that in any other medium except live theater right you make movies you make television shows you write books whatever you know any other creative entertainment medium we don't get to watch people receive the work that we do in real time in real time and and to have streamers that we can watch doing that for me is a joy I've never had it before I worked here and it's just delightful you just reminded me of something when we did we did that compilation of streamers reactions for episode five at the end oh that's right and we started pulling together we were pulling together different clips and things and I started asking around I was like hey if anybody has something good that they saw like if you were watching a particular streamer let me know and I was like I don't know if I'll really get anything but you know we could use the help because we're on a pretty quick timeline and everything like throughout the company stuff was pouring in everybody had somebody that they wanted to share everybody was just like oh my god yes I've been watching streamers all day and this is amazing you have to look at this one and this one and this one and this one and everybody had just been clicking all over the place where you know and just everybody was so excited and it was like that for this - it was but for the end of five ever we had I don't know if maybe was just internal but somebody did a little compilation video of people see me watching the end which it was not we showed it on the show yeah it was so cool yeah it was so good I think put that together that's right lucky for us so was that if so that was a good answer doubt that would be a fine answer for sure I think I think that my answer has more to do with the fact that and I think we talked we talked to morphus Lee a little bit about this last week we didn't get into details because we because we couldn't yet but that this episode was a particularly difficult birth in the sense that for for the narrative team at least dialing in specifically things as I've said like like tone and and figuring out we've built up over so long not just one season but there are things you know from since Irene was an egg we're paying off stuff that that's a couple seasons and a couple of expansion packs old at this point right and and and there's a lot of stuff a lot of big stuff we know that we have to accomplish which is why you know some of the streamers are going whoa re just got revived and now I'm flying on a bag and I'm chasing around still in the first cheddar what the hell you know which is yeah we have a lot of stuff we got to do here today that we built up to and and episode 5 also it wasn't as difficult to birth certainly but it was it was big right there's all durst I mean obviously the last 45 minutes especially or just like he had to play it four more times than you want Jo sure and and and so for six figuring out how to stick the landing was just something that for whatever reason didn't ever seem like it came easy for us it was a thing we really every day in in the writers room we were working over material and talking about it and trying to figure out why we didn't think it was working and and and you know Alex and lily and Neal did drafts up on trial and drafts of especially this the scene at the beginning with our ena and also the the stuff at the end inside Kralik I'm trying to get that just right trying to make sure there's not too much exposition trying to figure out how do you how can we be abstract in that sequence and yet not make people go what the hell are you doing right and which is one reason to be perfectly honest that we have Irene say I don't know what's about to happen I can't I can explain it to you but I want to share it with you because we knew if we tried to explain it it wouldn't make any sense Irene is becoming an elder dragon that's all that you need to know everything else is straggling yeah and so so weirdly enough though the fact that it that it took such hard work to sort of for the narrative part of it to emerge and really get nailed down and be what it needed to be in the process amazing work an amazing leveling up of writers that I watched not just Alex and Lillian Neil although certainly for them too but everybody in the room because one of the great things about the process that we have developed is it constantly is making everybody in the room better including me and boy what an incredible gift that is I've been searching my whole career too a way to do that really because I always used to tell people you've heard me say this but that that that I wish that I could take my experience as a reader in Hollywood a script reader and for two years and bottle that and give it to writers because that's the single thing that that was the best education for me was reading other people other writers bad screenplays and seeing them make mistakes that I was making too but now I could be objective about it and going oh that's why that doesn't work right and our writers room process that we've we've developed that on a daily basis for everybody in the room and so the pride that I feel in arduous hard work not only like the Kate thing we talked about last week the the you know the the the team just really really ground through these obstacles and and came through with a thing that I think just sings and is gorgeous and is abstract and beautiful and you can in some ways take whatever meaning you want from the end of it but for sure the story's not over and I'm just I I couldn't be more proud of them and and I love every single one of them the ones who are still here and the ones that are gone for all of the incredible contributions that they made okay top that yeah I mean the development of the episode gave this opportunity to see the whole team not just narrative but design production or engineering to see everyone at their best there are things that we do in this episode that we have not done before in our game and there is one moment in particular that I will not forget anytime soon Taylor who was the mastermind behind the the flying sequence yeah in in the mists when you're with Orion and chasing after croc rhetoric you know he he'd been working on this for a while and it you know it looked stunning and different and and and weird and awesome and there's a moment when everything just sort of comes together like all the assets are in and the gameplay clicks and everything just sort of looks the way that you realize it's going to look in the final game and you realize that you know when you're making a game it's broken until it's fixed right and that was broken a lot for a long time it was I mean it was and you know it was it was entirely because we've never done anything yeah it was so hard to pull off and the fact that you know it was not only pulled off but it was executed so well by every department and tailor you know really brought it home and seeing it as it was you know as players now see it for the first time was absolutely magical just just seeing that that moment when it all sort of came together we're all sort of they go oh my god am I am i flying on our aim yeah oh oh my god yeah and like we're all I remember like everyone you know like I walked over there because I could sort of see it on his monitor and it's you know and it's it's all it's all in and then everyone is sort of like turning around in their desks and getting up out of their chairs and walking over and they're huddling around Taylor's desk we're watching it on his on his monitor and we're like oh like wow like it actually it actually looks like it's in the game now it's amazing and it and yes yeah I mean there were a lot of moments like that throughout like like dragonfall the island in particular like you know when when the you know when we first saw a croc in the map and we saw his tail there we're like you know be like it'd be kind of cool if like his tail it came up and then like slammed into the ground and then you know art was like yeah like we can do that what whoa oh okay that was just we were thinking wouldn't it be cool in this magical world of things we can't do yeah yeah and I mean they were just there were there were lots of moments like that it wasn't really one moment it was several moments it was many many moments it was getting the line fly down his throat and punch his heart until it dies into the script right heaven very very very high and then making sure that that's essentially what happened all right yes lot just lots lots of those it was it was great okay so it's getting late we have a pile of questions to burn through all right I still want to talk about dragon fall and the events and everything and we have a couple of guys waiting for that so let's start going through questions we're we pulled questions from the forums and we will just go through these in order as you can whoever wants to answer that first one sure it's certainly not the writers the visual noise question sorry the question was will there be any attempt to read in the visual noise the last instance was pure fleshing I feel like it was it felt like a lot of flashing lights and effects it was not truly pure flashing lights I think that was the true-true of the battle at the end of episode 5 - you know it is to some degree an artifact of our game yeah yeah so yeah I this was part okay not partially this was completely my fault so the the idea there we have the - the kind of the dual reality is inside during that fight you have the you have the normal metaphysical fighting with with the Crockett orcs torment and then when he goes unconscious and the brand storm within him explodes out then you're in like a storm reality metaphysical space inside of so it's speaking to what's happening it it is speaking to what's happening but I was probably a little heavy-handed with with bang sparkle glitter so yeah I love I would say I love that description so yeah me tear that makes me happy um so yeah that was but yeah what that was was speaking to what was going on and yeah I see what you're saying yeah it's it's somewhat die jetting okay okay so why did you choose to humanize crack at the end we touched on as torn up by all the magic she's absorbed is it because croc 'is more crystalline and set in his ways did he just absorb more than she had are there other dragons experiencing similar issues man take this you man okay cuz it's I mean how to treat this question is somewhat delicate because you know it would be very easy to spoil things that we have in the works or even if their long-term enough that they're not necessarily already in the works but we've thought about them so so what I'll say is that's that's a good question to ask yeah the the what we what we have what we're beginning to see certainly what we saw with Krakatoa canned I think now everybody's aware of this is that is that Krakatoa himself as we learn when we were inside him and we're hearing the argument that's going on between him and the part of him that is tormenting him which is really sort of the manifestation of all those magics is the Krakatoa key like I said is not the the mindless rabid shark that he has seemed to be that something has been making him that way and what exactly know there's there speculation from characters in the episode that it may have something to do with all the different kinds of magics that he is absorbed and and I also want to say just because there's this there's this magic that's tormenting him it doesn't necessarily mean that croc is good no no that's right that's not we're not saying he was mr. Rogers before but you know before that happened by an imagination you know obviously all of our elder dragons to this point have have have certainly had very destructive aspects to them in terms of how whatever they do interacts with the mortal world yeah I mean they've just they've they've gone through this cycle many times I've destroyed countless civilizations so that's right yeah and and so but but the question of is there something recurring that makes this problem worse than it might otherwise be it is a good question to ask him to think of and it's it's a question that we are asking and thinking about as we move forward with the story and now that our een has received all of his Magic's it's a question Noreen is gonna have to think about okay all right did Glen realize didn't realize the full potential that Irene had in terms of being able to withstand multiple kinds of magic was it really just counting on our Enon blasts replacing the two dead Elder Dragons and maintaining at least a bit of balance I'm not sure if that second paragraph it's different okay that's a different that's a different question yeah so I mean getting getting into what glint did or did not know I'm not sure how deep into that we want to go not too deep but what I will say is this one of the streamers I can tree which one I remember when Irene ascended said oh she looks sort of like a prism and that's an interesting thing to take note of yes next my standard teaser answered that's an interesting thing yes mordremoth died half a continent away I was crouched II absorbed enough of his power Riko a magical indigestion how do you Asura have electronics I mean come on really wouldn't at the end of the day I think for us magic is not it's not bound by most physical properties probably yeah it's not a question we've ever asked ourselves honestly I don't think the the big reason we had to force Crocky out of the mists before we offered before we offered is because very bad things would happen if that magic were released in the mists how badly damaged are the mists thanks to Crockett Oryx rampage yeah so good question yeah that's a very good question and the answer is you had a catastrophic yeah probably pretty bad yeah you're flying through there in in the first chapter and it's you know there is a lot of empty space crack has been devouring the mists for quite some time you know after the end of the last episode and you know you're you're flying through it you're ripping holes through all of these different environments dragging chunks of it behind you yeah it's uh it's it's pretty bad and you know like like we've alluded to that's not something that we're planning on just sort of right that's it there are definite repercussions for everything that's happened in the mists not for nothing yeah we gonna have more more questions why didn't Crockett or just e Doreen in the narrative team comment on why they chose to end this episode and season on a the end moment yes so it has been noted that in the the verses from the book of Balthazar that Zafira is reciting over the trailer that the last line of last two lines of that are for it maybe the death is not the end but possibly the end of the beginning and I don't think it's telling any tales out of school to say that you can see that or Eames journey from being an egg to being a baby to being a teenager and now to ascending to adulthood in a sense and becoming an elder dragon that that is there's a complete arc there there's a journey that is the beginning of her life that is now over and she's probably got some life left to live so something you said earlier put me in mind of how long this arc this journey has been way way back when when we saw that glow coming out of the airship yeah yeah and yeah I mean predates me predates you like this is stuff so I don't know necessarily how much of what we sort of think we know now people who were here then making those choices necessarily had in mind but I know that we look at the as they made and they and we go okay what can we do with that right and so you know with Irene we have found what we feel like in a lot of ways is sort of the spine of our story the the whole story seems to have coalesced around her over much of the history of gilworth to post corium luncheon and so you know for us that line was not glib it is kind of the end of the beginning I think and that's so that's an end but it's also it implies you know that that you're just getting started okay so you kind of touched on that less that next one Rach is going to be joining the Alma Connie is rock showing signs of poor health during this episode or is it just where she pregnant somebody at yeah yes he said I think she's pregnant she's been raising her Cubs bran was the father I think is Rock's going to joining the Olmec on I mean I think that's that's pretty clear yeah if you play the open-world I was I know if you played just the Golden Path first and then the open world meted this may be a little confusing to you but it's pretty clear in the conversations that that rocks has with Boudica in the open world that that that is exactly what she's doing she's found her war band now he's found her tribe and she wants to go be with them and she knows that that's not going to be the easiest thing for bram a guy who's always pining after family and has just come to peace with the idea that this group of people and dragons watches his family that's not gonna be an easy thing for him to hear and and she being a lovely and very compassionate person he's hesitant to say it outright to him but yeah yeah and showing signs of poor health during this episode or is he just afraid of the monsters I'm not sure if that's referring to her her moments in the escort where you're going through the cave but that was a claustrophobic she showed yeah so she lost her war band in mind right that's a yes and yes that's PTSD bases yeah so she you know she's in this you know she's in this space where there are you know literal cave-ins happening around her and she's having you know she's having these flashbacks to that moment where she lost her war band and so we wanted to capture that you know very real sort of sort of fear that someone like that would have yeah having gone through something like that will Hogan be going back to Divinity's reach to be with the Queen Jennah now that he's been redeemed I love that this arc got resolved by the way so do we yes we're very very happy as for blogan and going back to Divinity's reach uh stay tuned mm-hmm on the basis that the world can't end because we wouldn't have a game that they did good valid your thinking with us now consideration be made to reduce the scale of the threats in the guild wars 2 storyline so that's a very poignant I think very very well made point is that you know if the stakes are always the world's going to end you know it's it's kind of difficult to really show stakes because you know that if you lose the world's going to end of the game can't continue that's right so so how do we how do we play with that and I will I will say consideration is absolutely being made yeah I mean you know we we this season we weren't sure when we started it two years ago when we started figuring out what it was two plus years ago we weren't sure exactly what our content model might look like after it we weren't sure exactly what we're gonna do and we have a history with each new season of making some changes sort of to various things you know sort of the scope of each episode what the what the cadence of how they drop and all that kind of stuff is and and so this season since we didn't have some of those answers it we we made what perhaps was the the questionable choice of going pretty big because you know we wanted to make sure that this story if this were really was sort of a culmination in ways and we were gonna move on to different storylines or whatever that it felt very complete and epic and I think that you know we we wouldn't want to try to sustain that moving forward because it's really hard so we're talking about ways that we can give guy stuff that you're gonna even really love but that also will will be sustainable in a way that we can manage and I think it probably does involve some some considerations like that yeah real quick I'm going to say we have time for three more questions because we are close to the 90 minute mark and we still have more show yeah just like it feels like it's been two seconds it it does but I can see the Jerry Lewis telethon frankly mark can you go to the next page and I will let you guys pick three questions yeah I think we re-entered the third one there basically yeah yeah how difficult do you find scaling in the guild wars 2 storyline when thinking about this in the story development meetings and have there been any moments in the past where you've wanted to do something on the cataclysmic side and had to reel it in for the sake of maintaining a degree of scaling every single story be that we come up with needs to be realized by a team of dozens of people across many many months designers artists animators audio people yeah so you know where we might start at a very high level with these you know cataclysmic sort of sort of things exterior Syria explodes yeah when when the rubber meets the road you know you've got you know artists who are like well I mean we can do this but it will take this long you've got you know engineers saying like well we can do this but we'll have to like laughs like tweak this thing you've got you've got writers who are like well I mean we can't jump from this scene to this scene because you know that that would be that would be you know too jarring so eventually there is a point in the development process where reality hits and you know you do need to make some hard decisions yeah although we tried to be conscious of that we're in the inception phase yes though the longer that you do this the more of the more informed you become of what you know what is what is possible in the amount of time that we have so we've gotten better at it I think we touched on that yeah but I'll just say the discussion will we get to know more about mothers soon don't don't expect full answers to that right away but it's a thing to think about okay Irene having absorbed magic for mordremoth society and Crocket organ Balthasar whatever was left is she the strongest elder dragon around that's a good question and I don't I'm not sure if we know for sure she's very young for one thing obviously she we we don't and I'm saying internally we're not exactly sure historically how Elder Dragons have been created or where they came from we don't we haven't decided yet whether our eeen is as a dragon who was who was hatched from an egg who then became a teenage regular dragon and then ascended like it's that a thing that anybody else has ever done before we think probably not we think she's the first one but we haven't necessarily come to a firm decision on that and so I think you know things like that that that's Lord that for us is unsettled would inform a question like that I think that for sure you can bet that if she's not and if she's not becoming that she's probably eventually going to have to come toe to toe with whoever is the strongest elder dragon around so that's you know that that's as much I think as we actually know his head off yeah I'm sorry it's okay maybe if we have a tiny delay while we wait for more questions all right oh not the first one we could do the second one can't and won't do the third one re did the the fourth one okay so the second process of elimination yes at the end of the story Crockett or ik says I hope you never have to kill what you love is this referring to glint yes yes yeah okay yeah it's it's yeah I mean and that's why well Crockett or ik is saying in that moment is this madness compelled me to do things that I did not necessarily want to do and that's been a horrible thing for him to have to bear and experience even while he's essentially trapped inside you know this giant Worman dragon body so yeah yeah Hawkeyes regrets he's got a few yeah I know I know but then again you don't even ask the question no it really was right you should never stop because you give me like the best ear worms oh that's true just put another song in your head all right thank you all for the past hour and a half because this was awesome and informative and entertaining you thank you for those of you who submitted your questions I am so sorry that we ran out of time we got to figure out a way to do that faster like a lightning round no that's literally why you're here but you guys are all awesome we were so grateful for all of the feedback you've given us and for playing our game yes very much you all stick around and you let two of you go back to work you guys stick around we are going to talk about dragon fall in just five minutes we'll be [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] welcome back and thank you all for hanging in with us we are back with definitely not Alex like someone new we're gonna talk about the other part of this release the dragon fall map which was amazing and the events on there so why don't you all go through and introduce yourselves talk about what you do here at ArenaNet and what you worked on for this release i'm balik's Bain I'm definitely not Alex Kane and yeah that's really all uncomfortable saying about that right now okay a hugh Norfolk game designer helped with the creatures on the map I'm Ken Benson normally my f QA tester but for this release I was in a QAM bedroll alright well let's start by talking about the the fun thing the methods of getting around on the map we saw a lot of things brought back and that was first of all thank you so much fun yeah I mean we had like we had the thermal tubes we had bouncy mushrooms and I was talking before we went live about how I played I was playing last night with a lot of longtime guild mates and it was it was so much fun just sitting back and listening to them enjoy everything on the map and people were say oh there's bouncy mushrooms here there's a there's a there's a ley line I can I can glide on this ley-line it oh my gosh there's a thermal tube and the old car heads essences in particular people you know well I don't even know what we call it that there's a spider-man spider-man spider-man's so do you want to talk a little bit about getting those in there and getting them up and running to be clear I believe it was um Jason you it was yeah Jason Reynolds was the designer that placed all of those things in the map my I guess my pardon it was very kind of like early on wall thing are still being implemented into the map and map art was being done during some of the playthrough sessions we were talking about ways to kind of like increase player mobility throughout the map especially with regard to just the different sectors but also like the final Crockett or meta and one of the things that I brought up because I you know as a player I also like really enjoyed those things from heart of thorns in season 3 of the living story I was like you know like it's the the whole the whole plan was that none of this stuff had to be it had to be optional like you still had to be able to do and traverse the through all the different areas with like mounts and stuff like you normally would but I definitely wanted to add this like flavor and specifically for the the oak heart essences I was like we are going to be in the Landers domain and the oak hearts essences were I actually went on to the Wikipedia to like research it and I was like yes so like this is like this is power these are like things that are created by the Druids and the Druids were followers of Melander who dropped their human forms to become like giant like creature like tree creature spirits so I'm like oh it's totally you know make complete sense for these to be here and so then and then I thought logically progressed to you over there could be like updrafts and lava tubes in the fissure ov whoa because it's all fiery and bouncing mushrooms in the forest and and then I think later for the meta I was brought up that uh we use the brand Brendon twisters from episode 4 help players get up onto Krakatoa yeah there is having feedback and work on a game from someone who is passionate about it and familiar and loves it it adds a it adds a really special something and makes makes this kind of difference so super investment yes like people having people like you working on the game is is really a good is really a good thing for us it's really a blessing and it is such a joy so I I appreciate that that was some of I mean you were the that was your early feedback was why don't we bring some of this stuff back what good why don't we use it players have these ministries out of it yeah yeah yeah and it did kind of turn dragonfall into like this Greatest Hits map for all the master yes I because I like part of like what I've been doing this week is you know keeping up with like hot fixes and looking in just keeping an eye on like Reddit and the forums and one of the things is like there's a couple of forum threads about like bringing back the masteries and like big kudos and I've just been like mentally taking a giant victory lap in that sense you should so it's a big deal it was awesome yes this is like this is like unashamed and cheering at this point and I know that every release has ups and downs and that felt like such a victory on just a hundred percent victory on hey here's something that we can do that's going to be great all the way through and adding adding in that they're not mandatory and you don't have to yeah this doesn't have to be a thing it's good advertising too because it's like if you don't have season free and you don't have hot you know it's like if you want to use these things you know you don't need them but you should check it out okay now I really like it so aside from that one of what were some of your favorite things that you worked on for Dragon Ball oh definitely the story in the in a QA capacity I've always been one of those I guess on the on the QA team when let's go to people like that my leads will go to me like here you go do the through line and earlier and usually early on in the development I'll actually set aside like a documents page where I just write up feedback I'm like the story and instance design or open-world story design but I think part of it also has to do with like having this extensive history playing the game and Guild Wars 1 there's been a few times where I've like written bugs or made feedback for like lorry inconsistencies or things like that and so that's always been it's always a little it's always a little gratifying when you find those and but it's also I think my favorite part of the game to just going through the narrative and seeing uh all these like parts come together one of the gratifying things was having uh I guess it's a big spoiler but the having Gwen and Logan and RIT lock meet that was like for anyone who's like a long term Guild Wars fan that's like a huge deal right um especially with Gwen because it's like she has this really long history or complicated history with the char and it's like to the point where like it's like it's hatred and it's that sort of thing but it's also like it's not like unwarranted I guess in that way because a lot of bad things happen to her when we go to my favorite parts of the episode we're gonna talk about that again yay yeah and then the I think I would definitely say chapter six just because it was like there was a lot of like bugs issues i'll and i was talking with kevin earlier that uh i me and him would back and forth a lot over the a lot of like issues that were happening it because it was a very complex and very complicated instance and there were a lot of moving parts yeah and there were there was so many times where I would like bug things and come across things sometimes by accident sometimes my like testing around other issues and he would just there were so many moments or he'd do me like an angry like you know frothy faced emoji whenever I would message him or when I'd link him a bug that I had written that we'd go back to it there like there was a there was even a couple like close to like where we went to stage integration and right before that and kind of like the 11th hour sort of things and he just like stared at me like with like expressions yeah because it's making games is hard yeah it turns no it's just I've heard that it's easy I've been told so now that I've made you cry what were some of your highlights of working on this and getting this episode of him running yeah so I came in a little later I switched teams over to help this team out later in its development so you know they came and they're like qb1 just jump in there's a bunch of creatures and because you know you worked on creatures in the past we want you to take a look at them I was like all right cool no big deal I'll jump in there mess around with some creatures and have some fun uh you know and they're like okay hey there's gonna be three armies three big armies so I was like okay well let's see what we got he with the shadow army the underworld Army and the milenge were me and I'm like okay cool no big deal and we look at these guys yeah pretty decent amount we reuse some assets and updated them we had some new assets you know some new creatures that were looked really cool and I'm like awesome well let's see so the first thing I always do whenever I come into an episode to help out is I'm like okay let me just play this as a normal player and just see what I can understand from this this these these guys and then then I'll kind of break them down like go through the numbers and all that good stuff right so like I go through and I start with the Malayan Joe army because that was the more reused assets and whatnot so they're good see what they did to spice it up right and so I'm going through and like I'm fighting this this nature nature spirit Eicher elemental and I'm sitting there fighting here and I'm like okay cool and then like I'm I just kind of sit it I used some test commands to make myself to know death so I can kind of see what the skills do and I'm kind of like writing up feedback and doing stuff like that and all of a sudden knocked down and I didn't know why and I was like I was like I did get up again and I was like that's weird whatever and I just keep writing up my feedback and I'm right I'm gonna get knocked down again and I think whatever it must be something else I'm writing a feedback and then I get stuck and then I get frozen and I was like okay I can knock down again and I was like what is happening I don't understand what's going on I don't see any reason why should we knock down and I start breaking down and looking through the scripts and there was just a random chance actual random chance on their auto-attack to knock you down no and I'm like I was fighting one and I was like okay let me go look let me go to the episode and let me like look for this creature this spawn and see what maybe there's just one of them ever right and I'm like okay let me see and then I found like a pile of like five of them and I was like stand in the center of this and see what happens and then I'm just like constantly knocked down and frozen and I'm like dying and I'm like yeah and so I just I noticed that what what happened was I find out later that there was this a big episode a lot of complexity yes a lot of people working on it because again this was the finale right so we kept the game I wanted to do a lot of stuff there have been ten there have been teams all over the studio yeah exactly and so you know what happens in development like this is something when you have a lot of armies a lot of creatures and you're also water instances a lot of content you know you know you're doing this giant dragon flight thing and you're doing all this stuff you know they divvied out the creatures to multiple different designers like here you take a couple here you take a couple here you took a couple also you're doing for instance also you're doing all the open-world content also you do SoDo me there's just tons of stuff going to designers right and so what happens is a designer you sit there and you're like okay cool I'm gonna make this guy awesome I'm gonna give this really cool thing that's gonna be sweet but then you don't think about sometimes what happens when there's two of them together a three of them together or this thing you didn't even know about because someone else was designing it gets matched with your character with your creature you designed and you have this kind of amalgamation of an encounter that becomes maybe over punishing or maybe two week or maybe too long or too short and and so when I came on this I'm like sitting I'm like okay let me see let me look at this guy of me by X person okay this may be a next person maybe by somebody else that's three different people on the same army that's a little weird okay whatever and then oh this guy went in and adjust these things and I see this check in from this other designer and I'm like well I mean this is like a patchwork army or something lot of people's a lot of heat on these highs right yes again no fault to any design or anything like that it's just when you're working on so many things you have to be able to jump in and help out and adjust into things and so for me it was nice that I was able to come in and kind of like blank and look at everything together I've made armies before you know I've made creatures before it so being able to go in and be like let me just cut out the random stuff let me just cut out this fourth knockdown let me cut out this for this really long duration cripple let me cut out these things cuz holistically I could take it in a spreadsheet look at it all together and go like what's this guy's cool thing right this guy's cool thing is X right he he does this thing and this guy's cool thing is this let me cut out these other four things he's trying to do right because the designer making one creature come make this creature awesome what happens is you make that creature awesome but the net other creature is awesome the other creature is awesome and then when they come together you don't feel very awesome you feel like a little puddle right hey that was my big contribution was just kind of bringing everything in line as best I could with time we had because this also I came in kind of late to the project cuz again it was people were trying to get this sucker out and make this thing really epic and I'm like okay he we need you to jump in and help out this thing good most whoever brought back the shadow army by the way that was discussion yeah it was it was a cool little addition dude I would hear about this discussion so it happens with the highest sort of levels I believe it was already made before I was pulled onto the project fairly early on but I think that when we started talking about the different the three different major sections of the map we were talking about the unique armies that we're going to be on them and I don't know which designer decided to sort of pull the trigger on you know she we should do you know it should be the the burning forest and if it's the burning forest that means it's got to be the shadow army and I remember you know sort of like looking up you know looking into the history of it and you know like what were the storytelling ramifications of that it seemed super cool because it is a section of the burning forest that's ripped out of the mists we didn't have to worry too much about you know oh well you know it is it you know is it Balthazar's Eternals versus you know Meng Jie's you know we're I'm gonna come clean with you here I'm not going to ever make the decision on what that is I'm gonna let someone else decide honestly I liked Menzies I did too like it's such a like a kind of quirky name yeah yeah yeah I don't disagree with you I'm sorry I just couldn't not it's fine I saw kids face tooth I'm comfortable however you want to say we all know what you mean Bob Bob's army oh it's not Canon by the way well that happened so that happened army yes we know what's going on next season no so so yeah so because these were pieces of the mists that we pulled out we didn't have to worry too much about that we could really focus in on the flavor and to really get the flavor of the burning forest you had to have the shadow army so those that that series of decisions was sort of like the if we do this then we should probably do this and if we do that then we should probably do this and then like seeing the actual like shadow army creatures in there was awesome yeah yeah it was a little weird at first because the forest wasn't on fire for a while in the last segment we talked about how like hard assets like you know come in in different you know in you know in different pieces over time the trees were not on fire until like fairly late and so I'd constantly be like like we're gonna like set this forest on the burning forest is gonna be like on fire at some point that would be nice or one of the interesting things that I thought because originally the shadow army used a bunch of it specifically like the more humanoid creatures used like sylvari models but then eventually they changed them into like the based off of like what was originally in Guild Wars 1 they reused the white mantle skins and I'm not sure if they use them in this case but they looked vaguely like how they appeared in the original games so that was really cool that they updated those all the armies looked awesome I was pretty pleased with how that all came together and they didn't hit too hard so those monks was mushroom Stoppers man oh those guys are you know devious yeah it's pretty it's pretty pretty dangerous you just reminded me of a comment that somebody was playing with last night he had wandered off by himself we're all like setting the taps down he had wandered off alone and I was helping someone else and all of a sudden he goes on discord I feel like I'm in Guild Wars 1 again and the monks are all healing each other he just sounded so angry and I was like do you need me to come over there I'm almost done with her I will be right there and he was like I think I've got it I'm just so tired is the monk thanks telling it wrong so speaking of the armies and ripping pieces out of the mists you had mentioned that you really enjoyed working on this part of Milan Drew's little realm it was pulled out of there talk a little bit about what that was like I'm alanders realm oh because with like Logan and those things so yeah I spent a lot of time in the southeast Lane testing wise I actually will just in all three lanes because I was heading up the tests QA tasks and tests for the non met up specific events and so I got very closely and intimate with a lot of these events and the armies and them and you know kind of like figuring out just like scaling and or rather that was more pushed towards like the actual QA testing team but like building the QA requests and the tasks and some of the like unique text cases for those and it was it was a lot there were so many events a lot of them I think it was like over 50 non-meta specific events one of the I think one of the challenges was as development was going along and the meta was changing like we had to the design was constantly changing like were these events or when they occurred when they could occur how often they would occur and so that and then was happening like while I was building these tests so it was like oh like you know I do and you know making sure design documentation was updated for the testers because it's thank you for yeah but yeah or if it wasn't then I would like ping them and be like hey can you answer this question you know because yeah but it was it was a lot of touch-and-go I think for all that development but yeah it was the yeah specifically for the southeast lane that was very gratifying especially for um Logan and Huck and Gwen that was for me I was really drawn to that area to I think it might have also been because we've as like is any like more longer-term Gilmour's players have you know we've been to the Fisher what we've been to the underworld misprints are completely new to the Guild Wars world never been there before so so you mentioned that you wanted to address the whole Gwen things yeah so that was a lot of fun one of the so I wrote any part of the open world that wasn't specifically tied to the golden path through line the actual story steps I I pretty much wrote that was I think the thing I spent the most of my time working on this episode were all those little camp conversations and all the little like every time you updated create a camp characters say something all the little event dialogues all that stuff was so much fun the right but the first thing that we needed to figure out was which characters are going to be represented in which camps and which characters are going to be part of the Golden Path and really you're not going to be interacting with them as much so for the southeastern line for the mole and rule and we knew so like wherever Logan went RIT Locke had to go wherever reluctant Logan had to go we thought that was going to be very interesting should hug and wherever RIT Logan went our or Logan Locke depending hey I don't judge but we knew that they had to be together and we initially I believe had them going into I think well it wasn't Milland Roux at first I think we had the Olmec on in the mole Andrew section first but then we thought having nature fight nature doesn't is not really exciting so we bumped them to the underworld which seems a lot more interesting because now you have nature against the dead and they're like what are we supposed to do there's no life around here that makes me think of that one ambient dialogue in defending these reach tree deaths the tree yes not necessarily a callback to that yeah yes but having then writ Locke and Logan go down into the Milland row area and then swapping it with the mist wardens we realize oh if when is in charge of this army and Logan shows up with char as his best buddy they're gonna be some questions about that incredibly awkward there's like hey you know here's my great great whatever grandmother who like slaughtered a bunch of your kind and also like you know your kind slaughtered her family and you know not particularly great yup Allah just yeah house you guys would like to there's a there's a lotta there's a lot of Guild Wars 1 lore about that that we didn't want to ignore and so I got to write these conversations where you know Logan and Gwen and RIT locker just being extremely uncomfortable around each other and you know Gwen Quinn's trying to like you know get a rise out of it like a little bit red lock has to be an adult man he hates it so much and it's such a nice little summary of a lot of really great yeah yeah so that was a lot of fun having K thens ìiím together was very interesting in the crystal bloom camp in the northwest because you know you have cave who's you know not really comfortable being on the front lines not really sure about her you know her position in this whole thing not really comfortable with the idea of people like fighting for her and dying for her in the numbers that you know that she's got and then you have Zam who's like you know Captain America kind of a you know just like like oh you're gonna do great you're you're the best I have such a good friend total total faith and confidence in you yeah and so that was a fun combination and then of course you have rocks and bata we got to really sort of play out the rest of Roxas o makan sort of story a little bit her transition into into that you know a lot of a lot of bits and pieces about how her past sort of informed that decision where she might go in the future a lot of fun stuff there that I got to play with as well and then of course all the little side conversations with all the new characters I got to I got to makeup was a lot of fun too so yeah that was that was just like a near infinite resource for me like like you know the bridge people you know lived a little Asura building little hollow bridges there were a lot of fun little escort missions were a lot of fun there's like the Norn who's you know talking to her Doleac and her dole yak is mooing in return that was a lot of fun there's a lot of fun little mini stories that I got that I got to write and that was a joy yeah getting to getting to all of those little personal touches in there seems like a very fun thing to get to do on a regular basis yeah you talked a little bit about some of the weirder things that you found do you guys want to talk a little bit about some of the bugs and quirks that you work at you first cuz you look like you have something I'll jump start that um so one of the things it's a and it was a very it was actually pretty recent and it's kind of like it was like a really major edge case it was like one of those weird things like that probably never happened to like 99% of the players but it was something I experienced I at one point got I was testing the the lava tubes in and I smacked into the airships I his airship as it was flying by and my character broke through the collision of like the pontoon and ended up inside the balloon and I was just like oh I guess I've been kidnapped by Corsairs now so I don't think I've ever portal inside like the balloons so you can kind of like see the area of the airship area below and just like well just checking in amazing so you also had one where the players the player character got enormous oh okay so this wasn't a bug that I found it was one of the other keywords testers they were doing multiplayer testing in Chapter two I and one of the things that they discovered they were able to do was to like I think if they died they could then interact with like their usual character UI which included novelty items mounts and but that in in that instance it would break the transformation yeah and like cuz you were all these little like blue orbs on or eans wing and so then but here's the thing I'm not sure if I want to break the magic of chapter 2 spoilers I just checked my notes to see exactly how the magic it's okay so thank you I believe is scaled down like in size so when you were broken out of that transformation and return to like your regular character form you're huge by comparison to like Orion and Crockett or ik and which I mean everything physically that's just everything has to be scaled down to fit an entire elder dragon it was because Crockett ork was so big he was clipping the viewing plane which you know I mean hilarious but not optimal wait so what does that look like it looks like Crockett or ik is missing several pieces of himself yeah that was just a preview yeah yeah I believe one of our streamers found that bug oh we're curious you don't sound like it's good I think I know I think I noticed um though on the forum that someone had found a way to like get the Halloween tonic to work in one of the areas that had present fixed or like they found like a mmm like a minut like opening to like use it yeah oh that's the fun of qat how about you so when I came on one of the things that are always fun thing to look at are champions champions and in armies are always the most complex and it's fun if I say this and it sounds so funny but I have to remind myself and some designers sometimes all the moral creatures they're like we vote we design open our creature what we list on the board what is it trying to accomplish bullet point one is should die right like the first thing that any open world creatures should be that we should design for is it dying right you're not wrong and it does sound funny but you are very correct right cuz because what happens is if you don't think about that sometimes you look I'm just gonna make this so hard it's gonna be sweet there was no love it everyone's gonna be miserable yeah exactly it's so when I was looking at one of the champions and I was looking at skills and I was I only remember which one it was but it was crazy and I started looking at skills and looking at everything and I'm like going through and we have in the way it works is we have a very pretty complex intelligence system for creatures which then goes and like if this happens if this happens and this if this this trigger hit happens then you use this one skill right and I was like okay cool no big deal and so I was trying to get this to trigger and trying to get this trigger and I couldn't get it to go and I was like ah whatever it's probably not that big of a deal I'll just force use it so I just forced it to use the skill and it did like 75 thousand damage to me a OE huge cone obliterated me and I was like well good thing is that's really hard to do I guess because I've never seen this skill and I was like well and the first thing I always do and this is good and bad that's like at least this skills not on life I was like let me go look incoming references look I was like oh no no this this is our life this is my life just like I was like no big deal not an issue probably not being like maybe it's like deprecated in some way I go and find out it's not and this guy has been just wrecking shop with this skill and I fir in III I forget exactly and I don't want to say the wrong one because long story short I like went over to like Z and I've always liked Z what is the policy for me fixing a creature that's live right and he told me any any and he said the same thing he usually be tell me when he goes do what's right for the game right that sounds great what's right that sounds like him it's I left it exactly actually bump the numbers up a little bit I was like I'm making sure so I went in it and made some adjustments to clean it up a little bit and then reduce the damage and it's so funny because I did it and I was like no one will know that I did this no one will see it and I feel like during this whole story there's like a narrator behind you just going but I did I was like what somebody who does this event where this creature because it was a very specific creature very strict in P&I; spawning in I think it was a half-hour heart of thorns map it would it was different and I was like I was like man that's somebody's gonna read through that and be like man I hate fighting that guy he always won shocks me I don't know why that person is gonna get hit by let's go go wait a minute he took his ear oh ah I didn't I didn't have a shot what is this the chance the dream it was just so funny because it was like it was so specific it was like if you're on the left side with five players that are within 600 range to 800 range and you have less than like sick or above 65% life on all five then fire that skill and I was like yeah but we did a play test everyone it happened one time I was like I gotta fix it all right so how about you Alex for Dragon but you've already had to give your favorite for this story but how about for the map so yeah I mean the dragon the dragon tail crashing into into the map was awesome I absolutely loved that the the the actual so yeah the I'm trying to pick out individual events that I enjoy yeah sort of working on but there are several events that I enjoyed working on and so I have to like stack rank them in in my brain and then the ones that I liked more from like a story perspective are maybe not the most mechanically interesting ones so I have to sort of like invert it I'm just gonna like metallic shuffling noises over here yeah yeah you can hear like the fuses popping in my brain right now I I will say at the end of the day the moment when I think you know you you're just starting out and you've got those three lanes and you basically have to pick which of the three by Connick iconic characters you want to hang out with for the next 10 minutes yeah it was new oh yeah I mean I always pick Logan and relock first but you know that's just me and writing all the little dialogue for when they're going through that that escort I did not know at first it was going to be as long a trip as it was so going back in last minute and writing like additional variants for some of their dialogue it was a lot of fun and of course the final the big finale of the meta event you know where you're trying to take down those three those three enemies within the the time gate and you know well you know you've got that timer sort of ticking down and you've got all the by conics sort of like overlooking Krakatoa ik and if you go up to them they've got their own little things that they're saying and relax very angry about everything because he's pretty lucky there were a lot of there are a lot of little moments I think that I enjoyed the most I think that the open the thing that makes the open world map so interesting in general for Guild Wars 2 is that it is built on these little moments that you can experience in any order at any time depending on how you approach them and we need to make sure that they all feel interesting and different and unique and you know there are there are things like the first time you complete an escort there is a unique cutscene that plays so like when you're with Logan and RIT Locke it's introducing reluctant when when you're with the omec on it's you know rocks realizing like why did I lead us to a graveyard this is the dumbest thing I've ever done I hate the undead why why am I here and then every subsequent time you do it there's a different one and just sort of thinking about all those different possibilities and it and entertaining the possibility space was a lot of fun there was a lot of stuff right that that was that could have been sure was I think that could have been managed by myself maybe a little better but at the end of the day we got through everything and felt it felt fun and felt good it felt full that was that was an important thing I think you mentioned the dragon tail that was something that I was talking about before we went live when I was playing with my friends listening to them on discord just experience this joy and excitement and we were like we were at the like at the base we were at that first area where you first spun in back there at spec camp and one of them just starts very excitedly like yelling on discord look to the left look to the left the tail the tail everybody look at the tail he hadn't seen that that tail rise up and slammed down in the ground is shaking and the tail in the distance I had sense of yeah and the shockwaves and that sense of how enormous this is and what we are standing on yeah you can hear that throughout the whole map I liken it to I know like Disney parks do this a lot like I remember we like I went to Typhoon Lagoon once as a you know when I was much younger and they've got the the tidal wave pool and they've got the ship up up on the mountain they're up on the top of this little this little mountain and every I think like every 30 minutes like there's this big horn sound across the whole park and then water comes out of the top and then the wave pool goes you can like hear it you can hear people screaming from like all across the park that was I think the feeling that we wanted to capture with Krakatoa and audio and design did a spectacular job yes I think they did a wonderful job with that yeah Crockett auric is menacing and scary as well he should be I think it coincides too with like the same time shoots off like a burst of like a volley of magical projectiles that mark around the map and like create these area of effects like giant dangerous Brande yeah yeah well you can see them sort of like rise up out of the center of the map it's super cool I will say this I'm not sure if it's still a thing but you should totally be on top of the tail when he lifts it because I'm not sure if it still does this but if you were it would send you up into the air just kind of like throw you especially if you're on like a glider or a mount you'll you go up yeah if it does do that it's clearly a feature and don't you take advantage of it in any possible way you can maybe have him time it with the airship so it smacks you into the air show hello sorry I'm late well hello well do you guys want to answer some questions that we pulled from the forums that's okay cuz you're gonna okay you can if you want but you all did say you would let's see first one might be for you we've already kind of addressed it but it's really fun so okay yeah so and also to be clear it wasn't just me I think that gave that feedback actually real quick the question is what brought about the decision to bring back the other transit mess methods like mushrooms Oh card essence I like how y'all implemented it in such a way is to provide variety but not make it feel forced can we expect to see them again in future Maps if it's fitting I can't answer that second one I as a player I would hope so I like the idea of getting more mileage out of these accomplishments these mechanical accomplishments that you have gained throughout through guild or through playing Guild Wars 2 I feel like I guess it would depend on what the teams decide like what is required for each new further you know chapter season like if it's like will you require like heart of thorns and path of fire for future so that like in that instance you would then have to have completed that but then you would also have access to jump bouncing mushrooms and Lateline gliding yeah and I think the important thing there is if it's fitting um the reason that we you know it was brought back for a dragon fall was because it was fitting yeah so you know it at the very least people notice this stuff as we're building the maps and if it seems like it's going to fit then you know people will be asking like do we have time to get this in do we have time to make it feel right there yeah and that makes me wonder if there's like potential for also like re skinning some of them to be more I guess fitting like for example there's lava tubes but there's also the geyser vents in a bitter frost frontier which are basically like a water reskin of the lava tubes like five designers just their noses started bleeding and they don't know why Oh heart essence where you like flyer okay we answered the second one yeah yeah since we saw new mobs for the map that we're callbacks to Guild Wars 1 do we have a chance to see the god realms again in the future man yeah I will not say that we won't I will not I'd like obviously I'm not gonna discount you know or or comment on future future story stuff but you know we did have an opportunity to see those God realms specifically because you're flying through those oh yeah so so was there any specific reason that Milland rouge realm was chosen to be a part of dragon fall aside from the fissure of whoa and the underworld as opposed to say the realm of torment or Dwain it's Lissa's realms it's utterly gorgeous and the will-o-wisps are really neat flavor for the realm so when we're building out the maps and trying to figure out the best possible way to differentiate the different realms that you're going to be visiting the our narrative concerns and there are design concerns and there are art concerns and when we started pitching ideas for what the different biomes were going to be one of the things that we wanted to make sure was that they looked very different from one another visually and fanatically and the armies were very different so we knew that we wanted to do I think the very first one that we picked was the burning forest because we really wanted to do that we thought that would be super cool and it turned out to be pretty cool so that was a good that was a good decision on leadership sparked and then the the underworld you know seemed seemed like a good sort of callback location that you know we had a lot of material that we could play with there and it was a fun fun juxtaposition to have that with the burning forest because the underworld is you know this you know this this barren wasteland and the burning forest is just on fire all the time everyone's at war always and so we needed a third one what's the third one going to be how like like we've got you know if there's there's like okay so you got yeah the the the fissure wall here and you got the underworld here maybe something green something green and and but like alive would be great and and yeah so yeah the parameters were alive not on fire and mole Andrew being the goddess of nature really felt like immediately we were like okay well that's super cool we can do all this stuff with you know like the magical sort of forest vibe you know we can we can harken back to the stuff we did in the guma a little bit you know we can have these cool Andrew statues and shrines everywhere we can have you know the the elemental sort of sort of forces and whatnot and it was it just sort of naturally came about as a you know as the X in the equation that we needed to solve for and it was super cool and we leaned super into it and I really like how it turned out and aside from like the imminent threat of like and a meat jungle enemies like trying to tear you apart it's actually a very relaxing like area to just idle in in the map it's that's both extremely funny and valid you're not wrong if you can just clear out some of the wildlife yeah those mushrooms get up into the canopies and just like look at the Gotham Stoppers can't reach up to into the canopy so no well you're golden oh we have any more questions we don't from the forums I do want to loop back for a second because you did make a point I wanted to make sure we touched on that note that your feedback wasn't the only feedback on adding some of those mechanics into the maps that's it's kind of a group effort which is oh yeah fantastic yeah no it was it was something that I initially brought up and I think at the time like they were like kind of considering it but like it was I think later discussions also involves some of like the other teams and people higher up and it so I was like when they decided to I was just like yes okay awesome well thank you guys very much for your time thank you all for sticking with us for so long this is a long show so two and a half hours it was but this was the season four finale we had a lot to talk about thank you guys for making us a map that didn't hurt as bad thank you so I appreciate all of you spending time with us I appreciate you guys taking time out of your workday and we will see you all next Friday I'm Gil Chet