GW2 Bastion of the Penitent Guild Chat Livestream notes and coverage.
Developers
Samarog
Challenge Motes
Developers
- Byron Miller
- Crystal Reid
- Bobby Stein
- In the beginning just a vendor NPC, gains more sass as more raid wings get released.
- Cairn is there acting as a sentinel for the prison. Mursaat Overseer was originally called the Corrections Offficer, Samarog is known as the Warden, and the final fight has the prisoner.
- Player skills have increased for the past year with the raid release and some even have soloed the first boss.
- If you are a human with the commoner background, your character will make some comment about being here before in the prisoner area.
- Overseer room was originally suppose to be a giant maze with event encounter similar to the Spirit Vale event stuff. There would be statues that blast out lasers that one shot you. Based on the design feedback they got, it was remade into a chess room with some basic things that resemble chess rules.
- There are rats that would run away from you if you get close. The rats are ambient creatures with buffs that make them immune to fear effect so they had to clone the models and make the fear effects.
- Concept art
Samarog
- The door to Samarog can be opened right away if you have a thief
- The creature artist who made Samarog is named Samantha Rogers so the boss name is a tribute to her.
- Samarog is the kingpin prisoner that runs the prison, he has hunted down and killed all the prisoners except one.
- They went to extra lengths to make the sound effect for when your character get impaled by the spikes.
- Raid almost didn’t get approved, they had to lobby pretty hard to get it approved. If it didn’t get approved the story would not be in the game at all.
- In the original version you were gonna kill the prisoner.
- Original concept art, the burden saul is carrying is made into a backpack you can get as a raid drop
- Is Deimos real? That is up to discussion and there are interesting arguments for both sides.
- Some parts of Deimos are made up from Saul’s surroundings and Saul’s torment can be seen manifested in the model.
- Deimos concept art
- The final raid cinematic begins at almost exactly at where the GW1 final cinematic ended with Mursaat hands holding Saul down.
- Concept art for the demon realm
Challenge Motes
- Last Cannon achievement for Sabetha added a new layer of difficulty. We wanted to push more of that for achievements.
- They are designed for players to chase after but not something they feel compelled to chase after.
- For the Mursaat Overseer challenge mote, it took players in testing a bit to figure out that the blue squares patterns are specific to each player.
- Is Deimos a real demon or represent one of Saul’s Demons?
- It is open for interpretation.
- What is Samarog?
- No one knows what he is or if he is from the same realms as Deimos. We don’t even know if it is a he.
- What does the Eye of Janthir do?
- It keeps things alive in the prison and peaces out after you defeat Deimos.
- Favorite mechanic cut from the boss?
- Vale Guardian had a mechanic where you can mix basic colors to make new colors to fight adds with new colors. It was actually a horrible mechanic as the color mixing wasn’t executed properly due to mobs getting crippled etc
- Samarog had a mechanic where he put you a curse on you that increase in stacks. Once it get to a certain number of stacks, you had to pass the curse down to another player like a game of hot potato. Turns out the game doesn’t supoort this kind of mechanic.
- Deimis encounter had a true sight mechanic that was removed. In the gambler version of Deimos, only the person with the True Sight can see the correct illusion and it was given randomly to a raid member by Eye of Janthir. One day they were changing the weapons skins and accidently changed the real illusion’s skins and testers found it much better.
- How far are you from the next raid wing when you ship a raid wing?
- Varies on the wing. Had some delays, now have two teams that leap frog. Had some design docs done for Bastion when Stronghold was shipped.
- Biggest mistake that occurred during the raid development?
- Samarog uses a new kind of knockback mechanic (launch point) that requires some vector calculations. They did the calculations wrong during design and it would send players miles into the air and instantly kills them. Right now with the Samarog fight, if you get launched at a specific angle, you can still get knocked up straight in the air but not as far.
