Category: Guild Wars 2

Of all the enemy-within factions for the playable races of Guild Wars 2, the Nightmare Court of the sylvari is easily the most disturbing. Loresmith Ree Soesbee discusses the sylvari lore including the appearance and goals of the Nightmare Court in the final blog article for the Sylvari Week. They are the mirror of the noble sylvari. They see the commandments of Ventari’s tablet as shackles to the power and potential to the new race. They are the means that will end the pure-hearted sylvari race.

Continue reading [GW2] War for the Dream

It’s the start of Sylvari Week! Kristen Perry begins with a shebang as she tells us how the player-controlled humanoid, plant race was designed and re-designed. I, personally, am just amazed. It’s another example of working and re-working things in that ol’ iterative process until it feels right. Perry did it at night on her own time!

The original design was not any more evocative of plants or nature than some forest elves. Perry mentions that they never seemed to hit the trifecta of noble, beautiful, and plant. Their visual design always felt like fae at peace with nature. I loved their story as it seems to stem largely from sidhe mythology, but they were about as interesting as elves to the eye. Or, rather, humans that were slightly different.

Now they feel alien. Something about them is not quite right. It doesn’t feel like an obvious, natural creation, like making yet another anthropomorphic race. The plant-grown sylvari feel unnatural, and that is why I think Perry hit the design straight on. They should be unnatural. They aren’t a culmination of evolution or even magical…uhh.. offspringing. They are weird. Perhaps unliked.

In so many stories about the sidhe and other noble fae, we are told that they have otherworldly beauty. Strange beauty. It rarely made sense to me. I usually went along a supermodel-ramped-to-eleven route in my mind, but I think the answer is something more along the lines of Medusa. Alluring and repulsive at the same time hits the mark, and it works great for the sylvari. I think that this design will especially appeal to both men and women gamers, whereas the old “elvish” design might not have appealed to that tough, CODBLOPSy guy.

I can’t believe the “stock” of the sylvari can rise much higher after this start, but, once again, I am waiting to be surprised.

–Ravious
wyrd

ArenaNet has posted another great article from one of the other roles fans hear less about than the glamorous Colin job. I absolutely love that they are releasing articles like this. The people at ArenaNet have such drive and passion, and even the IT guy in charge of the server room was intensely passionate about his role in the company. The sound guys below the noisy server room follow the studio’s energy, and some of their daily routine is shown in a video recently released by ArenaNet. Yet, pragmatically speaking I couldn’t help wondering if they were wasting time with horse clops and smashing glass. Surely, those sounds are out there?

Continue reading [GW2] Aural Canvas

There’s a secret to great underdog journalism (i.e., blogging): ask community questions. It’s such a simple idea, but it comes with a flipside: don’t ask wide-audience questions. I have been following news on Trackmania 2, and one of the devs expounds on this idea quite handedly in a fan interview (about the 3:40 mark). He even calls answers to wide-audience questions “ammo,” much like ArenaNet’s Chris Lye analogized here.

The difference between the two is a matter of expertise. Wide-audience questions require no expertise. “When is the release date?” is the most prevalent for Guild Wars 2. Community questions require some knowledge of things, and Sardu’s interview with ArenaNet’s Colin Johanson at the San Diego Comic Con is chock full of them. The answers are fantastic because Johanson can answer them without wasting “wide-audience ammo.”

Then readers get passionate answers just brimming with excitement, like this:

Continue reading [GW2] Community Questions on Necromancers

At PAX East, I was a little wary of trying the new classes because I thought everybody else would be (I did anyway). At the ArenaNet Community Open House, I knew I would be playing the engineer. There was a lot to be learned from the most controversial profession in Guild Wars 2. Did it fit in with the lore? Was it too much of a commando-feel in a fantasy world? And, most importantly how did it play?

Continue reading [GW2] Purview of the Engineer

Guild Wars 2 dungeons were one of the big presentation points during the ArenaNet Community Open House (and the press event the day before). I was very excited about this because the dungeon content would have us working in teams, instead of our open world meanderings. In an MMO without healers, it would be interesting to see how this content was designed. ArenaNet told us at the start to choose whatever profession (class) we wanted without regard to our teammates’ choices. Could we really succeed without even talking to each other about our group makeup?

As we started we saw a cinematic for the story mode, and if this is the benchmark of quality for future dungeon cinematics, we are in for a treat. Elixabeth is right (in her great article on dungeons at Talk Tyria); this has to be embedded.

Continue reading #GW2Fanday – The Dungeon Gel