Notes and transcripts for the GW2 Pax Anniversary Bash coverage occuring from 1:30 to 4:30 PM PDT.
Navigation
Living World Panel
WvW Announcement – Devon
Player Questions
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Navigation
- Tequatl Rising
- Living World Panel
- LFG Tool – dungeons, fractal, open world content, living world dungeons, personal story, player vs player, world vs world. The LFG is region specific except for WvW and open world content which are server specific.
- Support parties looking for group to merge, allow you to set custom message, you can see what classes are already in the party.
- For those already in a party, the LFG tool will display groups that can merge into yours (i.e. if you are a group of 2, the LFG tool will display groups with 3 players or less for merge).
- Groups started by friends, guild members will be at the top.
- You can kick and report other players from your group.
- Those who leave/join groups too often via the LFG tool will get a time out.
- Tequatl the Sunless – Challenge in the open world
- Revamped Tequatl with a new set of achievements. If you complete them you get a new title called The Sunbringer.
- Rewards overhaul, rewards given at end of the event. The undead adds don’t drop anything.
- Has chance to drop Ascended weapon, with a brand new reskin that are exclusive to Tequatl, and you can get a mini version of Tequatl as a rare drop!
- Require a lot of friends and coordination to take it down. All waypoints near the area are contested and it will take you around 1 minute to run back from the nearest waypoint.
- Megalaser and Hylek turrets are returning, and fight is designed so you can’t ignore them.
- Need more than 80 players who are over L65+ and well geared.
- Shockwave, can be jumped over to avoid damage, gets taller at 50% and you won’t be able to jump over it.
- Poison puddles, make a lot of the playable spaces not useable. Hylek turrets have #3 skill that can cleanse the puddle.
- Tequatl have Hardened Scales, which gain stacks, if too high he summons a bone wall. Hylek Turret can remove them.
- Hylek turret also have buffs and heals to give to other players.
- 15 minute timer on Tequatl, if you take too long he flies away.
- Turrets will get attacked by Tequatl Fingers and need protection by other players.
- If Bone Walls goes up, Tequatl becomes immune to damage and you will need to destroy it, which takes time away from the timer.
- Tequatl takes off in the middle of the fight and you will need to defend the Megalaser and the associated batteries. Risen mobs walk to the batteries and try to explode if they reach the battery. This event lasts for 1.5 minutes but the Tequatl timer stops when this event is active.
- Jump pads around the Megalaser and associated batteries to allow you to jump to them quickly.
- When Tequatl returns, he will get shot by the Megalaser, which allow you to do increased damage to him for a small amount of time.
- New ability past 75%, he will summon a vortex, if you get sucked into it you will appear in an underwater area and will need to swim out of it quickly or you will take constant damage.
Living World Panel
WvW Announcement – Devon
- Bloodlust in the Borderlands to be introduced on September 17.
- WvW season one announced – On October 4, running for 7 weeks, we will be creating from US and Euro worlds WvW leagues. (3 leagues of 9 worlds each for Euro servers and 2 leagues of 12 worlds each for US servers). We have created a schedule of match ups and each world will be matched at least one time against every other world in their league.
- Results are tracked and those who participated will be rewarded at the end of the season according to their world’s performance.
- There are weekly rewards and also rewards for worlds who win their leagues such as unique finishers.
- New meta achievements for this season that give you a key to unlock your performance based rewards.
- Devon Carver-WvW coordinator, Chris Whiteside – Design Director, Colin Johanson – Game Director, Stephen Clarke-Wilson – Tech Director, James Ackley – Audio Director, Daniel Dociu – Art Director, Angel Mccoy – Narrative Designer, Joanna Frazer – Producer, Paul Belz – Living World QA
- Colin: We had the idea of Living World before the game even came out. Dynamic events was the first step, Living World was the next step.
- How does the Living World approach affects audio? Can you talk more about the important of game immersion in audio?
- James: Immersion is a big thing we want to bring to this game, it something we paid a lot of attention to. Take Tequatl for example, all of the sounds change with amount of health a boss has, level of music change depending how close you are to him. We try to focus you on stuff that we think you should pay attention to at that time.
- Daniel: People are apparently taken by surprise by the slight stylistic departure from what they have seen in the game in the past. Everybody is curious for the reasons and asking us to explain. It is a byproduct of many changes that we have gone through since launch. With nature of content changing, our storytelling needs to change. Our tools have changed, our team configuration have changed. We are still fine tuning and finding the perfect sweet spot. You can expect to see us to continue in this style for the immediately future until we finally find our creative stride.
- Stephen:GW1 had pretty regular releases so we had a system build for that but just not at the two week release rate. Six weeks around June was the transition to change from monthly to biweekly. We have changed every process in the company. We told everyone it was going to be hard and everyone stepped up. There was a fair bit amount of stress. We are over the main hump now and still fine tuning some tools.
- Joanna: Producer is the keeper of the schedule, I help Living world teams to determine their dates and know when they need to hit their deadlines. Producer is also a facilitator and problem solver to remove road blocks – ask for new technology, more resources etc to make sure we can hit our expectations. If everything fails, Joanna smash.
- Paul: There is a QA embed in every team and I work over them to make sure they have everything they need. it is fun but also a lot of work. Each team is in different stage of development so you have to be able to compartmentalize and keep track of each team’s progress and goals. You can see differences and the unique pace and culture in each of the four Living World teams. Each month is developed by a different Living World team with their own unique approach to make the monthly content different. If you pay really close attention you can see which team designed which month’s content.
- Chris: From a high level point of view, we don’t really cut anything. We have a system of backlog where we look at what we created and thought about and prioritize things and eventually they will come out. That is one of the reasons why we can’t talk about so many things so frequently until we are confident that it is going to be released. When you get to the micro of Living Team releases, the overall goal for me is everything we do that comes out of the studio has to be of the highest quality which means that as the teams are spinning up, there would be instance we would take something out of a Living World release and it would be a modular component of the play experience. 9/10 of the time that will reappear. So there isn’t a single instance where I regret cutting something out because of the backlogs and it generally lead to a high quality release. The area that I am least patient on is that I know what is the pipe, I am like a kid in a candy shop. I want to get there sometimes before we are actually ready but the team keeps me in check.
- Angel: Favorite character – that is like asking a parent which child is your favorite. We put a lot of thought into each of the characters to make them as interesting, storyworthy, and as Tyrian as possible. We got Rox, Braham, Marjory, Canach, Kasmeer, Kiel, and Evon Gnashblade (more of a secondary character). For villians we have Scarlet which you have recently met. The characters will be evolving and will be growing. We want them to change through the course of the story. You will see characters deaths, you will see character love, character challenges with family, a lot of interpersonal/interplay between characters. We are moving towards a bit more cohesive group of characters and start to bring them together so we can tell bigger stories.
Player Questions
- Q: Of the things you can discuss, what is QA’s favorite unintentional bug that we never saw. The example would be the airplane bug except we never saw.
- Paul: The airplane bug is first, later on we incorporated the Norn animation for the riding boom during Halloween as a homage to that bug. Second one is being able to spin infinitely in some animations. Also sleep – jumps (??).
- Angel: Maybe? Yes we are going to be telling bigger stories. We have not forgotten the dragons. Scarlet is quite a cosmic villian and she will have her fingers in a lot of different pots That is all I can tell you at this point.
- Colin: Living World isn’t we are going to put something in for two weeks and then take it out. I know you guys saw some of that earlier this year and for some folks that feel like that is what it was. That is not what it is about. It is about putting in the content that changes the world for everyone with a story that drives the change and creates an experience for everyone to come together. We want to go bigger than the zone invasions you are seeing. We want create experiences, create landmasses, change landmases, change things you know really well in the game. You are going to see some of that even this year. The concept behind Southsun – the start of that really showed what Living World is about – players taking over the island and defeating the Karka Queen to claim the island as your own. That is the concept you are going to see. Tequatl is another example – change something you already know with Living World.
- Colin: Our focus right now is making a game type that is easy to watch and understand. That is one of the things we have accomplished so far and we want to keep that concept. This doesn’t mean we won’t introduce new game types in the future, we are playing around with a lot of game types right now. Some of the game types in GW1 we took them and applied to other areas in GW2 – i.e. WvW, minigames. A lot of GW1 game types are empty right now because we have too many and we don’t want that to happen. We want to support WvW and sPvP even more than we are right now and if we go add another game type it is at the cost of WvW/sPvP.PvE. It is something we have to becareful.
- Chris: In speaking to players, we felt that the rewards were not on par with the risks & time consumed. There was a very big push to reward the players in better and more exciting ways. It was interesting to see how it affected the economy and shortened the divide between rich and poor players. Now we have seen the analytics for rewards vs risk and playtime, we have a benchmark now and can balance around that.
- Chris: Are you saying it is not realistic to jump off a cliff and at the bottom have your clothes automatically change? I guess we have to fix that! That is your answer.We are actively looking into what we want to do with town clothes. It is a limited system that doesn’t fit with how rest of our clothing work and we are actively discussing to see what we want to do to change that. I wish I can give more details but we haven’t finalized our plans.
- Angel: Those are discussions we have internally. Because there are so many of you, it is technically difficult to make each of you feel like you are the center of things. However, we are looking to do that and we have found some ways that we are going to start to incorporate in the upcoming releases. In the future you will be given choices (i..e recent elections) and we want to put you in the driver seat. We want you to feel that you are choosing your story and have NPCs react to you based on your character’s experience. It is a little bit of an uphill battle.
- Chris: Heroes of Tyria will shape the world and you will change the course of history of Tyria as well. I am looking forward to all of that.
- Daniel: Providing better armor for all races is important to us. Charr is the least played race so we will need to distribute our manpower accordingly. Players who play humans and norn are more numerous and louder crowd. We feel for the Charrs, and given the time and resources we will make sure to do your justice.
- If Daniel has anything to say about it, they will all be freaky.
- Daniel: Not tool long ago we have a dedicated team that does nothing but think of better ways of addressing major encounters – everything from the creature’s look, move, behave, fight, defeated state. Expect our creatures not just more freaky or scary but also to engage the players in ways we havn’t being able to in the past.
- Angel: You will have to wait but when I say that I don’t mean that there is a timeline for any expansion type or content or appearance of another tree. However, Sylvari is one of my favorite races and as a loremaster I will do some cool stuff with them coming up next year.
- Angel: Cantha is a part of Tyria and the residents that are still living there are sealed off. I think it would be impossible to tell the full breath of Tyria without at least talking about Cantha/Elona. We know players love Cantha/Elona, they are still part of the world, part of the story, nothing is off the plate of possible.
- Colin: Those are all great suggestions.
- Colin: Players numbers and player login time, total hours played per week have consistently gone up since we did the biweekly cycle. This is even during the summer when MMO player population drops.
- Audience: Polymock
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