General
- Crystal Desert is a large area and has a lot of history from GW1. We want to avoid making it a tour of Tyria. There are definitely places we want to return to but not everything on the checklist will be checked.
- We talked to the designers who worked on prophecies and nightfall to find out what things have emotional impact and pay homage to them in Path of Fire.
- Major landmarks in GW1 will see a reappearence in path of fire and you get to see its state 250 years later.
- Designers had books on history of salt, northern African cuisine etc to do background research on the real world counterpart of Elonia. They also met with people who run refugee camps in Seattle so they can depict the refugees running with Balthazar with more sensitivity.
- New recipes added in Path of Fire, all of them with ingredients and recipes inspired by those you can find in North Africa/Mediterranean
- Our normal troupe of voice actors doesn’t sound right for the region so we went to recast actors of colors so they sound correctly for the region.
- When we designed new faces/hair for the elonian region, we decided to give them to players as well via the character creation and not hide them in makeover kits.
- When the gods defeated Abaddon and the aftermath turned Crystal Sea into Crystal Desert, some of the sea creatures evolved to live on land and hence the skimmer.
- Kasmeer is a proxy for players, especially those who are not of the human race. She represent how players would act seeing one of their gods return but evil.
- A lot of story instances in Path of Fire went through a number of iterations. The first story instance for example in its current state is the 5th iteration.
- In the path of fire story, we tried to address some of the story things that players were clamoring about and tried to resolve some things that happened previously in the off screen.
- Hugh Norfolk is now the creature designer for Path of Fire (previously PvP designer)
- Hydra was designed really late in the game when most of other creatures were already finished. They didn’t think they were able to do it since it was really late and they had to design brand new rig for the hydra. Hugh went to one of the designers and he said he didn’t want to make a three headed chicken like the hydras in GW1.
- They used the rig for wurm heads (for triple trouble wurm) for hydra heads that falls off.
- Keep your head peeled on the hydras and you may see some crazy stuff in the future when Hugh becomes a magician.
- Awakened, Branded, and Forged are three armies you will encounter in the Path of Fire zones to keep things fresh. There are also interactions when the creatures from different armies meet each other.
- For Branded, we already have them in Tyria but those in Path of Fire are a bit more upgraded.. We took them up to 11 on the scale and made them more crystals and explosions.
- Sand Shark is another example of a creature that evolved from the ocean to live on land and they are jawesome according tyo the designers.
- Choya – quaggans filled with delicious watermelon inside. At first they were kinda cute looking since they were based on the quaggan but then they did a bunch of funny things to make it ugly. Initially it had the quaggan death animation which was kinda sad but they changed it to blowing it up like a watermelon.
