GW2 Mounts Guild Chat Livestream Coverage

[iRedisko]

NOTES

Early concept art of mounts
General

• Mounts is something we have been considering for a while and we wanted to do something differently. In HoT we set up a lot of basic system for the game like masteries and in PoF we can expand on that.
• A lot of games just have mounts as a cosmetic piece and boost your movement speed. We want to do something different, we want mounts to be part of the world and give you a difference experience.
• We started experimenting with mounted combat a bit, since that is the place people tend to go when experimenting with mounts further. It felt a bit clunky and we didn't want to overlap with the elite spec system. We kept them separate and made mounts more about movement and exploration like gliders in HoT.
• Throughout development, we wanted to make them feel like creatures and not just a movement speed boost.
• Alot of work went into the movement system and a lot of subtle things you may not be aware of .
• We found it a bit clunky having players running to a fight and having to dismount to fight, so we tried out using engage skills, a way for mounts to jump into combat that also dismounts you at the same time. It put yourself at an advantage going into a fight and provide a smooth transition.
  • Springer jumps up into the air and land like a cannonball onto the group of the enemies below.
• Raptor jumps by default a max of 800 distance but when you upgrade it with the mastery system, it jumps 1600 distance. Springer jumps twice as high with the mastery upgrade as well.
• Mount camps are special renowned hearts in the open world where you can try out a mount, use its movement ability, and unlock it when you complete the heart.
• For exploration we soft gated some areas where it was more efficient to use one mount over the others.
• Each mount has its own tolerance to fall damage. Springer can take more fall damage than other mounts. At T4 of the Springer Mastery you can share that fall damage reduction to all mounts. When you max out the T4 Mastery of a mount, you can share some aspect of that mount with your other mounts.
• For motion sickness, we do have options to turn off some camera options such as camera roll etc.
• Some of the early concepts for mounts included a corgi mount.
• Mounts were originally a bit larger ingame (30% bigger) but we had to reduce them to lessen the visual space they were taking so they weren’t blocking the view of other players. They also scale to the character size you used in in character creation.
• We started out movement abilities we wanted to have and then tried to see what creatures would fit these. Spring mount was originally a Kangaroo but people loved the cuteness of the bunny.
  
• Mounts HP, stamina and engage skill damage are all separate and independent from player’s gear and condition. This made them easier to balance.
• We intentionally disallow dismount in midair as it can break stuff such as having players to use springer to launch themselves really high in the air and then glide.
• You are able to dye all the mounts at the same time without having to dismount and switching to the mount you want to dye
• There are hotkeys you can assign to summon a specific mount, allowing you to swap between mounts faster.
• Some interesting mount development bugs
• While developing the mount system they made the legendary wyvern a mount to test out the tether system

Skimmer

• Movement speed boost hovering over water/quicksand and there is less friction so you can drift. Some of the expansion maps will have a lot of water for the skimmer to skim through.
• Skimmer will be handy in some of the core Tyria maps like Orr
• You can mount a skimmer while in the water as well, so you don’t need to go back to land to mount.
• Skimmer also have lowered gravity, so you can drift in the air for a bit when jumping off cliffs/ledges.

Jackal

• Also known as the Teleport Wolf internally.
• This is the mount where we came up with the creature first before the movement ability.
• Jackal can blink forward and go through sand portals which conserve your movement momentum so there will be jumping puzzles where you need to go through a sand portal at a fast speed that teleport you in the air and you need to blink to the next area.
• Jackal teleport direction depends on your camera direction so if you are really fast you can jump in the air, do a 180 camera spin and teleport back.