Guild Chat - Episode 71

The following is an unofficial, player-written transcript of the episode. The accuracy of this transcription has not been verified by ArenaNet.

The 71st episode of Guild Chat aired on August 28, 2018. It features the sixth anniversary celebration for Guild Wars 2 with birthday messages from partners, interviews with Guild Wars 2 voice actors, and developer guests to talk about the past year in Tyria.

Transcription

Introduction [6:36]

Rubi Bayer: Hi Tyria, and welcome to the Guild Wars 2 Sixth Anniversary Livestream. Six years! I’m your host, Rubi, and we’re going to spend the next couple of hours celebrating the last year of development of Guild Wars 2 with you guys as a community. Whether you as a player took your first steps out of your player character’s racial city: Hoelbrak, The Grove, Black Citadel, Divinity’s Reach, Rata Sum. Whether you took those first steps in August of 2012, or if you took them yesterday, we are really, really grateful that you’re part of our community and that you participate in this world that we built. So, thank you for spending this afternoon with us to join in the celebration, and I hope you enjoy the next couple of hours. We’re going to be talking to some of the development team that has worked on Guild Wars 2 over the past year, looking back over some of our favorite memories, we’re going to hear from members of the Guild Wars 2 partner program, we’re going to watch some interviews with Guild Wars 2 voice actors and just kind of look back over the past year and enjoy ourselves. We’re going to start with the Guild Wars 2 game director Mike Zadorojny, but first we’re going to take a quick look at a video that some of you may have seen earlier this morning, the Guild Wars 2 sixth anniversary video. So, sit back, and enjoy with us!

Guild Wars 2 Sixth Anniversary Video [8:01]

Mike Zadorojny: Over six years ago, we launched Guild Wars 2. It was the start of epic journey for us as developers and for you, the fans, and together we’ve seen the community grow and flourish into what it is today. Now we want to take a chance to look back at the journey we’ve been on, as we’ve been learning and iterating on how to support and grow this game and celebrate together what it is to be part of Guild Wars 2. From the very beginning, we knew we wanted to bring Guild Wars 2 to life, continually evolving it through new story content and features. We started with small things that rippled throughout the world and then we went to lost shores. We told a brand new story line on a brand new map, with a brand new feature, the Fractals of the Mists, and it just kept evolving from there.

Tom Abernathy: We were embarking on a journey that nobody else had really tried to take before. To tell these stories that basically are richer and deeper because of the fact that they go on.

Mike: It’s like watching your favorite television show, except being a part of it.

Tom: Over the seasons, Living World has evolved constantly in terms of how we think about what the story is that we’re trying to tell.

Linsey Murdock: We had a ton freedom early on in Season 1 to figure out what Living World really was.

Tom: We were trying out new ways of telling stories in games, and it took us a while to sort of get a feel for what we could do.

Linsey: With Season 2, we tried out something pretty radically different from Season 1. We decided to tell a continuing story that would lead into our first expansion.

Mike: And we started to explore new areas like the Dry Top and the Silverwastes.

Linsey: With Season 3, we tried to develop a bit of a formula for what each episode was going to be, creating a process that would allow us to release big, meaty story updates, and then also start layering in some of the content that happens in between episodes.

Crystal Reid: Things like new rewards, new masteries, new raids and fractals.

Mike: New ways for players to explore, to discover and to be a part of this evolving world.

Tom: With Season 4, we wanted to push the boundaries a little bit and see how big our story could get.

Linsey: We wanted to really show players what we could do with this kind of storytelling.

Mike: Bigger adventures, more exciting foes, and a more epic storyline. Living World just isn’t about content, it’s also about features.

Tom: Living World provides us the opportunity to tell a larger story across multiple episodes in a way that dovetails with other things about the game; features and mounts, to all sort of integrate and support each other.

Linsey: With Living World, we like to provide something for all of our players. So, with each release, we make sure to include updates to our story, but we also have a lot of other content types that we add like raid and fractals, and new legendary weapons, and new festivals, and the current events that come out in between. They’re all part of the Living World.

Crystal: Festivals are great because it’s smaller bite-sized content that we can give players something to do during episodes. We have festivals like Wintersday, the Festival of the Four Winds, and Halloween.

Linsey: They all show the status of the world and show the way that it’s moving forward.

Mike: Looking towards the future, we’re excited to keep delivering on the promise of free, engaging, episodic content in Guild Wars 2. You can expect more great things from us as we move directly from Season 4 into Season 5.

Linsey: This means more engaging stories that expand the world of Tyria, new maps to dive into and explore, and more gameplay features that change the way the game is experienced. We’ve already introduced the Roller Beetle mount in episode 3, added a new raid, fractals and more, and we’re going to continue this season’s story and add new feature content in the coming months. We’ve got another raid, a new fractal and one of my favorite features of the season, Sun’s Refuge. It’s a personal character instance in a familiar and historic location, that goes all the way back to the original Guild Wars. You’ll be able to rebuild the settlement with opportunities to unlock NPCs, collections, and rewards.

Mike: And all of this without a monthly subscription fee. The remainder of this season is going to be one heck of a ride.

Tom: We’ve really got this hurtling cannonball of a story that is so powerful that it needs to keep going.

Linsey: The most epic stuff we’ve ever done for Living World is coming in Season 4.

Mike: We’re pushing the limits of what the game can do, and what we can do with the story, and we’re excited to see this payoff in cool ways for you, the players, and to keep the story going into the future with Season 5.

Discussion [12:58]

Rubi: Wow, congratulations, that is a lot.

Mike: Thank you, yeah, it has been quite the ride. It's hard to think about that it's been six years since we started on this journey. And there was another, you know, 4 or 5 years before that in terms of development. This franchise, the legacy of everything that we're doing, is just, it's exciting to be a part of the passion that you see around the studio. You know, internally, we're celebrating and just really happy that we've had a chance to share this journey with the players because at the end of the day we couldn't do this without our fans. And to see how welcoming they are to each other, how kind they are to new players, to us as long term developers is just phenomenal. So yeah, I love hearing all the personal stories that we get from this in terms of what the game has meant to players and it inspires me to push harder in terms of what we can deliver because it's just, again, we can't do this without the fandom that has generated around this game. And I really feel like the community that we have built or that we have laid the foundation for is just one that I'm just blessed to be a part of because this group is just so much fun and I hope we get to come back and do this for years to come, because this is great this is what I live for. And to kind of see where we go and what happens next is just going to be one hell of a ride.

Rubi: Yeah, it is something that I wanted to touch on. You mentioned seeing the community support each other, which is absolutely one of my favorite things and makes me so happy, you and I and a couple of our developers, Clayton and Byron, we're running around Gamescom last week, first of all, it already feels like so long ago. But, we were talking with members of the community on the show floor and I remember, there was one, it was a group of three and they were all guild mates that we were chatting with and they have been planning getting together since this last spring and it was all like this big road trip that one of them organized and this was their in-person meetup, because they are such good friends and they've known each other in-game for so long and Gamescom was their time to get together, because this friendship has transferred into the real world and there were a lot of things that they told me and I don't want to go into them too deeply, but there's a lot of real world support that they give one another.

Mike: Absolutely. And it's great, because every year that we go to all those Gamecoms, PAX, Paris Games Week, any of these these conventions, even the smaller ones that we attend, whether officially or unofficially, it's always nice to see the same faces coming back and they're always bringing new friends, it's always about 'Hey, look, I met somebody else now and this is the friendship that we've developed.' and so, you know, I am, I'm so honored to be a part of this this legacy of this game, because I care more about what we've done for the community than anything else, because again, this is, I look at my job in terms of what I'm doing for this game as I will know I have succeeded when people come to me in five, ten years down the road and talk about what Guild Wars 2 has meant to them, that they remember fondly the events that we were, you know, how we were fighting Palawa Joko, what it meant for the conclusion of season four and how the big epic journey that we're going on at the moment. These are the things that I want people to have fond memories of and about the friendships that they made along the way, and then I will know that this, everything that I've done here all the hard work that team has done, has paid off, has been worth it.

Rubi: Yeah, thank you guys, thank all of you for that, because that's why I think everyone in this building does what they do. There was a player who works on one of our fan sites that I was talking to at Gamescom and the reason we were talking way back in 2008, when I was a brand new player, one of my, excuse me, one of my first Guild Wars friends was someone who met her now-husband in Guild Wars and they're now married with a son, but they founded a fan site that is still going strong to this day and I was chatting with them at Gamescom and that's one of those legacies that started in Tyria and lives out 10 years later, and that's exactly why.

Mike: Yep.

Rubi: yeah, so we were watching the anniversary video and we're not done.

Mike: No.

Rubi: We're not gonna go home today and not come back. It ,I hope, I'm planning on coming back to work tomorrow.

Mike: Yeah.

Rubi: We have a lot to do.

Mike: I think I left the Gamescom community event in Germany last week and I said I'm not done yet.

Rubi: Nope

Mike: There's so much more that we want to do. So many more stories that we want to tell, you know new fractals, new raids.

Rubi: Yeah.

Mike: Improvements to PvP, to World versus world. Like, this is a living, breathing game and the, the enthusiasm and the passion of the people that walk down these halls is that collectively we have more to give, we have more to show and our story and our journey with Guild Wars 2 is not done yet.

Rubi: Yeah, so we're going right into season five. We're not, I mean, we're still, episode four is coming.

Mike: Yep.

Rubi: And but, we're already looking ahead to the next season.

Mike: Oh absolutely, you know these are exciting times for us in terms of what we're trying to accomplish with the great strides we've told in terms of the narrative storytelling, the cinematic storytelling, the overall gameplay design, the features the systems design. All of us has been working towards building up and, and being able to accomplish greater tasks and greater feats for what we want for this franchise and you know a lot of the foundation that we've been laying this year has been getting ready for what comes beyond. So we still have some amazing things to sights to see in season four, some great climactic fights.

Rubi: Yes.

Mike: That we need to overcome as a group, but the, the anniversary video was more of a promise to our fan base that this is not it. Like this is, we're just laying down the foundation to continue this and and go beyond what we've already kind of just been doing already.

Rubi: Yeah and all of you, please keep talking to us. We, we love hearing from you. We love that feedback. We, we listen and we want to know what you love. We want to know what you want more of. We want to know what you think could be improved.

Mike: Absolutely, internally we are paying attention to all the communication channels, whether it's the forums, whether it's Reddit, whether you know messages in-game. You'll always find me running off my tag, because I want to hear this stuff.

Rubi: Yes.

Mike: Like I said at the beginning, like this game does not exist without you, the fans and so your voice matters and so we do collect. We do look at the feedback. Obviously, we can't do everything all at once, but we have some internal priorities that we're trying to to work through, so that we can make sure that we are creating something together with the player base and it isn't just us kind of just releasing things without a plan or without a purpose.

Rubi: Yeah, so but we have PAX coming up in just a matter of a few days and I'm thinking back this time last year we were gearing up to announce Path of Fire.

Mike: Right

Rubi: And again like Gamescom it seems like it was both five minutes ago and forever ago. Before I let you go. What have some of your absolute highlights of the past twelve months been?

Mike: Shipping Path of Fire is my number one.

Rubi: It's amazing.

Mike: Yeah, like a lot of the initial planning and what we were trying to accomplish with the mount system building on top of the masteries was, was a huge challenge for us to overcome and how we were going to use that in the open world. The, the stories that we were telling not only on the maps, but in the the personal story or through the story journal. Those were very, very personal moments not to use the term over again, but I mean and we also threw some twists in there. Like, I'm not sure everyone saw how the first time you fought Balthazar was going to end and so that allowed us to kind of lay the foundation of where we were going moving forward and we made a bunch of decisions on Path of Fire knowing that living world was coming on the heels of it. So we knew that we were going to be able to spend more time focusing things on, on more challenging group content, meta events, those types of things or map wide events. And then you know some of the stories that we were telling like just going into episode 1. We had like a fractal, we had the open-world story and the, the you know the personal story was taking you through that map all telling you about the same location in different moments in time and a key character that was there throughout all of it. So it was a lot of fun to kind of be able to tell those stories in those moments, but I think a lot of the stuff I'm looking forward to at this point now, is like the road ahead. Like, I'm super excited and we're super ambitious in terms of we're trying to accomplish. So thank you all for this past year. Thank you for six years of supporting us in Guild Wars 2 and buckle up because we're not done yet.

Rubi: Oh man, right. All right, well we're going to let Mike get back to work and stick around, because earlier this year. We've mentioned it a couple times on Guild Chat. We were down in Burbank recording for Episode four and Festival of the Four Winds and episode three. It was a pretty long recording session and something that we did, was a series of interviews with the Guild Wars 2 voice actors that happen to be in for recording sessions. So we're gonna watch several of those this afternoon and the first one is coming up right now. So let's hear what Steve Blum has to say about playing in Guild Wars 2.

Interview with Steve Blum [22:58]

Steve Blum: I'm Steve Blum and I play Rytlock Brimstone. Charr! Rytlock is- He's amazing! He's... I think that, besides having a warrior's heart, he has the purity of someone that comes from a place that wouldn't necessarily be as barbaric and that shows through every now and then. He really cares about the people around him. "The fool was on death's door and you could have been killed rescuing him."

My favorite thing about Rytlock is actually something I found this morning when I was looking stuff up on Wikipedia. He was sort of the runt of the litter. He was... They called him Runtlock, I guess when he was training as a young kitty cat and I was kind of that kid, too. I was the smallest and the weakest and bullied a lot and having to fight through that, emotionally and physically, made me a much stronger person as I navigated the world and I think that that's worked in his favor also. For me, Rytlock's voice has remained the same pretty much. He is who he is, but I think that just carrying the weight with him that he unleashed Balthazar unwittingly... There's some guilt there and I think that that comes through every now and then, and that wasn't necessarily present in the very beginning. I think he was just trying to figure out his place and his new surroundings, but that that guilt, I think, has become a factor for him and may be a driving factor for him. "It's true that we're stuck. The bridge towers in front of Joko's fortress make it impossible to approach."

If I was to give Rytlock some advice, I would tell him to let go of the guilt. It's time. He's a good guy. He didn't mean to do it and (whispering) Sohothin was worth it. It was worth it! I love emotionally difficult scenes. For a large part of my life, I tried to hide vulnerability. I tried to hide emotion. That's kind of what a lot of us are taught in our families and when I have the opportunity to do that through any character, I relish it. I like to go to the deep, dark places. I love to bring stuff up that's uncomfortable for me, the more uncomfortable the better. So, as long as I don't blow my throat out doing it, I'm willing to to go to every emotional depth required for the character. It's actually fun for me.

I don't think I know anything about Rytlock that nobody else knows because you guys know everything about this game. You know everything about our characters. You tell me what my life story is. The only thing that I would say that I do know is that there's this guy who is not necessarily a warrior on a daily basis who is voicing this character for you, so if you've never met me in person: I'm a lover, not a fighter. So take that to the bank. "We'll keep the Awakened off your back, guaranteed."

So many great moments in voicing Rytlock. It's hard to pick one out. I think the greatest moments for me actually were after the fact. When I go to conventions and I see how Rytlock has affected people out there in the world because I'm sort of insulated in this little capsule here, this padded room. When we're recording this, we don't know what the response is gonna be until we get out there in the world and people come to me at signings at conventions all across the world with their warbands talking about their experience. And to embody any character that has an afterlife like that, and affects people and touches people, makes everything worthwhile to me. "Okay, charr! We'll take point! You with me?!"

???: And they're like, "Nah."^{[verification requested]}

???: "We're gonna go get a Starbucks. You tell us when you're done."

(laughter)

Living World Season 4 Episode 3 Long Live the Lich Trailer [26:55]

Palawa Joko: 10 seconds to curtain. Places for act 1, please! Places for act 1! Break a leg people. It's showtime!

Pact Commander: Joko has declared war, and we have to meet him head on.

Taimi: Guess we are really doing this. I am equal parts exhilarated and terrified.

Palawa Joko: Enough waiting. Joko's bored. Let's pick up the pace.

On-Screen: LEGENDARY WARHORN: VERDARACH

On-Screen: NEW MAP: DOMAIN OF KOURNA

On-Screen: NEW FRACTAL: DEEPSTONE

On-Screen: ALL-NEW STORY CONTENT

On-Screen: NEW MOUNT: ROLLER BEETLE

Palawa Joko: And scene. Hahahah! Hahahahahaha-hahahahahahahahah-ahh... Hahh...

Discussion with Matt Pennebaker (Game Designer) and Alexander Youngblood (Game Designer) [28:57]

Rubi: Hi and welcome back. Alright, let's introduce our next two dev guests, Matthew.

Matthew Pennebaker: Hi, I'm Matt Pennebaker, the systems design lead on Guild Wars 2.

Rubi: Alexander?

Alexander Youngblood: I'm Alexander Youngblood, game designer.

Rubi: Are you sure?

Alex: Game designer. That's why I'm here today.

Rubi: Ok, that's what it says. Sometimes he is other people.

Alex: Yeah.

Rubi: Alright well, why don't you guys talk a little about what you do here in Arenanet.

Matt: I will let Alex go first because his is a little easier.

Rubi: Surprise.

Alex: Easier? Alright, I'm a game designer on the current activities team. We had a behind-the-scenes where we talked about everything we do but we work on festivals, legendaries, birthday gifts. We do little events-

Rubi: All of those things.

Alex: All of those things, everything that falls between the cracks comes to us. I have been brought in to several different projects. I helped rebuild Lion's Arch. Actually, one of the first projects I worked on was helping Matt do the item collections. So that was a fun system.

Rubi: Oh nice.

Alex: I also helped out Path of Fire with the underworlds. So you guys can either hate or love me for Eater of Souls. I'm sorry.

Rubi: You hurt my feelings. Alright, how about you Matt?

Matt: So, I'm one of the design leads on Guild Wars 2. So I do things across the whole game. Primarily, I just help set goals and review, jump in on stuff when there is emergency needs for extra hands but yeah, more of systems level things with the game in the department.

Alex: You are being modest. He's done alot.

Matt: Yeah I was kind of like, I mean, I will let you have this but-

Alex: Matt's kind of an inspiration to me. He's been a mentor to me throughout my time here and-

Matt: And now I'm going to feel awkward to continue talking so the two of you-

Alex: He inspired me, because when I first started working here, I would talk about the game like "Oh this is really cool" and he is like "Oh yeah, I worked on that", "Oh this is cool" and "Yeah, I did that thing there".

Rubi: If he gets up and leave, I am going to be so angry with you.

Matt: What I do like to tell people when somebody asks me what I have worked on is usually anything you have loved about the game and anything you have hated about the game, I have probably worked on both of them.

Rubi: Aw. Alright, you mentioned birthday presents. Let's talk about those because this armor set just came out.

Alex: Yes, so this is a big year. Every year we've kind of been upping the stakes a bit, and we knew we wanted to do a really big gift this year. The armor is - we wanted to create sets that would look kind of unique and have lots of metal and look celebratory and almost parade-like, and I think the artists a great job on them.

Rubi: Yeah and I mean there was a lot of internal talk about that, but in the end we went with armor set, and it wasn't the only thing. It was just like alright here's your armor set, and that's it for the birthday gift.

Alex: No, I mean every year we've been layering on more and more, so you know this year you get to pick one of the armors, you get to pick two weapons, you get to pick a backpack. Each character gets like a bunch of dye kits and a bunch of stuff.

Rubi: Yeah, I'm super happy with the dye kits and the karma. Yeah, all right well thank you so much. I was - that's such an awesome thing to have in there. I spent probably way too much time saying there going "I don't know, I like them all".

Alex: What did you pick?

Rubi: I ended up with light.

Alex: Okay.

Rubi: I'm, I'm both happy and not happy with my choice because I also want a medium so...

Matt: I picked medium.

Rubi: I should have picked medium!

Alex: You should have. You made a mistake.

Rubi: I know! Right?

Matt: I also play Engie and Ranger so it was a easy choice.

Rubi: But, okay, see here's the problem; I have two mains it's an elementalist and a thief. There's no good choice here.

Alex: Yeah, but they're both very unique because they have like I know saying they have lots of armor on them right and they have actual metal.

Rubi: Give me both of them Alex. Give me both of them, right now.

Alex: You have to wait a year.

Rubi: I don't want to wait a year. I want them now. They are they're gorgeous and it's nice having the armor set as a birthday gift so thank you for that.

Alex: Yeah, of course.

Rubi: It's not the only new thing that we had though. So it turns out there's there's another thing that you worked on, Mr. Modesty.

All: (laugh)

Rubi: Let's talk a little bit about the novelties wardrobe and what is this, and how does it work?

Matt: Okay so for people who haven't been in game yet, or who haven't read the blog post or the patch notes, the novelties wardrobe was a place in your in your hero panel and in your wardrobe to store all sorts of kind of random bits and bobs we've added over the years. You know a lot of these started out as a 'hey can we do this thing?' and some designer made it work, and then it became a thing we do in the game and we kept doing it. Uh, accessing them from your inventory was really sort of cumbersome and that was the main thing we wanted to solve here was to just add a little ease of use, and so you know we added the wardrobe. There's four slots currently, chairs at the top one. Funny enough, chairs was actually the real motivating factor behind this...

Rubi: What!

Matt: ...which was probably this has been talked about, Byron added the first chair with one of the raids, see I never remember the name of it, I call it the Dhuum throne. [crosstalk 34:24] It was the bench bench of the I can't read the screen from here... of the final judge.

Rubi: Yes.

Matt: And I actually sort of told him if he wanted to add more chairs we needed a better system than it just sitting in your inventory and that was the catalyst behind all of this.

Rubi: You have to calm down with this.

All: (laugh)

Matt: So yeah we have that and we have musical instruments. This one was really important to me to have its own slot because I think there's a certain like very specific like player fantasy want to encourage with like I can walk around and pull out my guitar whenever I want like be that guy at the party. (laugh)

Rubi: Sure (laugh). Don't be that guy. Eh, be that guy what the heck why not.

Alex: That's so cool, that's a really good instrument.

Matt: You want to give a little background on the Charr bass guitar?

Rubi: What is this oh my gosh.

Alex: That is the first thing I came up with for the commerce team when I was an intern on that team.

Rubi: Are you serious? What is this.

Matt: It's a bass guitar.

Alex: Gui-charr.

Matt: Gui-charr. The Charr-tar

Rubi: Is it the Gui-charr or the Charr-tar?

Alex: In game its the musical bass guitar but now you know.

Rubi: Is it really?

Alex: It is supposed to be Gui-charr.

Rubi: Gui-charr or Charr-tar?

Alex: Gui-charr.

Rubi: I just want this fight to happen. Okay.

Matt: I don't have a horse in this one. Alright, next is held items there's a very exclusively bundle items which is a phrase we use sometimes but it's not super clear. Which are just you know, it's a item you hold in your hand. This is primarily kites and balloons. Maybe exclusively kites and balloons.

Alex: Oh, that one's awesome.

Matt: Yeah, we added a bunch of really fun ones in Path of Fire.

Rubi: Let's go back and look at that first one, the big tube dragon. I'm like just frantically hoping that Paul cooperates when I'm like "please look at that". What is this?

Matt: This is this came out today. This is, what's the name of it?

Rubi: Charr-tar, oh no.

Matt: I don't want to get the name. The Dragon Emblem Balloon. So this, players will get a free novelty choice box, currently I don't know the specifics of how the Black Lion Trading Post works so I don't know if it's, how long it'll be there. But you can get this for free if you log. If you've already picked something else from the box you can purchase it for gems but this is what I picked with my box.

Rubi: Well, I don't blame you.

Matt: Yeah, I've been running around on my roller beetle flying this balloon all day.

Rubi: Have you really?

Matt: Or, I mean not all day. Only been live for three hours.

Alex: I chose How to Dance and we had a naked dance party in LA today. It's pretty awesome.

Rubi: As you do.

Alex: Yeah, so anyone who's there thank you for that.

(Rubi and Matt laugh)

Matt: Final slot is the toys which is just kind of-

Rubi: I have that.

Matt: "And the rest" I guess is the best way to put it? Things that don't really categorize terribly well. We have travel toys and uh... dance.

(Laugher)

Rubi: That guy has too many clues.^{[verification requested]}

Matt: You know some, this one didn't go, there's some confusion around this one. Like it didn't go into held items, this is the Bouquet of Roses, because it has skills and it does other stuff. I think it does costume brawl, like it's got other functionality and so we want to make sure that was a clear distinction.

Rubi: Okay, so...

Matt: Bobblehead Lab.

Rubi: Oh my gosh, this might be the best look I've ever had at the Bobblehead Laboratory. I usually just throw it down in a crowd and run away.

(Matt laughs)

Rubi: Okay so, this is just part of your wardrobe now. You don't have to do anything it's just there. What do you do, do you just right-click the things and add to wardrobe like everything else?

Matt: Yes, that is correct. This account looks like it's already got pretty much everything it has unlocked. If you had something in your inventory just right-click on it you can unlock a thing. I believe the tooltip on these should all say novelty locked or novelty unlocked, so they are somewhat searchable in your inventory.

Alex: But Matt, what about tonics?

(Everyone laughs)

Rubi: Oh, I did not see you there.

Matt: And again, for people who haven't read the blog post, a question we knew which was going to come up which is "what about all of the transform tonics?", of which there are dozens of. Because there are actually over a hundred of them, it's taking a little longer to you know migrate them over to the system and get them thoroughly tested so we don't accidentally break the whole game by shipping something fun. So they're in the works.

Rubi: You're working on it, okay.

Matt: They're coming soon. I don't have a specific estimate, but pretty soon and you know shorter than some of our soons, that's for sure.

Rubi: Shorter than some soons, longer than other soons. But in the meantime, we've got all of this stuff that is now coming out of your inventory and in the wardrobe. And here's a whole lot of free inventory slots that are now available.

Alex: Yeah, I don't know what I'm gonna do with my shared inventory anymore.

Rubi: Oh my gosh.

Alex: Yeah.

Rubi: Oh, I just got three free shared inventory. Oh! I have to go, I'll be back in a minute. That's awesome.

Matt: Now I'm curious, what's in your shared inventory slots?

Rubi: Bobblehead Laboratory.

Alex: Essential.

Rubi: The water balloon. Well, it's important.

Alex: For Tequatl.

Rubi: The bobblehead lab and the water balloon thing I like to run in the middle of a giant crowd, anywhere I see like a ton of players, I'll just like run over to one side of the crowd throw down the bobblehead lab, run to the other side and throw down the water balloon thing. Jeez, what was the other, I'd have to go back I know there's the third one. I'd have to go back and look at the thing again and I'm not asking, I'm not making Paul like go through everything. But there was another thing in the wardrobe where I looked at it and it like registered in the back of my head, oh I've got that in a shared inventory slot, and oh I'm so excited to have those inventory slots freed up now.

Alex: That's awesome.

Matt: Paul is actually trying to be a little more helpful and professional than I am, but he's showing the-so all the slots in the in the novelties wardrobe can have keybinds associated with them, and so you can set. We want to make it work a lot like the mounts button and keybindings.

Rubi: Okay, let's talk about that throne a little bit. Just real quick because that looks kind of amazing and how can I get one?

Matt: Well this is uh...

Rubi: Sorry for putting you on the spot.

Matt: Can you remind me of the name again, I just don't like to mess up the names. Is it Emblazoned Dragon Throne I believe, right?

Rubi: Emblazoned Dragon Throne.

Matt: It is available right now on the Black Lion Trading Company.

Rubi: Yay. Can we have Paul sit in it and that will entertain us while I ask you, I have one more question for you guys. I would love to hear about some of your highlights from the past year of Guild Wars 2 development. What have been some of your favorite things?

Alex: I think my favorite is, we did this ley-line anomaly event.

Rubi: Yeah!

Alex: And it's just this big energy boss that runs around.

Rubi: Like Matt immediately starts laughing a little bit.

Alex: Yeah, well, because there was kind of a weird thing that happened with it after we released that content. People started seeing that anomaly in the world and we had no idea what was going on with it, but like players were freaking out. So we added like some achievements to say, here you saw it, good job. And we added a quest that said, you know you're not it seeing anymore, and the placebo worked.

Rubi: Hahahahaha!

Alex: People were no longer seeing it. We still have no idea why that happened but it did it.

Rubi: Okay...

Alex: Yah. But that boss was fun the work on. He's cool.

Rubi: Was it? How about you, Matt?

Matt: So working on the novelties wardrobe was a lot of fun.

Rubi: Bet.

Matt: I actually don't get to you know work on content much these days, and so this was an opportunity for me to, you know, get in and implement some stuff again, which is really fun.

Rubi: No, that's awesome.

Matt: But beyond the thing we just talked about for 20 minutes, I just have to say working on the roller beetle.

Rubi: Yes.

Matt: I worked with Joel a lot on sort of you know, how do we make it feel as good as possible with breaking as little of the game as possible. Turns out we didn't iron all of that out, but players may have noticed there's some world outs you can do with the roller beetle. Surprise, surprise.

Rubi: Well, this is my stunned face.

(Laughter)

Matt: I had never really worked with Joel before, and you know I think fans of this stream know Joel pretty well at this point. And he's super bright and super fun to work and super sassy.

Rubi: Yes, once you get Joel talking about something he's passionate about, I just want to sit there be like, keep going tell me more, because this is amazing. It is an experience in a very good way. That's awesome. Well congratulations on another year of Guild Wars both of you. Thank you for all of your hard work. Very, very much appreciated.

Matt: Thanks for having us.

Alex: Happy birthday.

Rubi: Happy birthday Guild Wars 2. Yeah, all right you guys stick around we have another short video and then a couple more devs to hang out with. Congrats(?) to you guys.

Matt: Thanks.

Living World Season 4 Episode 2: A Bug in the System Trailer [43:26]

PA Announcer: Welcome, krewe members to another bright day in Lab Alpha-One-Nine. Creating yesterday’s tomorrows, today!

Taimi: Bad news, zero idea where the base is. But I did find the name of a scientist there.

Commander: So, if we find the scientist, we find the base Joko's using to launch his attacks.

On-Screen: STARRING: THE MAN with THE PLAN

Shadows Agent Kito: One of their convoys just received an unusual order to delay their arrival. Taking their place should get you inside.

On-Screen: One GRUMPY Guardian

Braham: The Commander leading me around in chains? Uh-uh, not a chance.

On-Screen: A FUR-OCIOUS Feline Fighter

On-Screen: And the Commander as D. COY

On-Screen: NEW MASTERY

On-Screen: NEW LEGENDARY DAGGER

On-Screen: NEW MAP

On-Screen: NEW STORY

PA Announcer: A friendly reminder from the administration: rumors of invading corpses in the area are false.

Singing: Fear not this night

Singing: You will not go astray

Singing: Though shadows fall

Singing: Still the stars find their way

Singing: Who needs the light?

Singing: Fear not this night

Content Creator Messages [45:30]

Aurora Peachy: Hey guys, it's Aurora peachy I'm a Guild Wars 2 livestreamer, reactor and reviewer. I just want to say happy sixth anniversary to Guild Wars 2. Thank you so much for everything that you, ArenaNet, as well as the community of this game has given me over the past six years. It's been an absolute blast. Happy birthday!

Reaygun: Hey everyone, welcome. My name is Reaygun and this is the sixth anniversary for Guild Wars 2. I actually stopped playing around the time Heart of Thorns was launched and then I came back for Path of Fire when I saw the news articles online and saw that ArenaNet was adding mounts to the game. Which I thought that is exciting I got to check that out. And I think I can actually speak for his to the community when I say ArenaNet single-handedly has managed to create the most alive and characteristic mounts in any MMO out there to date.

GRM Adrian: Greetings ladies and gentlemen I am GRM Adrian and I've been creating Guild Wars 2 content and live streams for about a year now. And I want to start things off by saying congratulations to everybody involved with Guild Wars 2 from ArenaNet right down to you guys the community. It's awesome that we're celebrating the game's sixth anniversary. So keep being awesome everybody and enjoy Guild Wars 2's sixth anniversary celebrations. I'm gonna leave you guys with a question, what does Palawa Joko taste like? Serious question.

Jebro: Hey everyone Jebro here Guild Wars 2 shoutcaster for PvP. It's been an amazing six years, sixth anniversary of Guild Wars 2 with this awesome community. I've had the opportunity of course a to shoutcast around the world at different events including PAX South where I was part of the panel for Heart of Thorns the expansion announcement where I met my wife. My whole life changed and I am now in America of course. Guild Wars 2 has meant a lot to me, it's meant a lot to so many people. The creators the team who obviously create the game and you the player in the viewer at home. Have a great sixth anniversary, I will see you soon. Here's to another six and I'll see you in the mists.

Discussion with Matthew Medina (Game Designer) and Nick Hernandez (QA Embed) [47:34]

Rubi: Welcome back- to the Guild Wars 2 anniversary live stream and a couple more of our Guild Wars 2 developers. Why don't you guys introduce yourself and talk about what you've worked on here the past year?

Matthew Medina: I'm Matthew Medina. I'm a game designer here. The last twelve months for me have been Path of Fire, shipping that, getting that out the door, and then spending a good amount of time on Festival of the Four Winds.

Rubi: That's right.

Matthew: Yeah, which we just released.

Nick Hernandez: As it says up there, my name is Nick Hernandez. I am one of the Living World QA embeds. And my job is pretty much to just make sure that all of the content is meeting standards that we set for ourselves at ArenaNet. And the past year has been pretty much bridging Season 3 with Episode 6 to Path of Fire and now us rolling into season 4 and kind of just the whole cadence that we've got going on. Yeah.

Rubi: Yeah.

(laughter)

Rubi: So yeah, there's it's been a really busy year and that's like I was talking about with Mike earlier. This time last year we were just gearing up to announce Path of Fire and it was like this frenzy. We knew it was coming and we were preparing we're going to tell the players this is coming and not only is it coming, it's coming very, very, very soon. Which was just incredibly exciting and also kind of terrifying.

(laughter)

Rubi: And it feels like it has been this non-stop ride ever since. And in between there, we were bringing back Festival of the Four Winds, which is something that we talked about in a recent Guild Chat that you've been working on for so long.

Matthew: Yeah, yeah.

Rubi: And I know for me that was one of the highlights of the past twelve months, and this was something that we talked we touched on briefly in Guild Chat.

Matthew: Yeah.

Rubi: But you and I were chatting after work, and I don't even remember how it came up, but it's one of those moments that like sticks in your head. And you said Festival of the Four Winds is coming back.

Matthew: Yeah.

Rubi: And I just went... "I'm sorry, what?" Because it sounds like you said Festival of the Four Winds is coming back. And I know you wouldn't just like dangle that in front of me only to take it away.

Matthew: Yeah.

Rubi: Because that's mean. And this was in like January.

Matthew: Yeah, yeah. January is when I really kinda got started on, you know, the first sort of design pass paper design and and prototyping and figuring out what we were gonna do, and obviously the the festival had run before so we had a lot of the groundwork laid, but it was a lot of figuring out like what worked, what didn't, what are we bringing back? What are we gonna leave on the table? What do we wanna add to it this year? And especially because we wanted it to be a recurring festival, making sure that was set up so that it was sort of a timeless thing that could come back year on year-

Rubi: Yeah.

Matthew: -and not have to be, you know, revisited by the team every single time 'cause we wanna try to automate as much as we can so that festivals run smoothly on a nice cadence. So yeah that, was uh back in January, which is you know not too long after Path of Fire shipped. So it was sort of a nice change of pace for me because Path of Fire, as we know, is a big undertaking.

Rubi: Yeah!

Matthew: So it was it was a lot of a lot of late nights of stress of like, oh my gosh, this thing is really gonna ship after however long we worked on it. So you know this was a it was a nice balance to my year to actually because Path of Fire was such a big thing and this was, it's not that it wasn't a big thing, the Festival for Winds, but it was a nice sort of lighthearted uh piece of content-

Rubi: Yeah, absolutely.

Matthew: -you know, put a lot of grueling time on it.

Rubi: Yeah. Well and there is there is a difference between we have this story about you know, we've got Kralkatorrik in this looming threat and we're fighting Balthazar and oh look flying Dolyak race.

Matthew: (laughs) Yes exactly.

Rubi: And not to trivialize one or the other but like you said that lightheartedness. It's, it's nice to have that balance. And I know a conversation that I've seen here and there um is wire how dare the Zephyrites party. How dare you?

Matthew: Hey.

Rubi: Well because you need that.

Matthew: You've got to have the good with the bad, right?

Rubi: Yes.

Matthew: You can't just you know, there's plenty of bad stuff that happens in the world all the time and if we just sat and dwelled on it all the time, nothing would ever get done. Like you have to have that fun, you know, lighthearted approach to life sometimes.

Rubi: There's definitely a metaphor for real life and gaming in there somewhere that I can't quite find. But it's it's there. Well how about you, Nick? What were some of your highlights over the past twelve months?

Nick: Um...

Rubi: You have to pick one, no.

Nick: There's so many.

Rubi: You can pick several.

Nick: Well, I think at least something that I enjoyed working on the most was the Griffon collection, um from Path of Fire.

Rubi: That's right!

Nick: That one was just absolutely amazing. And uh shout out to Rob Stokes, who was the uh designer that went absolutely insane on that thing. Like he it was his passion project, and you could tell.

Rubi: Aww.

Nick: Yeah. Um I just I just remember like the, the collection itself in my opinion is amazing and is really well developed, but like just seeing the systems behind it is insane. Like uh yeah, so uh with episodes 1 and 2, we introduce these things called visibility channels, which is basically uh NPCs will show up at certain points.

Rubi: Visibility channels.

Nick: Yeah.

Rubi: Okay.

Nick: And that depends on um you know, like this buff that gets placed on the care on the player um and it's all client side. Before that, we didn't have that in Path of Fire. So what Rob actually did was he made some absurd amount of different teams and stealthing. Like because if you look at the Sunspears Sanctuary, there is like what, 15 NPCs there and like each one shows up depending on like the things that you do within the world throughout Path of Fire. So whereas now you would just set visibility channels before he had to do a lot of different team switching and um applying of stealth and things like that and a lot of checking its progress. It was insane.

(laughter)

Nick: Like I actually remember looking at it. And he had like just upwards of hundreds and hundreds of different teams and um I think if I remember correctly uh Doge also worked on it. He was like one of the programmers that worked on it.

Rubi: Oh yeah, yeah.

Nick: Um so shout out to Doge too because like with without that kind of programming uh backbone to to be able to support this, it would not have gone out the it would have not gone out the way that it did.

Rubi: Okay, so when you say teams, I hear teams here in the building.

Nick: Yeah, sorry.

(laughter)

Rubi: I'm like, wait a minute, you said hundreds.

Nick: Yeah.

Rubi: Are we changing up the teams more than I realized?

Nick: No no no.

Rubi: Wow.

Nick: So in game, what we do is we have different teams for different, uh agents, you know, or characters. So like, there are hostile teams like the enemies that you fight against, Guild Wars 2, they're all red. There's neutral teams and those are like the ambience that you heard, not the ambience, those are like the neutral characters, like the... like the Rock Gazelle and stuff like that.

Rubi: Okay.

Nick: And then there's Ambient Teams, which are like bunnies and bunny rabbits, rats, you know, those things. And if you notice, like, some teams will fight, like, some creatures will fight other creatures, but not fight you and vice versa.

Rubi: Yeah.

Nick: Each of those is a different team-

Rubi: Okay.

Nick: -that basically says, like, "I can fight these teams, I'm friends with these teams," and so on and so forth. So basically what we needed to do, or at least what Rob needed to do with this, he needed to make sure that you were put on teams that made it that way the NPCs would actually be stealthed to you but not attack you so they had to be hostile but not hostile towards the player. It was absolutely just crazy.

Matthew: I'm pretty sure it broke a few times.

Nick: Oh it did?

Matthew: It's just the way it is.

Rubi: Oh?

Nick: Yes.

Matthew: I remember anytime you mess with players and teams, it has the potential to, or that.

Nick: Yeah, I remember there was one time actually on on that there was an example where I was standing there and one of our testers same as Johnny, shout out to Johnny because he also worked heavily on this. I just started like like he was taking damage he's like what's going on and I could see the NPC but he couldn't see the NPC, and the NPC was just like attacking him and I was like "don't move."

Rubi: Oh, no.

Nick: I was like I need to debug right now. So-

Rubi: And he's like "But it hurts."

(laughter)

Nick: It's like "We're gonna die." Yeah, it's just I guess that's why this that one at least to me was the most exciting and I'm gonna stop rambling out because I can talk about it-

Rubi: No, that's okay, because that's kind of exact that scenario is exactly what I was picturing like something invisible is beating me to death. What's happening?

Nick: You're supposed to be my ally. What's going on? I though we're friends.

Rubi: Also, I can't see what's happening. I just know it hurts and I can't see it. That's amazing.

Nick: It was a trip to work on that one.

Rubi: Yeah, the behind the scenes of a lot of these things that on the surface seem very simple, but it's like this Rube Goldberg machine underneath is consistently incredible to me.

Nick: Yeah.

Rubi: And watching, well, like when we found the Griffon, and this is a conversation that I had with some players last week, when players found the Griffon. It was it was this absolutely incredible rush because we managed to keep that a secret and there were some players I don't know if you guys happen to be watching. But thank you because you made my week last week this group that was saying, we figured that something cool like the graphic you would advertise make a huge deal of this before the game. But then we found it on our own in game and it was incredible and one of the guys who was talking to me said "I was just like riding through the desert and I saw something swoop past me, and I stopped, he like pulled up and went, what, what was that?"

Nick: I love that.

Rubi: It was like not something he recognized. And afterwards, and he said retroactively going back and looking at the Mount Art and realizing the way in the background.

Matthew: There's a little something.

Rubi: -was a little silhouette of a griffon and putting all those pieces together afterwards was so incredibly gratifying. And everything surrounding that griffon was just so much fun. And knowing that it had that effect on the players and that all of you enjoyed that as much as we did.

Matthew: It was one of those where I've been around the industry a long time. It takes a lot to sort of surprise me. And when they said, "Oh, we're not going to announce this. We're going to hide it and we're going to let players discover it," I thought, "Why?" Like this is like the premier thing that we're like shipping with this expansion you would want to you would want to, you know, totally we think I want to make a big deal about this.

Rubi: Sure.

Matthew: You know, I also went to art school where the marketing was a big part of my education, and so like that was like marketing Anti-marketing was like, "no no we're not gonna put the big bullet point on the back of the box."

Rubi: It's weird, right?

Matthew: Yeah, it was like why would we do that that seems counterintuitive, but then it works. So it was just one of those things of like, wow, that was an awesome moment to see players discover that.

Rubi: It was so good.

Nick: And like to go off of that, we, of course we all knew about it, so we just had to kind of sit there and watch and wait for players to finally discover it, to finally figure out the pieces because like, you know, we couldn't touch it. Like it was mandated it's like nobody in the studio can be the first one to get the Griffon.

Rubi: That was the thing I was gonna say because I don't know, I wasn't sure if you guys remembered, but... And I think we may have talked about this at some point in the past, but as soon as somebody unlocked it, it was going to show up in the API. So we had a studio-wide mandate, like Nick said, where nobody in the studio, we couldn't start the collection. It didn't matter if we were ready to start the collection. We're like sitting there waiting for one of you to do it.

Nick: Yeah.

Rubi: And then there was like this mad in studio rush, like, "Yes, we can finally get the Griffon!"

Nick: But not in a bad way, though. It wasn't like, you're like, hurry up. It was mostly like just pure... like-

Rubi: We're waiting to wrap up. It was like Christmas morning.

Matthew: Yeah, it was.

Rubi: We're just waiting and I think yeah, we were just waiting for you guys to find this wonderful, amazing thing and we didn't want to ruin it from in the studio.

Nick: Yeah.

Rubi: So yeah, we were just like all kind of, "Don't touch it. Don't ruin it."

Nick: Yeah.

Rubi: Don't mess it up.

Nick: Also because the fact that like we didn't we reward the first player that, that's like stumbled upon it and or discovered it if I remember-

Rubi: I think so yeah, and with with this much notice, I can't remember exactly what it's like in the back of my head going. I know we did a thing.

Nick: Yeah, I think I think I remember that we did a thing. I remember-

Rubi: I also can't remember what I have for dinner last night.

(laughter)

Nick: There was a person like tweeted out about it if I remember correctly, but yeah, we were going to give a prize to whoever the first person was actually discovered it because it's an undertaking to even get to that point.

Matthew & Rubi: Yeah.

Nick: And yeah, if I remember correctly, the person definitely tweeted out about it. And they were like, "Oh my God, look what I got. Look what I got."

(laughter)

Rubi: Yeah. It was-

Nick: It's just stuff like that. That's, I don't know, that's what makes me love working here.

Matthew: Yeah.

Nick: We care about our community quite a bit.

Rubi: Yeah, so the door just opened and I figured it was going to be somebody coming in here to tell us what we did for the first player.

(laughter)

Rubi: Here's what it was.

Nick: Right.

Rubi: Yeah.

Matthew: It was also, there was this moment after. You know because you got the unlock for the Griffon, but then you had all the masteries that really kind of-

Rubi: Yes.

Matthew: -you got a really need to really make use of the Griffon in a way that was-

Rubi: Sure.

Matthew: -super cool and like so watching players as they you know unlocked all of those. It was just, it was so much fun from start to finish to see how that collection was implemented and was delivered to players.

Rubi: Yeah, it really was. Um and it was something that was a big topic of conversation, was that it was a more expensive mount. Total of 250 gold in the end, and something that I, as a player who does not have that in my mattress, appreciated was that it was broken down in chunks of 25 gold.

Nick: Right.

Rubi: Like, "Oh, I can still progress. I don't have to just sit here and twiddle my thumbs." and farm up that 250 gold all at once. It was a considerate thing for those of us who do not, who don't have like a dragon horde over here.

Nick: And like, you know, the Griffon was supposed to be this like staple mount, like the prime mount. So I remember like, we had conversations at least pertaining to the roller beetle where it was like, we wanted to make something that was, like good and fun and that player just enjoyed but was more accessible than the Griffon but didn't overshine or wasn't overshined by the Griffon.

Rubi: Yeah.

Nick: Yeah. Which you know is is a struggle also in itself, yeah.

Matthew: Yeah, we have a problem at the studio setting the bar high for ourselves and then trying to figure out what are we gonna do To up that not necessarily take away from the bar. We just set-

Rubi: This is true, yes. There's, there is that weird little dance of okay we did a really cool thing now. We have to do a cooler thing that doesn't make this thing. Yeah, it's this weird little line to walk because I appreciate that. I mean, I love that we have high standards.

Matthew: Yeah.

Rubi: But it is, yeah, let's not, let's not render things obsolete, please.

Nick: Yeah, I mean it allows us to push for innovation like what I was saying from visibility channels like Rob kind of bought in this thing of like, "Hey, this is a new way that we can play things that like sets the bar", but it's also like through that we found out a new way to do things that allowed us to push that bar even further.

Matthew: Yeah.

Nick: So it's not just like one-upping ourselves by finding new branches that we could take, which just makes it super exciting to work here in my opinion.

Rubi: It does. And I think the theme that I'm finding in everything that we're talking about and the thing that makes me so incredibly happy is the thing the underlying theme and all of what our highlights are is watching players discover these cool things that we've put in game and virtually speaking watching, watching your faces light up, and watching how much you love finding these things that you guys have created.

Matthew: Yeah.

Rubi: So, again like we've been saying thank you so much for enjoying this world and making all of this hard work worth it.

Matthew & Nick: Yeah.

Nick: It definitely does make it all worth it.

Rubi: Yeah.

Nick: I can definitely agree on that.

Rubi: Yeah, because I mean we're here because we love to be here. And we're here because we love that you guys love to be here. So, well I will let you guys get back to work. Congratulations on another year of Guild Wars 2.

Matthew & Nick: Yes.

Rubi: And you guys have... more things to do to prepare for what's coming.

Nick: We, we sure do. I think Z said buckle up and that's, I was going through some upcoming content yesterday and buckle up, oh my gosh.

Matthew: Yeah.

Rubi: I know what you're both working on and I cannot wait for you guys to see what's coming.

Matthew: Yeah.

Nick: So it's gonna be exciting.

Matthew: To say the least.

Rubi: Alright, well why don't we take a look at another interview with one of our Guild Wars 2 voice actors, and I will let you guys get back to it. Thank you and congratulations and happy anniversary.

Matthew: You too.

Rubi: Alright, we'll be right back.

Interview with Yuri Lowenthal [1:04:42]

Yuri Lowenthal: Hi, my name is Yuri Lowenthal and I voice, among others, Faren and Hero-Tron, who sometimes Hobo-Tron, sometimes Job-o-Tron, who hopefully will just Heal-o-Tron, just keep troning. When I come in to record a session and I'm playing, you know, Asura Male or whatever, that's great, and it's always a good time. But when I see Faren, when I see his Faren script, I know it's gonna be an amazing day. "The delegation will be so impressed, received by not one, but two of the most distinguished heroes in the world."

Faren is such a delight. He is memorable to me and so dear to my heart because he is so earnest and so in love with himself, and yet he is without malice at all. If you were using that somehow or if you were treating people poorly because I mean you know except for Bongo, who's you know Bongo's did that's just Bongo's lot in life, I guess. But he's just he's just so charming and clueless that, that I adore him. I adore him mightily.

Do I have anything in common with Faren? We're both on the clueless, I think on the clueless scale, we're both pretty far to that end. And I do my best to live without malice, so I would have to say. And he's always got, here's the thing I think we might share most of all, is that he is infinitely optimistic, but more so than he should be. And I think we definitely share that because I am also, I live on the optimist's end of the scale.

Faren has changed over the time that I've played him for sure. And I love that. I mean, any actor will tell you that we love to play characters with arcs, characters who change. As much as I love Faren the way he is, it has been marvelous to watch him change over time. And... dare I say, grew up a little, is that horrible? We don't want him to grow up too much. Maybe, maybe just a little bit.

"Seems to me this Joko has already declared war on us, and I for one am joining the fight." Something that I know about Faren that nobody else knows. I'm always loath to give up secrets about Faren. The bluster covers, I think, the fact that he is very uncomfortable with the ladies. He does have quite the confidence that he would like you to believe. But I think Faren would, contrary to popular belief, he would love to settle down with someone, but he's never been able to find that person. (whispers) Also, also his first name's Bob. (Rubi laughs) Bob Faren.

(On-screen disclaimer: Lord Faren's first name is not actually "Bob")

If I could give Faren one piece of advice, it would be to wear pants more often. No, you know what? No, because I love that. It would be to actually take those lessons that Bongo gave him and practice more. So I think he's growing into a type Faren and that's going to need to back up the words that he says. So I think while nobody's looking behind the scenes, he should be practicing the heroing so that when it comes time to actually be the hero, he's got something I like to stand on. "Commander, I did it. The scarabs almost got me, but that day needed saving."

(laughter)

???: Yeah, you beat it. ^{[verification requested]} Keep it there. That was awesome.

Discussion with Eve Eschenbacher (Voiceover Lead) and Tom Abernathy (Narrative Director) [1:08:35]

Rubi: Bob Faren, you heard it here first.

(laughter)

Eve Eschenbacher: He's so great.

Rubi: I liked talking with Yuri so much. I could just sit there and chat with him all day. He's like the sweetest dude. So, well thank you guys for joining for our Guild Wars 2 Anniversary livestream. Thank you guys for sticking around with us. Happy anniversary! Congratulations on another year.

Tom Abernathy: Thank you. You too.

Rubi: Why don't you guys introduce yourselves to our viewers and talk a little bit about what you've been working on for over the past 12 months. Remember everything, no.

(laughter)

Rubi: He's like, "Oh, God."

Eve: Okay. Uh, I am Eve Eschenbacher. I'm the Voiceover Lead, and I have been working on all of the VO for the past year and plus.

(laughter)

Tom: I'm Tom Abernathy, I'm the Studio Narrative Director, which means I'm also the Narrative Director for Guild Wars 2, and over the last year we have finished and sent Path of Fire out into the world, and we have finished off Episode 6 of Season 3 in the time that I've been here, and then of course released the first three episodes of Season 4 this year, and we're coming up sometime soon, not going to say when, to an Episode 4. It'll happen.

Rubi: Someone at Gamescom asked me if I could tell them anything about episode 4. And I was like, "I can! Are you ready, are you ready? (whispers) Episode 4 is coming."

(laughter)

Tom: That's right. That's pretty much all we can say.

Rubi: I'm not wrong!

Tom: You are not.

Rubi: And I got to keep my job.

Tom: Like winter, it is -that's right.- like winter it is coming for sure.

Rubi: Yeah, so like you said the past 12 months and more because VO does like way way in advance, as does narrative even farther because you can't just get in front of the actors and be like "make something up".

Note: The text below hasn't yet been converted from raw subtitle text into pretty print like above.https://www.youtube.com/live/OQItV-R4kKk?&t=4203

We'll just edit together in post there are some days when it's just kind of you do you and we'll figure
But it is good to have some words
Well, not to, I mean, you know, we, we create the fictional context that everything happens
in and all of the gameplay.
So, in fact, narrative is, is, you know, for us at this company, and with this game especially,
narrative is basically, it kicks off the process in a lot of senses.
It's us usually working closely with Lindsay Murdock who's the lead content lead design
TAKE VO
GW2 and we start figuring out what the season is going to be
a year before the first episode will be released on average, I would say probably,
yeah, 9 to 12 months.
So we have a pretty good idea at this point of things going into the future.
And that video came out today, right?
Yes. Yes, okay, so I can say,
yes, there will be a season five.
My eyes just got like this big,
I was going, which one?
I don't know what you mean, how many,
but they're all on it.
So everybody now knows there will be a season five, yay.
So that is the thing we've been working on for longer
than frankly you probably would think
we would have been working on it.
And at the same time, we are in process,
we are literally in production for all the remaining episodes
for this season.
You know, that process, the process of, from initially conceiving a living world season
to the release of the last episode of the season is probably two and a half years plus
from beginning to end.
There is a lot going on.
Well, so what have been some of your favorite, I mean the things that we've released and
you guys get a pass on going much farther back into the past.
(laughing)
Over the past year, what are some of the things
that we've released that have been your favorite?
Or even with some of the VO stuff that we've--
Oh, we've had some really great sessions
with our actors. Yeah.
Let's see, we recorded episode three back in April, I think it was.
It was April.
It's the 4th.
It was July.
Five is coming up.
And so I'm living in like the middle of the--
I don't want to talk about it.
Three different episodes right now.
Yeah, because that's what Tom was saying.
We went and saw Infinity War while we were down in Burbank.
And I was just like traumatized.
Yep.
And so, yeah, trying to keep everything straight in my head, it's like, which episode was that
again?
Because I got to remember.
Okay, here we go.
It is hard because for us, it's like everything, so many episodes are in production at the
same time at different stages and we do forget what happens in which one.
We just knew what the sort of total story is.
Yeah.
And like what's coming to my mind right now is all stuff that I can't talk about because
That's episode four stuff that hasn't--
That's right.
It's coming.
There's awesome stuff coming.
We've got some really great stuff that we've done as well.
We've gotten more diversity in our cast
and that's something that was really important to me.
Being able to add new actors and new voices
and new types of voices in rather than just having
a whole bunch of white people in our cast.
Diversifying, getting more people
and--
Some of these, some of the actors that we've brought in have just been amazing.
I mean, all of our cast is amazing to start with, but, you know, when you bring in a new person,
you're like, "I hope this works out," and then they come in and they just blow you away.
You're like, "Yes."
Well, it has to be super stressful.
It's an unknown quantity, and there's a lot at stake.
And that is that's an important thing to think about and I know we've worked very hard on that the past couple of years because of the
Regions of Terry that we were moving into and we did need to diverse fire cast a little bit
And I feel like that's been really successful the actors that we've hired have been so unbelievably talented
Yeah, I mean alone. It was an amazing opportunity for that
And we've discovered
Excuse me a bunch as he said of actors of color
who we didn't know about and who ought to be getting work to be perfectly frank
more often than they do, who are fantastic. And so that's a great resource for us
because we love using them. The pool of actors that is now sort of part of our
company has been greatly enlarged and diversified and gives us all sorts of
new sort of flavors to work with. We called in a couple new actors, I'm just
thinking of for Path of Fire, Sonya Leslie and Cherise Booth.
And, you know, we just wanted to make sure we had a breadth of voices in Alona.
We got them in the booth.
Their credits on IMDb were, you know, kind of sparse compared.
But we get them in the booth and we're like, "Oh my goodness, these guys are amazing.
Like find more stuff for them.
Put them in the game wherever we can."
We started writing roles for them specifically.
Really, they were that good?
Well, I met Sonia Leslie and I listened to her work
and I was just sitting there in awe of how good her voice was.
She's very, very good.
I had a funny story actually with Sonia Leslie.
She's also the voice of the mother and teacher Suzy
on a kid's show called "Sid the Science Kid,"
which my son and I watched, yeah.
And so when I saw her name come up, I'm like,
Oh, she's teacher Susie.
This is going to be awesome.
And we call her in, she's recording with us.
And I was like, just so you know, my son absolutely
loves Sid the Science Kid.
And he and I watched together, and she's like,
I think that's the first time I can say that Sid the Science
Kid has gotten me a job.
Are you serious?
That's so funny.
And meanwhile, my kids over here going,
will you get Matthew Mercer's autograph?
So good of us.
Yeah.
That's awesome.
Well, going back to what you were saying about,
we record so much in one session,
I'm thinking back to April, because you guys are down there
so much more than I've gone once, twice in four years.
But I remember back in April we were doing like episode three
Festival of the Four Winds little bit of episode four and there was just so much crammed into that week
And there was a winner a fractal tour or something. Oh gosh, that's right. There was also the fractal. Yeah
Yeah, Alex off stage and say yes
There was a fractal I wrote.
We had that session I think was 3500 lines.
Which is pretty big for us.
33 or 3500 lines.
Yeah.
So much.
Yeah.
That's pretty big for us for sure.
Yeah.
I'm just like counting how it's like two studios, eight hours a day, five days and hopping
back and forth.
And we always have to do, we have to record cinematics for an episode with the previous
episode session because the Cinemax team needs that audio in advance because their work takes
longer to do.
Right, so like you said a little bit of episode four and all of these all these various things
You know, yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot. There's a good thing. We have great producers cuz and any because
You know, it's a lot of material. Yeah
Well, seeing some of, once you see all of this work, you've seen it done in the booth,
and you've seen it through, you've seen it through the table reads and everything,
would have been some of your favorite scenes to see.
Once we got Pathfire out the door, what were some of the favorite things that you got to
see on live and player reactions?
I know I'm lying, but...
Well, okay, so, yeah, and we've talked about this before, but the scenes in...
episode one when the commander goes to the jail to bust out Zayim and you hear over the
calm, you hear Timie begging for you, wanting to know where you are in a very hushed tone
and she begins weeping and you hear people dying and screams and stuff and then it becomes
clear that Joko has kidnapped her and is killing and awakening people in front of her, basically
to torture you, to get at you, right?
That for us was a really big scene because it sort of staked out new ground in terms
of how real we were planning to get with the emotional stakes and the weight of stuff that
happens.
So we knew we were taking a risk.
we crossed our fingers, thought it would work.
When we got the performance from Debbie that we got,
we knew as far as that was concerned that it would work.
She was amazing.
Oh yeah.
But you know, honestly I thought,
we're gonna put this out and they're,
how far players are gonna be like,
this is awesome and the other half are gonna be like,
whoa, that's kind of a little different, right?
What's wrong with you people?
Yeah.
And what was shocking to me in the best possible way
was that within a couple of hours of the release
of episode one,
We started already seeing people talking online about how
How affected they had been by that and how for the rest of the episode they were just I've got to find timey like like it
Let exactly the sense of urgency and and and sort of ramping up the pressure that we wanted it to and they care because it cared about her
So much and everything right and
And so it clearly succeeded in a way that, speaking for myself at least, I had never
dared to hope that it would, with a lot more people than I expected that it would.
And it felt like a real validation of the direction that we were sort of wanting to
go in.
And the thing that's unique in a lot of ways about
living world is that that you know we put that out and we're seeing that reaction
Within a couple of hours and and that very day we can then take that knowledge into our session
Sessions working on the other episodes ago
Okay
Now we have a sense of what they're going to be willing to go with us on right and and so the immediacy of that feedback loop is
Astonishing and so incredibly fun
So that's the big one that sticks with me.
Yeah.
Again, this speaks to something that Mike
and I were talking about earlier.
We are listening to you guys so hard
and we need to hear this
and we want to hear what you have to say about this.
like people like Tom and Eve are literally taking it right back into the recording studio and
Saying okay, here's here's what they're saying
Mm-hmm, and it's right it makes an enormous difference. It really is helpful. Yep, and and and of course we wanted
The impact on timey of those events to be something which lingered
across episodes because we're a serial we're not just an episodic show our storyline crosses episodes our character arts cross episodes and so
There is we knew then what we could do with Debbie and what we could do with timey
That she could handle the end that we thought the players could handle and and not all of that has has come out yet
But but it will
And I think people like it.
Well, and it helps with Debbie specifically.
It helps talking to her and hearing what she has to say
over the years.
She cares deeply for this character on a personal level.
She's not just coming in like, okay,
who is this, this, this Tayme?
(laughing)
You know, I'll read this thing on this paper.
She knows this character and she loves her
and she cares for her very, very much and relates to her.
And she's got,
She's got this character in her head and it you can really tell yeah
We have so many actors and Yuri is another one who's with Farad as you can see
Who who do they've been playing these characters for a long time and and they have watched and
Participated in the evolution of those characters as well, right?
One thing that we talked about a lot is is that a number of our characters including the the PC frankly
are not exactly the same now six years down the line as they were when the game first started and
We we hope that we're always working to give
actors an ever more rich and fully dimensional sort of a
Set of material to work with when they come into the booth
And they do, we give them the scripts and information ahead of time.
They know what the story is going to be, they know what the arcs are, and they come in really
ready to play ball in a way that they don't have the opportunity to, and a lot of the
jobs they work.
And so that's another reason I think that they really like working with us.
If there's a behind the scenes story that I kind of want you to tell because it really affected me
We were talking about when Joakook kidnapped Jaime and you what she was she was having to do that weeping
Oh, yeah, and I I will just find out this way
It was that one of the most stressful sessions I've been in not because of of anything that
you know, like was going poorly, but because it was going so well, because that session was like Debbie
Dairyberry sobbing for four straight hours. And she was amazing. Yeah, we did the lights. Everybody
is just sitting there in the booth watching her performance like.
like you know yes biting our nails we're also stressed and please understand
how tall is she she's a little bit shorter like she's that is one way you
could put it like yeah she's shorter than I am but no she's she's amazing but
we're all sitting there just like
like panicked and stressed for her listening to her deliver these lines and I have a fitbit that my my
Pedometer here it also chart watches my heart rate
So I bring up my data after the session and my heart rate was spiked like for the entirety of this session
I'm just like in high anxiety just watching her
I'm sitting there going this is gonna be amazing when we get this into the game because if it's affecting me that much
Just sitting here listening to it bearing being recorded
Like, it's going to blow people's minds.
Yeah. And everybody had very strict instructions.
You're going to want to comfort her when she comes out.
Leave her alone.
Don't just let her deal in her own way.
Yeah, we had more people probably in the control room that day
than we ordinarily would like for a scene like that.
You want to...
Not put too much stress on add stress to the actors you know situation but just
because of various things that were going on we needed to have that many
people down there at the time and my recollection was that at least three of
them were in tears of various points during the session it was super intense
and and and we you know we had a long talk with Debbie beforehand
about what it was gonna be like and what we're gonna want.
Oh yeah, she was, before she went into the booth,
she had a good grasp on where we were going to be going
and was ready to go there.
And you have to, I think, respect actors
and the difficulty of what they do
and extend to them that courtesy of letting them know
what you want and giving them the opportunity
to agree to go there with you because, you know,
it's not an easy,
job that kind of a session for sure.
Sure.
Normally, you know, normally with a recording session,
and I'm speaking in broad generalities of all recording sessions for VO games,
a lot of times the actors will see the material for the first time when they come to the booth.
and we made sure that we got a hold of her beforehand
and said, "So you know, we're gonna be doing something
"very different, just be ready for it.
"We're gonna talk to you beforehand."
Just to kind of mentally prep her for the session
because it wasn't the normal Guild War session.
It's good to mentally prepare our voice actors
for surprising things.
That's a story for another day.
(laughing)
Well, we wanna elevate our material
and the performances and everything
to a level above what you usually get.
in those video games and other animated stuff,
things that most of the actors work on, right?
I mean, if you're an on-camera actor
or you're in a stage play,
you have at least part of a script
and frequently the whole thing,
and you can study who your character is
and sort of do your homework
before you come in to do the thing.
Right.
And we feel like it's only gonna help our actors
and get better performances out of them
if they have that same kind of information
available to them ahead of time, so.
Yeah, absolutely.
So that is time is kidnapping and watching or hearing the things that Joko was absolutely
a highlight in a very upsetting and stressful way for me over the past year.
But something I'm going to I'm going to jump in and give one of my own hearing fair and
grow up a little bit.
has been because he kind of had to.
Has been such a huge highlight for me because again, like you said, Yuri is another actor who has a very real affection for his character
and who knows him and has walked this path over the years in Guild Wars 2.
And it seemed fair and turned...
And I say this with all love and affection, from this gigantic doofus.
And he's still like this lovable, gigantic doofus, but he's had to very suddenly, like, stuff got real.
And he's had to very suddenly grow up a little bit.
And he's kind of...
He had this line at one point like you gave me busy work before and I'm not having it anymore
Mm-hmm, and I'm still kind of an idiot, but I'm working on it right
and like Yuri's selling this because
He's he's like got this thing where he's so proud of Baron. Yeah, cuz he's trying
Yeah, he's an amazing actor and yeah, and hearing that when it translated into game
I was like, oh my gosh, it's it worked because
He believes it. Yeah, well and and part of the the kinds of directions that we're going in that we were talking about a minute ago
Involves that right involves involves characters who we feel like the last time we left them
Maybe they weren't quite in a place that is where we want them to stay we want we want we want to
Who are you thinking of?
Cabram, naturally.
That's what I'm thinking of.
Come on, we're all thinking of you.
Yeah, I mean, you know, he's a character, another example of somebody who we felt like, and this isn't just us.
I mean, we were studying players talking about him, and clearly they were not satisfied as a group.
with sort of where he'd been left as a character they felt he'd become this emo Mopi
Kind of stick in the mud whom who they didn't yeah, I mean, you know, well and his mom
I mean you had good reason granted
there was a lot of discussion about that back then and
the a lot of these sentiment was
Players, you're feeling something, you're feeling anger and people don't always handle grief well.
Right.
Sometimes you handle grief like an enormous jerk.
Right.
Right.
Or a child.
Sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think, yeah, so I'm not slamming Bram and saying that.
I think you had very good reasons for being in the space he was in.
But we felt like he'd been in it long enough.
And we wanted to--
Boop!
Yeah, that's right.
We thought that what the commander would want for him,
basically, would be to give him a little kick in the seat
and say, look, you can't spend your whole life
grieving for the things that you've lost.
We all lose things and it matters for sure.
And again, that's not going away.
Bram's carrying that with him,
even as we move forward in a lot of different senses,
not to give anything away.
But we felt it was important that Bram
begin to grow up a little bit
and begin to recognize that
that he has a life that he needs to live and he has his own legend he needs to go make happen right?
And yeah and and and
and it's funny because of course in episode three particularly we had Joko. Joko's pretty hard on Bram.
Joko Joko makes some pretty harsh
He really got shot.
Like that whole scene, I'm walking through like, man, you don't let up.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The jokes about him being stupid and all that kind of stuff.
And Bram's not stupid. But we loved, one particular thing that the writers really loved was,
I forget whose idea it was, but...
When Bram goes, "EPI DEM, IC epidemic."
I can't spell, you know?
Because he's having fun with it.
I forgot about that.
Yeah, so he still has a little ways to go.
He's not quite over all those things yet,
but there's more to come in terms of his journey.
And he's definitely character.
that we're bringing back to life in that way.
I'm glad we're moving out of that rut.
Yeah.
And I love that we didn't just flip the switch.
Like, oh, he's fine now.
Yes.
Very important.
He's growing.
This is the thing, we don't wanna make anything
like that happen, like that, right?
Everything needs to be a multi-episode sort of arc.
It's a slow walk for all these characters.
Yeah, it is. It's weird.
Or it would have been weird for Bram to be like,
"What? No, I was never awful to you."
No, it's everything's fine. We're happy now.
There were things that had to get worked through.
And so another thing that I really love is the end of episode 2.
where they keep going through the portals,
trying to find their way back home.
And then the last one, they're sort of stuck on this rock
in the middle of space, you know, Thanos' land, basically, right?
And they've got nothing to do,
and it becomes clear that the thing,
the only thing they have to do maybe is talk about the thing.
Super awkward. Right?
And just as they're about to do it,
that Gord comes through on the on the calm and it's like,
Oh, thank God you're here.
Okay, we'll go home now.
Right?
Like we wanted to bring them to that point,
but not actually let them have the conversation yet.
Okay, this is uncomfortable enough.
Here we go.
Right.
Right.
Yeah, it's it's going to be interesting watching
his progression and his journey.
But I am glad like you said it's a gradual thing and not just okay. Everything's fine now. Yep. Wow snapping was in super poor taste
Go me
Yeah, we have there are more characters who those things similar things gonna be happening with yes
We can we can say a lot more in a couple of months. Oh, man
My theme for the day is I cannot wait for you guys to see what's coming. Yeah, so alright. Well, thank you both happy anniversary
Congratulations on another year you too
and save me some pizza.
(laughing)
All right, well, you guys actually might want to hang out
in the room for a little bit longer
because we have another VO actor interview.
Yeah, we're gonna talk with Karly Walgren.
Oh, Karly! Yes!
Yes, right? Yay!
Karly's one of my favorite people.
Yes, she is awesome, so stick around
and we'll be back in just a couple minutes.
Thank you guys. Thank you.
Thank you.
(whooshing)
Hi, I'm Kari Walgren and I play Keith.
Keith is very enigmatic.
I always like characters that aren't straight up good or straight up evil.
So her alliances are always a little bit in question in the game, which is a lot of fun.
She's a Silvari and she kind of does what she wants.
She's not really playing for any one team.
No timey. Commander.
We have a lot to talk about, don't we?
I think one of the most fun moments of Voice and Cath was some of her scenes with Fallon.
They were so lovely and deep and very touching,
and I think they just kind of showed us some insight into her character that we hadn't seen before.
So for me personally, I just, I really enjoyed that.
Keith has gone through a lot and changed through the game and I think vocally it just kind of adds layers.
It adds subtext to the character, which is always great.
You know, when you have a game that...
is long running and you get to know the characters on a deeper and deeper level.
That's like really fun for us on the voice acting side.
Because you get to explore different parts of their personality
and you get to learn more about them and I think that comes through in the performance.
We have a lot of work ahead of us.
I think I can help with that.
I think my favorite thing about Keith is that we never know what to expect from her.
We never know who she's going to side with.
We never know if she's going to help us or lead us astray.
We never know who she's going to love.
She's just very, very enigmatic.
If I could give Keith a piece of advice, maybe watch her back.
This is fun, wasn't it?
We should collaborate again sometime.
[Laughter]
Here we go as you kind of continue.
[MUSIC]
We, the gods, saw there could be no victory in our inevitable conflict with the Elder Dragons.
If you won't join the fight against the Dragons, I'll see you all burn with them.
That conflict could only end in two ways.
The ruin of the city.
Or the utter destruction of Tyrion's magical balance.
We only handed an elder dragon the energy of a god.
What could go wrong?
The Awakened have been terrorizing our town.
Caging anyone who resists.
I don't know how much longer we can survive.
Orin?
Hope she still remembers who her friends are.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(air whooshing)
(upbeat music)
All right, welcome back.
Thank you guys for joining.
Happy anniversary, Happy Guild Wars two birthday.
It's a happy day.
I am so happy that we're going through this
and getting to talk to all of you guys.
Why don't you two introduce yourselves and talk about what you've been working on the past year?
I'm Alex Cain. I'm a writer and narrative designer here at ArenaNet
This year gosh, I've been on a lot of things. I started by writing
Books that showed up in episode one of Living World. I did some open-world stuff for episode two
I worked on
Fractal for the deep stone fractal. I was the writer on that and
Next raid that we're hinting at but haven't really talked about too much, but that's that's coming
Yes, it is indeed coming people know it's coming. They don't know what it is
I do. Sorry. Ben?
Same thing as him, I worked on raids.
Oh, I'm Ben Arnold. I am the content programmer for Fractals and Raids.
So obviously worked on raids.
And, you know, the random fractal updates, new fractals, QOL.
Sometimes random things for living world and obviously pathifier stuff.
Oh, festival before wins too.
That one too.
That one is the...
Oh, that's right.
Yeah.
We worked on a lot of the same things, I guess.
Yeah.
Which is why I scheduled you together.
Yeah.
Well, what have been some of your favorite highlights over the past year?
Well, you go first.
And you don't have to just pick one.
I was kidding earlier.
Oh, okay.
I mean, all of my favorite highlights are...
I think my most favorite highlight is the things that I can't talk about yet.
That's so frustrating.
Yeah, it is pretty frustrating.
But just being able to work with the Fractals and Raids seems together has been pretty amazing.
Originally we were kind of more separated, but our content had a lot of overlap.
So while we would kind of come together for some meetings and things, there were a lot of resources.
that one team would sort of miss out on that the other team had.
So when we sort of combined the teams,
it allowed us to kind of share those resources more efficiently.
We had meetings together to sort of plan out all the different encounters
using the skill sets of both teams together.
And that's just been a joy. I've enjoyed it.
And I think it's going to be a good thing for the content going forward.
It's a fun group too, just having everyone in the same room.
You can toss ideas between the different teams, like, "Oh, this isn't good for the fractal,
but it'd be good for the raid," you know, and there's a lot of that.
But gosh, yeah, I mean, I'm also really excited for things I can't talk about, but...
Yeah, I want to say that the Festival of the Four Winds was a really fun sort of highlight.
It was really great to see that stuff go out as quickly as it did.
You know, that's just the nature of the festival, I suppose.
And, you know, people have a very strong connection to the original Festival of the Four Winds.
So it was really fun to see that sort of immediate payoff for that.
But I think that the Deep Stone Fractal was probably the most...
satisfying thing that I worked on that I can talk about.
That was sort of the first big solo project that I worked on.
Insofar as something is solo here in a writing capacity,
you're always talking through your scripts with other writers,
and you're working with your table reads,
and you're talking with designers.
Yeah, so that was a lot of fun.
I think it's on my mind because we were just talking with Tom and Eve about VO stuff.
But like we said, we were working on,
I just happened to be in the recording studio watching
when we were recording some of the VO
for the Deep Stone Fractal.
And hearing some of the VO was like the spookiest session
I've ever, I was just sitting there going,
oh, I think that's Cthulhu's stuff happening
and maybe I should just leave
because everyone here is definitely gonna die.
Yes, people, you know, I knew that players
would figure it out.
Eventually, and they figured it out very quickly, that the language that John Demagio's, or
not John Demagio's, Steve Bloom's character is speaking in the Deep Stone Fractal is a
vocalization of a written only, text only cipher that was in...
earlier content in the Guild Wars universe and it did not translate perfectly to English
at spoken word, it was kind of nonsense.
And you did get a lot of these, you know, it looks like a Lovecraftian, sort of like
there are 14 consonants back to back, what am I supposed to do with that?
You know, my kingdom for a vowel.
But yeah, he is Steve Bloom.
He performed it admirably.
I do remember hearing John DiMaggio,
there's a bit at the end where he's talking,
he and Steve Bloom were like overlapped a little bit.
And so he was timing it to Steve Bloom's original dialogue.
And,
You know just hearing John sort of you know like like what exactly is going on here? Who what is he saying?
Just do it. Yeah
And he did he did it really well. It was a lot of fun. Yeah, it was I was that a session that you skyped in for
I did Skype in for that one. I wanted to go but I got to go to the next one instead
which was the-Oh, I'm so jealous.
I wanted to go to that one.
I desperately, yeah, so that one was for the raid.
I actually got it wrong when I was gesticulating wildly
to Eve and Tom before about the last record session.
Oh, okay.
It was for the raid and it was a lot of fun
and people should be very excited about it.
I am like chewing my tongue in half over here.
Yeah.
Quick, talk about the last raid wing.
[LAUGHTER]
The last one, you mean the one before the new one?
Yes, don't talk about the one that's not out yet.
It's killing me.
Hall of Chains was really great.
Hall of Chains was a good one.
It was.
We should talk about that some more.
Please.
That one was a lot of fun to work with because it was another thing where we were making a boss fight that was a god.
Which reminds me of Balthazar, when we had to make Balthazar. How do you make a fight with a god that feels like you're fighting a god, but isn't actually like fighting a god because he would just wipe the floor with you.
Byron did a really good job with the actual Doom encounter and just the whole aesthetic of the raid itself. Just the underworld.
There was a location we had.
been two before raids and it was something that just the whole aesthetic of it is not something we'd really seen before.
And just that in itself and just all the encounters I think came together really nicely.
So if you enjoyed that one I think you're gonna enjoy the next one for sure.
I didn't work on it but I enjoy it as a fan. I've seen many playthroughs of it.
Well going back, I mean the underworld raid in particular, I mean that's a place that is iconic from the first Guild Wars.
And that feels like...
Was that intimidating? I mean was that something that you had to step back and take a harder look at before you went back there?
So luckily I didn't really have to because I didn't we didn't really fully merge the teams until sort of the end of the development
I just sort of jumped in there to help with building some of the skills out and kind of polishing up things like making all the
weird cracky patterns on the ground for Doom for instance.
I feel like...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But just working in that space and working on all those things was a little intimidating because you have to make these skills that
Kind of compliment the whole arena and compliment
The fact that you're in the underworld and you're fighting, you know, like a god of death
Sure, that was yeah
Feel like the god of death is probably gonna win. Yeah, maybe not it had to feel that way
But you have to always be able to triumph
Right. Well, yeah, you get at least a shot. Yeah. So what were some of the QL things that you put out?
Well, actually just recently one of the big ones was that we shipped today. The agony resistance changes now in fractals.
You can see the agony resistance up in the top left hand corner,
which was a problem before because you would sort of jump into a fractal with somebody who maybe wasn't familiar with agony resistance or didn't realize
they didn't have enough so then they would die to it.
And then we also moved the instabilities to the top right hand corner because having all those buffs on your bars all constantly shuffling around makes it really hard to tell what's going on sometimes.
But there's been a lot of things like we are I added the thick health bars option so you can look at how you can see health better for your party or your squad.
You can see like who's in your subgroup instead of just in the squad and actually help healers kind of be healers in our game.
Yeah.
a lot of other stuff that I'm blanking on right now.
I try to do little QOL things every now and then
in between bigger projects, if I have some downtime,
I kind of look at some of the low hanging fruit
and try to do some of that.
Honestly, all of those little touches like that,
they add up to make an enormous difference
and make the game so much better.
Yeah, usually the little QOL patch notes
are the ones that get the most comments
and things on Reddit. Isn't that funny?
Yeah, it's like the smallest little feature,
but everybody freaks out about it.
Yeah, it's very true.
Alright, well, I will let you guys get back to work because apparently there's something else coming.
I don't know. I don't know.
There's some stuff.
We're dying here, you guys.
Seriously.
Can we like push this anniversary back by a bit?
I don't know.
No, there's stuff that you guys need to get finished.
Yeah.
Okay.
Alright.
Congratulations.
Happy anniversary.
Happy anniversary.
Get back to work.
You have something to get out the door.
It's true.
Uh, guys, stick around. We will be back in just a couple minutes.
God of War.
We know there's something in the desert that will help us turn the tide against Balthazar.
So, will this be your first Godfight?
Yeah, you...
(dramatic music)
The Elder Dragons will die by my hands.
And their blow up will become my power.
I fear he may get the weapon.
If he does, the consequences will be unpredictable.
We're gonna kill a god or what?
We cannot defeat him on our own.
There's no coming back. We must strike now.
Look out for the band in this room!
No more running, Baltasard! Face me!
[music playing]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Head over to page three.
Hey, I'm Misty Lee, and I play Rocks Whetstone,
and various and sundry other human people,
and sometimes people that are dying.
Stepping into the role of an established character is sometimes really scary because you want to make sure that you're honoring all the mythology that has come before,
while also bringing a new heart and honoring the new line and the new adventures that they're about to take.
So it's a huge responsibility, but it's also a tremendous privilege because what an awesome role, right?
Olmecon! Our place is on the front with Ritlach Brimstone!
Today we fight to take down a tyrant!
Rox is awesome because she's gruff and tough and has always been so independent,
but really she just wants to belong and she never really thought she could.
So the fact that she's now on this new journey and learning to function within this community,
she's kind of cracking open.
And it's a really beautiful, wonderful thing to see this gruff exterior,
but this beautiful light on the inside.
They really are amazing fighters, but they don't let fighting define them.
My favorite thing about Rox is that she has this playful gruffness that's followed by a lot of heart.
So she's got this sass and this brass and this really gold glow.
If I could give Rox one piece of advice, it would be you are enough.
Rox and I have a lot in common, 'cause you know I'm pretty brassy,
and I'm pretty tough on the exterior, but very soft and squishy in the inside, like a lobster.
And it affects everything about her, because you want to honor all this bad assery,
and yet you want to bring that warmth, because it's always there.
Even though she's worked so hard to try to fight it, and try so hard to be independent,
she loves everybody.
Some day he'll grow up.
I have to keep believing that.
One of the most fun moments I've had doing Roxas' voice, well, it's all of them.
Every time Bram is in the room with her, I mean, it's just, it's like, you know,
he'll grow up someday. I have to keep believing that.
You know, like, she's just so optimistic and yet tolerates so much.
Oh my god, we're done.
Fantastic.
[Buzzing]
[Music]
[Music]
Welcome back to the Guild Wars 2 6th Anniversary live stream. I am here with two more of our developers.
Why don't you two introduce yourselves and talk about what you've been working on here.
Hello, I'm Jessica Croft.
I am currently a rewards designer. You might have known me from living world from story from rate from everything
All the things yeah a little bit of everything and I'm caramel claim and I am a game designer are working on these skills side of things
Doing all the elite specializations, you know, I can answer lots of questions about those
We did a lot of design on those
So yeah, that's basically all I got
Alright, well let's talk about some of what you guys have enjoyed working on over the past year.
I know there's a lot, so you can just pick out some of your favorites.
Okay, why have you asked me that? I struggled because I'm like, wait, oh yeah, that was two years ago.
How about, I'll prompt you first, Jessica, how about Hall of Chains?
Ta-dah!
So you were, I was watching you interview Ben and like you asked him some questions and
I just wanted to, like I was sitting over there and I just wanted to dive on screen
and be like, "Wait, I can answer that, but I'm pretty sure that people want to appreciate
that."
And that was your moment, I would have appreciated it so much.
Oh, how it chains.
So I worked on HoloChains primarily on the original concepting of the raid and primarily on Desmina's character and the fights and everything leading up to that.
It was, I think the thing you asked was like, is there a lot of concern? Is it scary working with something as well known to players as the underworld?
And the answer is hell yeah, I mean like the thing is
It's that rose-colored glasses thing, like no matter what you do, if you try and make
something that was like the original, you're inevitably going to not live up to what players
expect in their head because it looks amazing in their head.
It didn't look that amazing.
Go look at it and go worst one.
It was good for a time.
But the nostalgic glasses are so strong.
Yeah.
So the thing you run into is like, "Oh, I'm going to go to the next one."
Do we try and ultimately like disappoint some people to recreate that experience?
Or do we kind of like branch out?
We go for some of the same themes but kind of scrive into a new direction, make it our own, make it a very Guild Wars 2 experience.
And that's what we did.
It works for the lore of the underworld especially since it's an ever-shifting place and you know
It's been a long time since you've been in there. There's also a lot of upheaval
When you go in there if you fault no spoilers, I guess for the the raid, but yeah
It's like so far past the spoiler time limit on this right
It's okay. It's like being handed this cherished thing and then being expected to live up to the expectations of that
That's what that that's kind of the scary part
It can be super scary because again the nostalgic goggles are so hard
You're never gonna live up to
someone's
Someone's memory of what they think it was like when it's not necessarily the reality
I mean for me in particular that yeah for me in particular is Ricky because
Lindsay
Who was my direct boss at the time work made the original underworld? Oh?
Oh, I would just take the president's under my desk you are a brave person to me
This industry makes you brave. It's it's very true. There's a sound bite for you
(laughing)
But it came out extremely, extremely well.
I've seen a lot of player feedback on that one, and a lot of people had a lot of fun
with that, so congratulations.
Yeah, I'm glad I like this.
You can call that a highlight of the past year.
It certainly was a big part of that year of my life.
Right.
Yeah.
How about you Carl, what were some of your highlights of the past 12 months?
The past 12, well I guess the Path of Fire stuff that came out.
We were hard at work in trying to like get a bunch of new and cool elite specializations
out there.
I put a lot of time and effort into like the Weaver, the Elementalist stuff and working
on a lot of like kind of fine-tuning like little pieces of like animation and, and,
and making sure that it felt like a very complete unique experience.
You just reminded me of something, Wayne, you mentioned the Weaver, because we had a lot of our members of the partner program visit the studio to preview some of the new elite specializations.
There was one partner.
And you and I were like prowling around waiting for somebody to log in on the weaver and one of our partners did and you and I were like
Standing behind that person waiting for them to start figuring out the weaver
It was it took a little while and then and then they are like
As soon as they like, you know, like, change of tunements and they're like, "Oh, what's this?
Okay, now change of tunements again.
Oh, what's this?"
And then they started poking around and it's like, "Oh, oh my goodness."
And their eyes were just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and they know
who you are.
That was every bit as gratifying as I hoped it would be when they started figuring out.
Way cool to see kind of the excitement building and like that.
just that realization of what this is.
Yes. It was really fun.
It was hard for me,
and I loved it just as someone who played that elite spec.
It was hard for me not to just shove their hands away
and be like, "Okay, let me show you."
I can't imagine how you were feeling,
just keep your hands behind your back.
(laughing)
Holding on. Yes.
You know, there's been...
So aside from elite specializations and kind of like and working on those and seeing those go out and people we are all excited and
play the heck out of them.
Yeah, there's been we've been working on balance. We've been working on like doing a
changes and reworks and all that kind of stuff and underwater was one of those
that you got to kind of work on together Jessica and I and we had I got to do a
bunch of I am wearing the shirt today Revenant underwater we get to work on
that Trident stuff that went out for them adding a new weapon to the game
was really fun to just kind of like hey here's an update
For Underwater, new weapon. Let's go.
And just get worked on a bunch of the reward stuff for that.
Yeah, I mean that was a really fun process just because as systems,
I don't know how much you guys know about the structure of our teams,
but systems does whatever any other team needs in terms of systems request.
So very often, I'll be working on one thing for Living World,
Carl will be working on some PvP update,
and we're all on different things.
But for the underwater stuff, we're all on the same thing.
Like Carl was showing me all these cool skills all the time,
and then I was like, "Oh, man, okay, I got--"
What do you think about this?
I gotta make this super motivating
for players to actually see this stuff.
And so it was really fun having that kind of...
That mutually supporting relationship there. Yeah, do you want to talk a little bit more about the systems team because?
most of you guys don't work here, so
Are less familiar I imagine a couple of you do
Hi guys outside the office. What's up? Get back to work. No, we're celebrating today. Hey, work a little bit, please
We have a lot to do
But if you guys want to give a high level what the systems team does and introduce your team to people.
Yeah, I think a lot of Carl do that.
Carl's like, thanks.
You're the lead, right?
This is a weird time to be asking this, but you're the lead, right?
No, I'm not the lead.
Is it a radio?
You all met, everybody met Matt Pennebaker a little bit earlier.
Yes.
And he is the lead for the system team.
I thought he was like the lead lead.
Our radio has been running.
Who's been working on getting everything wait a second are you saying you're not more important than I am?
Yeah, so Randy has been working on on like kind of getting everybody together and working as this
advanced unit over the last, well that's another thing, over the last like a bit of
time and something's been developing recently. We actually had a forum chat
a little bit. Yeah. And we got on there and like kind of introduced the
systems team and talked about like you know the things we do and I
One of my posts was more about how we choose to rework things or what we do when we're
looking at feedback and reading through the analytics and stuff like that and how we choose
what to work on for that period of time.
Awesome.
Thanks.
I'm so curious about the power structure now.
I'm gonna...
I think what we're learning here is...
That took such a funny turn.
What we're learning here is Carl has a very commanding personality.
Cool.
She just believed in this and you've...
I partly feel like I'm gonna...
On the other hand, I am all struck at your ability to lead, even though you're not the leader.
And now she's gonna push you around.
So?
Yeah, no more taking orders from you.
Yeah, at one point I was the...
That was my job to kind of like kind of steer some of the elite specialization stuff
So but you know we can we can work around all that kind of stuff. I
Love it. So
Back to underwater
How was the player feedback? How did it feel seeing the player feedback and all of these new things that you could do
underwater once you guys got done working on this? Because I know I loved reading.
Wow, look at all of these things that we've added.
I got it.
I think the most satisfying part of that for me is much like the real world.
There is a lot of water in Korea.
That you're wondering where it's going with that one.
They're like a hundred places you could have.
Yeah, I took it the good place.
You're welcome. There's so many places underwater that players really had either no reason to explore or no motivation to explore.
And it's all of this content, like it's entirely a land mass, well, kind of a land mass, that just players don't go to.
And it was really exciting to see players actually be reinvigorated and actually taking the dive back into the water.
Had to slip one pun in.
It's fine.
I remember when we talked about before the water puns were just, they were ever, there was a flood of them.
Thank you.
Well I'm glad some of you got your toes wet.
Okay.
So well thank you guys.
I know a lot of the work your team does is kind of in the background.
So thank you for everything.
especially things like the underwater revamp that goes out there and gives
players a whole new area to explore and a reason to go back in there. You guys
have had a lot to put out in the past year and I know there's a lot more coming
but again can't quite talk about yet. Even today we got to do some of some
reworks we got the the Herald stuff going in there. That's right. And then like we
got the Guardian staff reworked.
Do you want to talk about those a little bit?
I guess.
Surprise!
Surprise!
Garnier staff got a little bit of a rework.
This update we felt like the weapon, it wasn't cohesive at all.
Its whole goal was supposed to be like, this is your support weapon and it's sort of like,
it wants to be a little bit of healer and it wants to be kind of like this.
area control thing and it's also melee and so we kind of took one of those
aspects we said it's less of a melee weapon now now it is it's going to be
ranged it's going to be it's gonna have it's two skill it's one of its defining
abilities is now going to have some heals on it and it's gonna and so we're
you're the Guardian is able a little bit
provide a little bit more support with that weapon itself.
You know, and it wasn't intended to like, it wasn't like, we're going to take this weapon, we're going to turn it into a damage weapon.
That's not what this was about. It's supposed to be like, you have the ability to, you know, hit multiple targets at range now if you...
if you so choose. But we're taking and kind of shifting the focus more toward that support.
So those are fun. Awesome. And got new effects. And got to put those some cool new effects onto
the weapon itself. That was really fun to see something like change.
I'll be honest, I haven't had time to log in at all today, so.
I got to play a little bit, too.
I will go look very soon, but I was a little busy getting ready for...
Speaking of heralds.
Speaking of heralds.
Speaking of heralds.
So, I want to talk about a whole different herald, and that's...
You're giving that look like you were...
I'm trying so hard to remember an employee named Harold.
I don't think we're ever employing heralds.
Not that we discriminate against heralds.
Don't take it that way.
But one of the things that's really satisfying to me
as a designer is seeing something that just
started off as a small side project.
Blossom and and just become something that the fans are really excited about and
I'm of course speaking to Lady Camilla who is your herald for episode three
like I was I needed to
Have an NPC that you could work with that new things about you that's very excited about your history in order to do the
banner collection the back banner collection and
And...
The idea to struck me it's like there's this herald that has
Sent you some mail throughout the course of your leveling up and seem to know a lot about you
But you've never found out anything about them. You've not you don't know what they look like
You don't know what gender they are you know what race they are
That's like we should we should fill that out just to round out the world a little bit more and to bring back a surprise
character that people might actually be interested in knowing more about totally and
And--
So yeah, I ended up throwing together the composite. The composite is like what the character physically looks like in the world
It's complicated
but yeah, I threw it together and I put her in the game and you know
I thought she would just be like a stepping stone for the whole collection and
But then like one day I was reading Reddit and there's this thread and I cannot remember the person who did the art, but thank you so much shout out to you
Person from Reddit. I don't remember the name. I'm so sorry
but
they did this thread about how like
Lady Camilla is criminally unappreciated and it's like this appreciation thread for your Herald and they did fan art of the character
And I was just so touched by that. I love that. Yeah
That's way cool
tons of comments about how she's the perfect GW2 waifu.
So I guess it takes one to know one.
That is honestly that kind of thing
where you put this character in there
because you felt like she needed more.
There's this Herald that's been...
writing you letters and acknowledging your accomplishments all of this time.
And this was just like a little labor of love over here on the side.
And that player feedback, that's what we've been talking about all afternoon is that
this is the kind of feedback that we love that keeps us going and
it feels amazing.
To have that kind of feedback. Yeah, I mean we were we were people we read reddit sometimes
It's not the best idea and but sometimes you read it and I read everything
For I'm sorry
picturing cereal boxes and
Like the back of shampoo bottles and yes, I read everything
Read everything
Pillows I read those do you tear them off first because that's terrible
No.
But that kind of thing, it's really gratifying to know that that work that you put in is seen
and loved and appreciated.
That's why a lot of us are in this industry.
Yeah, we're here because we love it and we appreciate that you do too.
So well thank you both for your time.
I appreciate it.
Congratulations on another year of Guild Wars 2.
Six years you guys.
Yeah.
Six years.
What?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, well, yes, here's to six more.
We're still not out of to drink.
My water, yay.
Cheers.
Cheers.
Congratulations, you guys.
You all stick around.
We will be back in just a couple minutes.
For the six years I have played Guild Wars 2, I have witnessed how this game that I love
has redefined the MMORPG genre. I have adventured through beautiful lands, and discovered in
myself a spark of creativity kindled by a community of gamers I am proud.
To be a part of, I am the Crichton Herald, and I invite you to come and celebrate the
6th anniversary of Guild Wars 2 with me.
Let's all hope for at least another six years and remember our favorite experiences in the
game. Some of mine include organizing the two glorious raid tournaments with thousands
of viewers watching and of course racing for Worlds first in the five raid wings we currently
have. I can't wait to see what arena it has in store for us in the future. I am confident
it will be a truly epic adventure.
Hello everyone, my name is Sam and I have been an Ironhide Partner for nearly a year.
This almost coincides with the 6th birthday of this amazing game that we're all playing together.
This game that I call amazing because it has allowed me, throughout my active years,
to meet some of the most wonderful people I could have ever wished for.
Funnily enough, I'm gonna be spending the days leading up to the anniversary
with these very people at the Gamescom Festival.
And none of that could have ever happened without Guild Wars 2 bringing us together.
Hi, my name is Cassandra Logan and I'm an aspiring game artist.
My passion for video game art began 10 years ago because of a Guild Wars art contest.
This year marked the exciting launch of Path of Fire as well as my
into the creative partner program.
ArenaNet and the Gillers 2 community
has constantly inspired me to strive towards my dream.
Thank you so much for your support of me
and others like me.
Happy sixth anniversary.
(coughing)
Keep it.
There's a little wind on the microphone.
Let's check it.
My name is Matthew Mercer and I'm the voice of the male Norn Clare character.
I've been with Guild Wars 2 for a while now.
Quite a while.
It's been a gracious and awesome ride.
But I've done a lot of things in between.
between each expansion of the game and so it's always kind of a fun way to keep
to keep the character voice and personality it's a little bit of dialing back into the world
thankfully they do have audio reference the last time you record so when you get in the booth you can
match what you previously did but also it's kind of the drive to the session is
very much getting in the mind space your character and thankfully my character in this game
The male norn is a lot taller and brawnier than I am, so it's a fun little play in the freeway on the way over,
just feeling larger and more dangerous, I think.
I'll deal with it. Don't go anywhere. The Sun Spears will decide what to do with you.
One of the challenges for voicing a player character versus a non-player character is non-player characters are generally
Story-fixed meaning there there's a moment in time and a scene in which you have to
Really encompass what the mindset of that character is and you can be more dynamic
You can be more in the moment as a player because a lot of bits of dialogue have to fit together
You have to find this sweet spot where things don't
stand out against each other too much in case any of these branching trees of dialogue and such intersect,
but also sound natural,
and not everything sounds monotone and the same note over and over again.
So it's a very, it's a very more technical element in the back of your mind as you're doing these lines.
So that's one of the challenges of doing a player character. Also the volume.
lines comparatively because NPCs will pop in and out but the player is always
there so the script is definitely a lot more formidable when it comes to
recording for player characters definitely. Path of Fire has been a real
interesting experience for my character, the player character in general.
It's not often that a character gets the opportunity to die
peruse the afterlife and then struggle their way back and in doing so possibly have set other
evils into the world that might come to fruition. So for me, I think it's fun to explore that kind of encapsulated
trip to the underworld and trying to salvage your soul in the face of despair.
It was really fun to take a care of it. It's been very stoic.
up to this point. You know, the male norn is very sure of himself, and he rose risen to a commander
and to then be brought to that level of almost lost mortality
was kind of fun to bring that back and what kind of haunts him after that and then eventually just the
general loathing for Balthazar and what he represents in his Dunn world around him has been
such fun to inhabit that.
Plenty of accounts to back that up.
Then again, Joko says a lot of things. He claims he killed Balthazar.
My favorite thing to bring to this role is...
Oh man, I think for me, who's generally not a big brawny guy, I think it's fun to bring
the thought that I could pretend to be, and some people might believe it.
I see the player character at this point is now on this path of not just renowned heroism,
but it has responsibility.
So, it's been great to write him to that point where he's now at the super front line of
these cataclysmic events, do or die situations as to where it can go.
Oh man, I can't even be a nephathem.
Like this scope is already so intense.
"Okay everyone, listen up.
If you're human, stay behind the bramble walls.
Your role is support only."
I would like to see this hardened, burly warrior have to make sacrifices that affect him in a way
that normally a Norn, who's a very masculine character, cannot hide the emotions that brim beneath.
I think that'd be a fun exploration.
And for me, it's always-for some reason, it's very impactful to watch the armored exterior of a hardened
mercenary or warrior crack.
You know, it has almost more impact at that point, you know,
in order to break that masculine shell.
So I would like to see that explored more, definitely.
If I could give my character any advice,
I'd say don't forget where you came from.
Don't forget hard drinking and whole brick.
'Cause I know you've been on the road a lot,
you're not giving yourself time to relax, unwind,
and get in the fist fights for the hell of it.
'Cause I think that's the Norn way.
And for me, I would like to see some of that classic Norn,
kind of Norse influence, you know,
"Come on, hit me 'cause it feels good."
Kind of a scenario come back in,
but maybe that's just me.
Okay.
Well, how'd that do?
[BLANK_AUDIO]
[Music]
That might be one of my favorite interviews. I love that. He's absolutely hilarious.
He's got such a good...
Sent to humor and energy. Yes, and just shoots up like eight octaves there at the end
So well, thank you both for giving me a little bit of your time
Thank you all for sticking around with us for a couple of hours
McLean welcome to time welcome to town. Don't look at your watch while I'm talking
It's good to finally be here after all this time. I've made it to time
Yes, thank you for our welcome to our time zone.
Yeah.
Well, why don't you two introduce yourselves and talk about what you've been working on
here the past year?
Sure.
So, my name is McLean Deemer and I am the composer and musical director for ArenaNet
and Guild Wars 2.
And I work on music, lots and lots of music.
So much.
Never ending train.
Just barreling down the track.
Caitlin.
Hi, I'm Caitlin Isaacson.
I actually was the audio intern for the past 10 months, but as of a couple hours ago,
I'm now an associate sound designer.
Congratulations!
Thanks.
Yeah, it's exciting.
It kind of definitely feels pretty surreal.
I'm happy.
You look like you feel a tiny bit shell-shocked.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Congrats. You absolutely deserve this.
Thank you.
I am glad to have you on board.
So, all right, well, why don't we talk a little bit about
what you've been focused on the past year,
because you've had a lot going on, not just this.
Yeah, definitely.
What have I been working on?
I've got, I've had a lot more kind of responsibility on the living world maps and stuff than I assumed I would as an intern coming in,
but I've done a lot of the ambience design, different props and things like that.
I've helped out in the Foley Room for a variety of things.
Should I go into detail about stuff?
Go for it, yes please.
Okay, yeah, I guess.
One thing that took me a while but was also kind of was really rewarding when it worked out was the turret system in episode three.
It was kind of a thing that the audio team discovered like fairly later on into production because it's a little hidden in there.
And we were like, oh boy, look at all these turrets. Look at all these effects. Okay.
And so I kind of just did all of that and got a lot of really good feedback from the team and kind of reworked things and that sort of thing.
I got some good feedback from the players, so that was really cool.
Yeah, that's incredibly gratifying. Again, that's something that we've been talking about in here.
Is that that player feedback hearing, "Okay, we've got this thing on live,
and we've been working on it for months. In some cases, we've been working on it for over a year.
Now it's on live. Players have gotten their hands on it, and we've gotten here what they think,
and they love it. Thank God."
Yes, definitely. Yeah, and I for sure check Reddit and stuff.
Like, that's real.
That feels amazing. I know. How about you, McLean?
What have been some of your highlights? What have been some of your favorite things to work on over the past year?
Well, there's two big ones I can think of that were also pretty big hits with the fans.
So one of which was the...
quasi remix, I mean reimagining of Fear Not This Night for the episode 3 teaser.
We were all thinking it.
Yeah, yeah. So that was something that was kind of long in gestation. That was an idea
that that was kind of a collaboration between marketing and the cinematics team. They said,
you know, they said, what if we did kind of a spookier version of the song?
And they came to me and said, "What do you think?"
And of course I was like, "Sure, let's try it."
And they said they wanted to do it with a male voice instead of a female voice, as on the original with Aasia.
And as soon as they said that, I was like, "Tch."
I'm gonna end up singing this. I knew it. I knew it because you know just from from this perspective of like time and budget
Reasons and stuff. I was like why I know I can sing I'm a man with a voice that can sing and so
If I'm gonna be writing it I might as well just try and so it took a lot of
There was a lot of like jumping around like what key works best for me because the melody actually has a lot of it goes
Very low before it gets really high. Yeah, it's kind of all over the place. It's kind of all over the place
Yeah, yeah, and just the physics of the way voices work
It's it can be tricky to you know, you're like, oh this you know try like singing the national anthem like you got to pick
What note you start on very carefully and so this is kind of the same idea in that there's a huge jump kind of towards the end
So I did some experimenting with the trailer came out
And I didn't feel great about that version. It was like good enough and it had to get it out
but then
You know the request came in of like there has to be a longer version of this and so I gave me a chance
It was coming. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so it gave me a chance to that's okay
It gave me a chance to fix the mistakes usually when you put stuff out there in the world
All you see is what was wrong with it
You never get a chance to go back and so this was a chance to go back and revisit it
And we had some on the trailer too, but I guess on the final version there was some more contributions from Kaleid
There's sort of an ethereal voice floating over the top of it
That I think just gives it like this
It turned it from something that was pretty good where all I could do was focus on my own voice and how much I hate hearing
My own the sound of my own voice
To something that I thought was really special and the final product
thing came out great and it was like the day came out I was I'm a late riser so
woke up and like roll over and grab my phone check Twitter and say 10 billion
notifications I'm like oh my god today it must have come out today sorry about
that again yeah so that was cool that was cool yeah that was amazing yeah
thanks and then the other big thing was some sort of
Indirectly related to me was I was happy to bring back another fan favorite composer into the family
Lena Lena Rain. She
Left Irina net maybe two years ago at this point as from left as a designer
She went did something else and then she came back to Seattle around the end of last year
And she had reached out and said, "Hey, I'm back and I'm trying to really kickstart this composing thing.
If you, you know, I loved working with you, everyone, want to work together again."
I said, "That's funny, you should mention that because, you know, Guild Wars is a very large game
and I'm just one person and there's been other people that have contributed over the years."
And when Lena was here, it was so great having her here because she was so deeply involved in the content.
and could write music for it and understood it on a level that I couldn't because she was the one that created it.
So when she left I was like, "Oh my god, I'm alone. I'm alone again."
I'm scared.
Yeah. And having her back was amazing and I think it was something that kept secret for a very long time.
She's like, "When can we tell people? When can we tell people?"
I'm like, "I don't know. I don't know."
But to have her back was really great.
So those are two kind of highlights of musically for the last year for me.
Yeah, it feels really good having Lena back as part of our family.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And if you all wanted a couple of faces to go with the new version,
if you're not this night, here they are.
So that was awesome work, both of you.
Thank you. That was something when we first put
that trailer out, and honestly when we first heard the trailer behind the scenes
before it was even public, we were all looking at each other going,
they're gonna want the full version.
We should warn him.
Yeah, yeah.
We should probably let him know
that they're going to be screaming for this.
Yeah, well it's, you know,
I was really worried about doing an actual full version
because the lyrics, there's a lot of words in that song.
And at the tempo, yeah,
that the tempo that the trailer was at,
it would be like this 12 minute epic.
You know just a constant like oh here's the next verse here's the next verse
But fortunately the first verse of that song the lyrics are pretty spooky like if you read them
They're very dark and yeah
You know the arc of the song as it starts off dark and then it's like hope and all this stuff and sunrise and all that kind of business
But the first the first yeah the first verse is all very dark lyrics
And then there was that one change that Tom Abernathy suggested with
which was Who Needs the Light instead of
Yeah, that was creepy.
Whatever the original line was, I can't remember.
But that one thing was the sort of whole thing
that it pivots on and it makes that first verse
very, very dark, which was fun to sing.
Yeah, I'm sure it was.
Yeah.
Yeah, adding on, adding on Caitlin's vocals.
Yes, very key and they and and Kailin and also beautiful. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, and
Kailin and Chris Burgess who's
Part of the audio team as well. He did the final mixing and he I think his voice might be in there a little bit too
It was on the trailer version. Yeah, I'm not sure if he put it in the the full version maybe yeah
I think I think when we did the trailer Kailin was out sick
I wanted her voice on it
So Chris ended up doing a kind of falsetto thing and then when we got a chance to do the long one
Yeah, when we got to do the long one Kailin
back so but Chris also did the final mix and he's the one that really put the
finishing touches on it so it was a collaborative effort for sure. Oh man I
did not know that about Chris I figured he just saved it off for the Jugman
version and no he's got it he's got a great ear and better than mine better
than mine for mixing. I know about that but I'll take your word for it.
Okay, that's awesome. Well, thank you for contributing to the final one. That was it really did add a lot to it
Thanks, I appreciate it
It's I'm super happy that I've been able to sing here. I did a lot of singing in LA before I moved here
So it's nice to be going. Yeah. Yeah, I was mostly professional singing and freelance variety of music and audio stuff for a couple years
Oh keep going. Yeah
I didn't know this, so this is news to me.
Tell me where.
We're just now meeting you on this show.
Hey, sorry, I wanted to do.
I went to USC for music, mostly voice and composition,
and took some classes in sound design and things like that.
And I chose USC because it has a really good games program.
So go USC, free publicity.
All right, they don't need it.
They're fine.
Yeah, so once I graduated, I sang it at a whole bunch
of churches, which is an interesting thing to do
as a Jewish person.
I probably wouldn't have thought that that
would be my future as a child.
But you know, it is what it is.
and different acquires and things like that.
It's like my favorite part of the whole show right here.
(laughing)
Talking about singing with Caitlin.
But yeah, I've been taking lessons since I was a kid
and have been an inquire since I was nine
and it's kind of like the most consistent thing
in my life for sure.
Awesome.
Yeah, and the hope, at least for me,
is that we get more opportunities
for her to sing on things.
It's nice to have.
a new voice as part of the pool.
Yeah, so we're gonna try to make that happen.
Super down.
Well, I'm like locking eyes with your boss going, huh?
(laughing)
Awesome, well, what are you guys
without giving too much spoilers?
What are you guys looking forward to?
Oh boy, without too many spoilers.
I mean, looking forward to the players.
Yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to the players' reactions.
I feel like some of the stuff we're working on for the future is really, really fun.
And just, I mean, it's fun when as a person working on the game,
and you have to kind of like play the content over and over,
and at least as a sound person, you're kind of sitting there like,
"Oh, that sound," and you like watch the same thing over and over to make sure it's kind of good.
But it's, and I'm still enjoying it, so I think that's a really good sign for players.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, for sure.
Well, so I guess they mentioned that season 5 is happening.
That's the second time somebody's been like, "Can we say that?"
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know.
You can start singing and go, "Okay, wait, should I be?"
So season 5 is coming, and just this past week I have been working on new music for the
end of season 4, trying to musically set up season 5.
And so a big goal of mine is to do something that I just because of time constraints
I haven't had as much time to put this level of thought into
What melodies what motifs are gonna represent what and and how they can develop and and there's been a lot of like laying the tracks
Before the train just to get stuff finished
But now I've got a little bit of breathing room and what I really wanted to do was have longer
Melodies rather than just a couple notes that represent characters and stuff and things that can be broken apart and expanded
And there's some really cool stuff coming up for the end of the season
That's gonna set up season 5 musically and for all the kind of musical detectives out there, which I know there are
Hopefully there's some breadcrumbs that they can
follow. All right now you guys have something to look for. Awesome. Well
Caitlin we've had you for a year now? Just about 10 months. Alright so well
congratulations on year one. Thank you. And here's to another great one with you.
Thank you for being a part of our team and congratulations again. Thank you I
really appreciate it. Yeah and congratulations to both of you on another
awesome year.
Guild Wars 2. And here's to many many more. You guys stick around we will be back in just a couple minutes.
Six years ago, I ventured into this beautiful world and have since been a one-trick, a sura
engineer striving to be a great DPS and even better floor tank for my raid group.
I've traveled the world to visit all of you amazing people who have become my peers,
my mentors, my best friends, and even found my love.
I will cherish these years of in-game events, story updates, and forever be thankful to
all of you who have made a difference in my life.
Thank you so much and we'll see you around the coming years, friends!
Hey guys, this is Juri from the French community here at Wastoo Shop.
So.
6 years already! Ready!
This is going so fast!
Zidans, Scarlet, Mordremoth, Valtazar, Choco...
What's next?
I'm so excited to discover this!
I'd like to thank Eren for making this game,
but also all the players in the community
to be so amazing through the years,
in-game or outside,
like at the first event we are organizing every year.
See you all in Teria!
Hi there, I'm Joyn Jess, a partner Twitch variety streamer.
I've been playing Guild Wars 2 for the past five years and I love enjoying this charming
game and its wonderful community.
From the heart of thorns and Path of Fire expansions, to living world seasons that set
our hearts on fire like we're in, to updates to existing game modes like PvP and World
vs. World, to new players joining us and old fronds returning to the game, there's been
a lot to praise JoCo over the years.
So please join us.
in celebrating the sixth Guild Wars 2 anniversary.
probably be the expansion launches for Honearthorns and Path of Fire, specifically
Path of Fire because I skipped school and played and recorded. And I'm not
condoning skipping school but if you happen to be sick, I won't tell you one.
Now go out and save the world.
and save Tyria.
[MUSIC]
Bring that down on to pray for them.
And this is too far.
139 and 131.
The name is Lex Lang and
I play the character Char Mayle, who's the playable character.
Well, it's always exciting to voice a non-human character, mainly because you get to do lots
of vocalizations that are more animalistic and that the body size is a lot different
when you're playing an animal versus a human.
And so you can adapt your performance based on those qualities.
And it's always very exciting for me anyway to play creatures and demons and big characters,
wolf people, that kind of stuff.
Canak, get back to work. We can handle this.
I like the stability that he brings when he's present.
You know, there's a certain strength that the Charmail has.
Also a sense of knowing that he has when it comes to
like maybe what to do next. I like to bring that sense of myself
Towards into that character as well
Because every once in a while like I feel like I know what I'm doing or I know what to do next. It's very rare
But yeah, that's a fun trait to bring
He's constantly going up against bigger and more
more, um...
capable opponents and so you know he went from starting where it was
killing a dragon and then it was killing you know a god and undead and now you
know he's going through all these different challenges and so it's it's
it's pretty cool to see that character evolve and like keep on taking the steps
and power up and up each time.
Lead the Olmakan and Ghost legions to the front lines.
The scarabs will be thickest there.
If I could give the Charmale any advice, it would be forge ahead and keep going,
even though you feel like quitting sometimes.
He just keeps on having to face these insurmountable tasks and opponents,
and somehow he continues to get through it.
And, you know, I would say that would be my advice,
even though you want to just throw in the towel.
Keep going, keep going, because that end result that you're looking for is there.
Follow your dream, Charmail.
Just follow it, keep going.
I will, Bram.
For you, and for Timie.
The acting challenges are just that, whereas opposed to a character that's like a stationary character, you know, saloon owner or whatever it may be, you know, as a city dweller or whatever, their role is to...
plot points sort of throughout the story,
whereas a playable character is constantly making these different choices
and there's a variety of different choices in the performances as well
that will take the story down different paths depending upon which adventure you go on.
Unfortunately, Farron's right. Joko's declared war, and we have to meet him head-on.
Where do you see your character's role and his voice heading in the future?
Would you like it to go?
Ah, well you will have to play the game to see the answer to that.
I already know where it's going and it's awesome.
It's awesome.
You are gonna love it.
You people at home are gonna love it.
Everyone's gonna love it.
It's so, it's awesome.
I can't say, I've already been,
I already had to sign the thing to say I can't say,
but it's off the charts, cool.
Off the charts, cool.
Yeah.
Guild Wars 2, Charmail, baby.
[crunching]
Commander, there's something I have to tell you.
I went into the mists after my sword.
But I found something else.
Refugees are pouring in from Alona.
If he kills an elder dragon, Tyria will never die.
I cannot stand the glory of Balthazar's light.
I am in right for this wrong.
I just can't.
Can't believe one of the gods gave up on us.
(dramatic music)
They cannot escape my wrath.
And I am dying.
I will be the Omega.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[Music]
Alright, welcome back to the Guild Wars 2 6th anniversary livestream. We're going
to chat with one final round of Guild Wars 2 developers. Why don't you all go
down the line, talk about who you are, and what you've been working on here at
over the past 12 months. Wow!
My name is Alina Chadwick. I'm a content programmer for Living World.
I worked on the first instance for Episode 3 and a whole lot of things in the background.
My name is Clayton Kisco. I'm a game designer here at ArenaNet. I was the team lead for Episode 2.
So I've been working on Living World content.
And I am Lindsay Murdock. I'm the lead designer on Living World. I work on all the episodes.
Do all the things. I do all the things. I try. Poorly. You do great. So, well, let's do,
just like we have with some of the other devs, let's just talk about some of our highlights
and what your favorite things have been over the past 12 months. There's a whole lot to choose from.
(laughing)
And whoever can, you guys can fight it out over who wants to go first.
I guess I started talking so I guess I just volunteered myself.
Okay, so in the first instance of episode three, you rescue...
Thank you.
Oh dear, I'm terrible with names. Your robot friend.
Blish. Thank you.
Sorry, you rescued Blish.
You rescued Blish from being toned off and it's terrible.
Oh yeah.
Blish is adorable.
Blish is adorable.
And there's that scream and we got a custom animation specifically for Blish's scream.
Oh yeah.
I love that.
Oh did we?
That was a custom animation.
That was a custom animation.
Seriously?
Oh my gosh, did you do the animation?
Oh no, oh no.
I was about to do it so in price.
I was like, oh my gosh, you can't do everything.
No, no. Oh wow, that's incredible.
I mean, Ally is a magic person just to be clear.
Yeah, seriously.
Wouldn't terribly surprise me, right?
(laughing)
But I guess we didn't have super emotional golem animals,
did we?
No, not really.
It makes sense.
So, oh wow, I had no idea.
I mean, I noticed the animation I picked up on it,
But it hadn't been.
Like I didn't know to register the absence of that animation in every golem. I've ever seen in the game in the past years
So that's wild. Yeah, we've actually been getting a lot of custom animations for Living World this season
Yeah, both for cinematics and for just in-game moments
To try to elevate that quality and get some more emotion out of our characters. So it's been pretty great
I don't want to put you two on the spot, but can you think of more?
As examples if you can't that's all the examples I'm gonna be able to think of are in content that we haven't shipped or talked about
I always I work like so many months in advance it's hard to like rewind my brain be like okay
All people have seen is up to episode three.
(laughing)
Yeah, and we were talking earlier
while we were breaking forward the videos
that we were showing about that internal panic
of trying to remember, is that released or not?
(laughing)
Yeah, that's scary.
That's okay, that's super interesting though,
and I'm glad to hear that we have these
custom animations coming out and how,
because we talked earlier a couple of segments back
about how those little things add so much to the game,
and it makes the world feel more alive.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we'll keep rewinding your brain.
Yeah.
I think my favorite thing so far has been the fans' reactions
to episode three's ending, if that's a spoiler.
Are you going to put the spoiler thing on?
No.
Oh, there you go.
Nice.
Just the joke we can eat in out of nowhere.
Right?
I'll have deep blue sea.
That's custom.
Those were all custom animations.
Yeah.
Oh, that's right.
Totally.
Because--
I mean that pulls cinematic, right?
Like we did MoCap for Joko, all of that was super custom.
Orien's Animations coming out of the cinematic,
all that's super custom.
That's right, I will not forget the first time I saw that.
when he's, I mean like he's just building to his crescendo and she just comes out of
freaking nowhere.
Yeah.
That was incredible.
I was reading the Twitch stream and people were saying the exact same reaction like I
just legitimately gasped in real life out loud when that happened.
When we were talking in the meetings trying to figure out how to play that moment.
There was a lot of sort of contention and back and forth of like exactly how to get the drama that we wanted.
And I think the way I put it is, what if she just punches him straight out of the cinematic?
Yes!
And that just ends it.
That's thump!
Takes care of him in the most dragon-y way she can.
That's good.
Problem solved.
That thump when she hits like kudos to the audio team.
Yeah.
That was...
Like visually it was really shocking, but the audio was unbelievable too. It all worked so beautifully.
Somebody asked what Joko tastes like.
Do you have any ideas of what he might taste like?
Dusty? Yeah. Very dusty.
Old. Some tar.
Acrid, probably.
(laughing)
Nice.
Yeah.
Tastes like burning.
Bitter.
Tastes like burning.
(laughing)
Man, you guys haven't had lunch yet.
Aw, no.
We should be talking about eating.
There's so much pizza in the lunch room now.
Yeah, you're under control.
I was like, should I get you guys some pizza?
I was like, there's probably gonna be leftovers.
It's okay.
We'll get something at some point.
Yeah, that was absolutely one of the one of the best surprises
Because I was not spoiled the first time I played it. I played it before release just checking it out
So I generally try not to come on Guild chat not knowing what I'm talking about
I like to at least know what the content is
So I played through it and I remember I was at my desk and just like
Whoa, that definitely just happened.
One leading up to it was the episode three trailer.
Wait, was that the episode two trailer?
The three episode two.
Yes, that again, I'm trying to rewind my brain going,
I don't know, the one with Fear Not This Night in it.
Yeah, you know you really teased out Joko
You know you first hear his voice over calm in episode one. We didn't let you see him yet
And then you get a glimpse of him for the first time in episode two
And then and then three is when he has his big moment, of course. Yeah
So I
Went to ask and probably this is mostly a question for you Lindsay because you've been on the game for so long
How I guess how did we get Joker to where he is because he basically was in Guild Wars one
He was a huge joke. He was a joke
And the thing that I was always thinking about when we got to Guild Wars 2, I was like, "Oh my gosh, I can't wait to..."
"I would love to see like some slapstick between him and the Mad King." And I'm so much happier now, like this. I never...
Six years ago, I never would have seen this coming, but I love it. Like how do we get here internally?
Um, well, yeah, you know, I...
I was nervous for season four to be taking on Joko because he was such a joke in
in Guild Wars 1. And let me just say really quick that I think the best
cinematic we ever made for Guild Wars 1 was the cinematic at the end of
Tari's story where he kills Palawa Joko and I think the best cinematic we've
ever made for Guild Wars 2 is also Palawa Joko's death so nice symmetry there.
Yeah, I was nervous about how we could...
You know really make a great villain out of him because he seems so one-dimensional
And and that's that's largely why we
Decided to kill him off fairly quickly to take care of him fairly quickly rather than build
You know multiple seasons out of him as a villain since he is fairly one note, right? He's just
laughably evil
He was legitimately like freaking terrifying. Yeah. Yeah, so once once we kind of like nailed down
our arc for him and our amazing narrative design team got their paws on him, started writing lines for him.
They just elevated him so much that by the time we were in, you know, getting close to our VO deadline for Episode 3, everyone was saying, "Man,
I kind of wish we hadn't decided to kill him off so fast.
Like, we're enjoying this so much.
We're enjoying writing for him.
We're enjoying listening to his lines, you know?
Look how sick.
(laughing)
Oh man, his lines, the stuff that the statues spit out
in the open world map.
Oh man, amazing stuff.
And I actually was really fortunate
to be invited into the writer's room
while they were working on those lines,
really developing them in table reads
and that sort of...
Pow wow brainstorm, you know
Place where you're just spitting out, you know, how about this how about that was some of the most fun? I've ever had in my job
They really know it was narrative folk like is really fun
It's really fun
And then when you get them like reading lines in character hilarious Alex Kane does a great
anything. Alex Kane did a pretty pretty great joke in those meetings although
although I really loved Samantha doing line reads for a character in episode
four that I will not spoil which was absolutely great she's just loves that
guy so yeah those table reads can be real fun we're going into table reads on
on Clayton's content soon here.
Very exciting.
So, yeah.
Oh my gosh, that's...
Yeah, we just tackled him.
I don't know, like we just, we decided, we built up this arc, we were like,
"Okay, we're gonna have him do these things and these two episodes leading up to this big thing,
and then we'll kill him in three."
Originally, in our original work on this season, we were actually gonna kill him in episode two,
but we wanted to stretch it out a little bit more.
And then just our writers...
They did too good of a job.
It's very true.
They really did.
I remember I passed by and
I don't remember which
story step I was on, but you
walked in and like there's this guy
sobbing by his
dead wife's bedside and Joe goes like
"It's like you don't even want to see your wife again!"
And I'm pondering how twisted this is and it's like the worst kind of torture and I'm going wow
We really we kind of went all in here didn't we look at that? Yeah?
He's a very twirly mustache
Seriously fun villain and now he did
Now he did
Sorry.
Miss Gif Managed.
Miss Gif Managed.
Miss Gif Managed.
Yeah, right, yeah.
Miss Gif Managed.
Great.
Areas over there like writing it in the ground with her.
Yeah, yeah.
It's fine.
Problem solved.
Yeah.
And she, um...
She'll eat everything now.
Solution.
Yeah, when she's like sitting there gnawing on him and timey comes in and timey's just like oh
Oh, that's not okay. Yeah, we were talking about Vio earlier and that was one of the sessions that I was fortunate enough to get to watch and
timey or Debbie Dairyberry giving these like timey's gags and and
Wretching reactions were amazing because they were even even like down to that like the nuance of
How ill do you want her to be exactly?
(laughing)
That was like how hard we were working on
getting this exactly right.
It was very fun to watch.
Good question too, I've heard of her be like,
how ill are we talking here from scale from one to test.
And then I have full confidence, right?
Like she's amazing at what she does.
She'll be able to like hit any,
anything you were to give her, I'm sure.
Yes, there was a whole like scale of retching.
Yeah.
(laughing)
Debbie's performance is this weekend.
weekend this season as time has been incredible.
(laughing)
Yeah, this season,
Timie has been through a lot
and Debbie's performance has been really magical
and selling that, really emotional.
So that's kind of, this season has been,
that's a good highlight, it's just Joe goes whole thing
and Irene coming out of nowhere.
And I love knocking him right out of the frame.
That was such a good call.
So I actually want to back up because you mentioned you worked on a lot of things behind the scenes
Are there things that you worked on that got into game that players would recognize that are you recognizable change?
Like Ben was talking about like QL changes
so
I'm tiny remember exactly when this went in but at some point between
stream.
Episode 6 of season 3 and episode 1 of season 4.
We added what we internally call visibility channel tech.
Oh yeah, we were talking about that earlier.
Yeah.
Yeah, basically have the ability to assign a channel to various characters in the world
and then turn on and off those various channels per player.
Yeah, Nick was talking about that.
Ah, yeah.
And saying that it was...
much more difficult than he kind of anticipated at first and there were some
fun bugs in figuring that out. Yeah, there's some rules you have to follow.
Just because you can't see something doesn't mean it can't attack you. You
can change that. You can make it. So,
The problem is just because you can't see them, that doesn't mean they can't see you.
If they can't see you, they can't attack you.
So when I implemented this, I'm like, "Okay, I'm implementing this.
Technically you can use this on hostile creatures."
Don't!
Don't do it!
You don't want to do that!
"Famous last words from a programmer."
Yeah.
You tell such things to designers and the designers get all creative and and then the visibility channels have some
Restrictions to them, but it's allowed us to do so much more storytelling in the open world
It's a big reason why we're starting to actually see our friends
in the open world maps interacting with us.
Really?
Yeah, on certain steps,
'cause we can actually do, when you're on this step,
see the scene, you know, that kind of stuff
and have states changed that way.
Yeah, and it just, I think it allows us to,
Tell the story in a way that feels more integrated with the world.
So like, we can't just, when you're on your own story,
and you want to, like we have an instance where you want to talk to Bram in the open world,
and we would love for Bram to follow you and talk or do everything right,
but we can't because if someone else is also on the instance, right,
and wants to come up and talk to Bram and start that all over again,
We don't have the ability to do that.
We still don't really have them to move around.
Yeah.
But we can have a static braam.
And you can have this conversation in the open world
with him now.
And he could be invisible for people who are not on that step.
Oh, OK.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So if we need a character to come in and have a moment
with you in the open world, we can do that now,
thanks to Allie.
Play with specific visibility.
And that is actually an interesting limitation that's come up multiple times where designers
will be like, "Designing a scene, I'll be like, 'Hold on, wait a second.'
You just had that character do something."
"Troering in action."
"Like do plenty of mode or something and everybody is going to see that regardless of what."
This part of the step they're on, you know, it's tricky.
It sounds like it, but worth it.
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
But like I said, Allie is a magic person.
She just makes things work.
So there's a lot of tricky things that we wouldn't be able to do without her.
She just jumps in and suddenly it's happening.
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you so much.
That's absolutely magic.
No, just wrong with it.
I don't believe that.
Yeah.
This is a thing that I'm completely willing to accept.
I have a cauldron under my desk.
Yes.
I see it.
It's real.
All right, yes, I will accept that.
I will completely accept that.
We've been talking about just some highlights over the past year and one thing that we've
talked about over and over is feedback from you, the player, and things that we've heard
about the content that we've released and things that we've put in.
What's been some of your favorite player feedback over the past year?
What have been some of the, your favorite things that you've heard from players?
[BLANK_AUDIO]
There's a lot there's something that we've already covered and that can be that can be in person too
Oh
Hold on now. I got switch switch gears in my right here. Hold on
Yeah, I think I got I got I'm gonna give I'm gonna what you guys are thinking I'm gonna talk about one that just
I got a kick out of when I was watching Clayton talk to players last week because Clayton
was like talking to a big circle of maybe like six or eight players while we were at
Gamescom and one guy was like, okay, what's the easiest content to make in game?
And I think maybe the goal, right?
I saw the same look on Clayton's face that I see on Lindsay's now because Lindsay's like thinking about this
She's like, huh, okay
Clayton's immediately like the wheels start turning. He's like, hmm, okay
And it was too static in PCs having a scripted conversation. Just like emoting. Yeah
It's just like throw some emotes on them and give them and it was like is there Vio? No
And there you go. Emote talk loop and it looks like they're just having this random conversation in the background. Exactly and simple
And it was it was the answer and it wasn't really it's not necessarily like playable, but it was I mean
Watching and Byron had a lot of similar conversations. Um
Byron's they were asking Byron to explain what is what is your job?
What exactly does it mean what you do and Byron said okay, what I tell people
is that I tell the game if things are a cat
or if they are not a cat.
(laughing)
And he went on to elaborate,
he could just say that and then go home.
Oh, I wish he would have.
No, I'm gonna make it.
When I was on "Gilwars" when I used to just tell people
that I write quests and I spawn monsters,
now trying to describe my job.
My job is different now.
I don't know how to describe my job now.
(laughing)
You make sure the people who are doing those things
do it well.
Yeah, right? I would imagine you're basically looking at all the other people now we're making monsters. Yeah, I definitely that is definitely a piece of it
Yeah, right. Yeah, I also kind of help people get set up with the stories that we're telling
I'm also like lower continuity in a bunch of ways. There's a lot. Yeah, there's a lot
But those questions and the answers that you and Byron gave
opened the door for, okay, I kind of understand this,
so now I can ask slightly deeper questions
about what you do and how this gameplay works
and watching those conversations and that feedback.
Once you guys were giving players a better understanding
of here's how my job works,
and here's exactly what I do,
like what does game designer mean?
I design games.
What does that mean? Watching the players ask more and more intricate questions was an absolute thrill.
That was like one of the coolest things I've seen in a while.
Yeah, I've definitely done that even with players in game asking me like what I do.
And a lot of times they think, when they hear designer they think art.
Do you guys get that too?
Yeah, they think art.
And I went to school for art, but I don't actually
do any art in my job.
And so playing that almost like 20 questions
to narrow in for them understanding what we kind of do,
it's tricky.
explaining this. It's like the ideas behind the world.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're talking to players who play these games specifically ours, but
like then you go home to like holidays and talk to in-laws and they're like, "What do
you do?" You're like, "I don't know where to start."
Talking to non-tribe explain it to non-gamers.
Yeah, it's like, "I've given up."
Yeah. I'm just sure, okay, yes.
I don't know what I do.
I neither do you, so let's just talk about something else.
But it is so cool to see the fans so interested, right?
And it's always an amazing opportunity to like,
educate them or share with them,
or like, kinda show them a little bit behind the curtain.
Yeah. 'Cause I feel like
we get better feedback at that point,
because as soon as I started describing
those easy pieces of content,
we had a couple of those people ask those questions,
the fans asked those questions,
like started to like brainstorm ideas.
And we're like, oh, and you could do this.
And I was like, yeah, exactly.
You get it.
This is awesome.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that really opened up--
those are fun conversations to have.
Yeah.
That was enormously exciting.
I loved that.
Yeah.
That was super cool.
Yeah.
We're running-OK, so we are running a tiny bit short on time.
We have about five minutes left.
So we can talk a little bit more about player feedback
and what some of your favorite responses have been
and what some of your favorite content
is that you've worked on over the past years.
past year. You can do years too if there's something that super stands out.
Because you guys are wrapping up this anniversary celebration.
Yeah. I mean, every, for me, I, since I work on
every living world episode, from start to finish, they're all kind of
like my special children. I love
each of them for their own things. I almost feel like
Every time we're shipping an episode, it's my favorite episode yet.
I'm like getting to that point where every episode, I'm like, this is my favorite episode yet.
Like I'm feeling that way about the next one.
But then I'm like, oh, but wait that next one.
Oh, but wait the next.
You know, oh, but wait the other stuff coming up.
You know, it's so easy to get focused on what's next.
You know what I'm super looking forward to that I can say now
since we released the video is Sun's Refuge.
Yeah.
I am doesn't feel good that we can actually say like hey this thing is coming. Yeah, it's such a like nice weight off your shoulders
When something gets like announced like okay, that's one less thing
I got a stress about accidentally saying or something. Yes. Yeah, I I love Sun's refuge. I said it in the video
It's one of my favorite things that we've done
When we when we originally were working on home instances and talking about what we wanted to do with home instances
We talked a lot about it being a content hub.
We didn't really get to realize that dream largely because of time.
So when we decided to make this little instance at a Sun's Refuge,
that was kind of the direction that I gave to the designer who was working on it,
is think about it as a place that you come to and you get to learn more about the area,
you get a lot of lore, you get a lot of NPC interaction,
but think of it as also a jumping off point for content.
We don't have quest hubs in our game, but this is pretty close.
And getting to build out that space through content, through these interesting ways of
delivering stories is really exciting to me.
It really, to me, is sort of home and sense.
is realized. I'm really excited about it. I know neither of you worked on it.
Did you help out with tech? Magic person. Always.
There's a lot of tech that we developed for Guild Halls.
For like well visibility once again. Yeah, yeah because it's a space that you can build out based on what content you've done
It really takes advantage of the visibility
worked on oh my gosh, that's awesome. Yeah, and
visibility of
pops in the map and
Morphing the map so it looks different
and that sort of stuff.
I get so excited when people use that tech.
I'm sure, because it sounds like there was a lot of work
that went into it.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, that was several months.
It was a better two.
She keeps, we keep developing it a little bit more
and a little bit more and like I said,
it's just allowed us to do a lot more storytelling
in the world.
open world.
Um, as badly as I want you to talk about things coming.
Will you join Living World with this season?
Yes, I did.
With Episode 2.
With Episode 2.
Partially through development too.
And I want to like, I don't want to like be like, well that one is.
It kind of is though, like Episode 2.
Like that trailer is probably the highlight.
Just like, because it immediately encapsulated what we were doing.
from everybody working on it and it got everybody excited and so
I had nothing to do with that trailer but I was super proud of that trailer and so that was the thing that like
I was but like I feel like that's selfish or something because like that was the episode I worked on but like
that is the thing I think I look back to. You had everything to do with that trailer because you worked on the content that was in the trailer.
That's fair. Yeah that's fair.
But yeah, but yeah that I think that was like and like oh yeah it was just so well done. I know we've talked about McLean's like
like the song use and all that stuff
but it really is just so good and yeah.
It was a great piece. Yeah, and
The song really did make an enormous part of the trailer, but this the whole tonal shift
Yeah, of that trailer really reflected what was going on in the content because it was you know
I was like hey, we're going to we're going on a fun caper. Whoo-hoo. Oh
Everything is bad and I got I had fans at games gone like call out like that structure of like very like oceans 11
Yeah, they're like that was so cool. I was like, oh, I'm glad you liked it like that's great
And the cinematic scene for going in there and getting those shots of those mummies behind that sewage waterfall.
That was so creepy.
Yeah, it was really creepy.
I keep going back to that in my mind.
But I was trying to avoid it.
But there you go, you got it from me.
But that's literally why you're here.
So just enjoy it.
Okay.
It's fine.
We really did talk about that one as like okay it starts out as the heist movie and then it switches and you really realize you're in contagion
All right, well, let's call it good and let you guys get to work
Thank you all and
Congratulations so much on another year of Guild Wars 2 happy 6th anniversary
Whoo, I know here's to many many many more years. I really appreciate your time
I appreciate you guys coming on to chat about
the last year. We got Path of Fire out the door. We got season four underway. We talked this morning
about season five for the first time and so I know I can't I can't decide if that's terror or
excitement or half and half. I feel like it's wrong both. But we have so many exciting things coming
for you guys and we really appreciate the past six years with all of you spending time with us in
interior.
Here's to six more and thank you for continuing this journey with us because all of you the players are why we are here.
This is why we do it and we appreciate you talking to us and spending your time with us.
So, alright, I will let you guys get back to work.
All of you stick around because the folks over at Luke crate are going to be doing a Guild Wars 2 live stream.
So hang around and we're going to be hosting them here on this channel.
So we will see you right here.
Thanks everybody. Happy anniversary.
Congratulations again.
[music]

External links

Guild Wars 2 Episode 71 - Sixth Anniversary Livestream on ArenaNet's official channel on YouTube

Guild Chat - Episode 71

Contents

Transcription

Introduction [6:36]

Guild Wars 2 Sixth Anniversary Video [8:01]

Discussion [12:58]

Interview with Steve Blum [22:58]

Living World Season 4 Episode 3 Long Live the Lich Trailer [26:55]

Discussion with Matt Pennebaker (Game Designer) and Alexander Youngblood (Game Designer) [28:57]

Living World Season 4 Episode 2: A Bug in the System Trailer [43:26]

Content Creator Messages [45:30]

Discussion with Matthew Medina (Game Designer) and Nick Hernandez (QA Embed) [47:34]

Interview with Yuri Lowenthal [1:04:42]

Discussion with Eve Eschenbacher (Voiceover Lead) and Tom Abernathy (Narrative Director) [1:08:35]

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