Guild Chat - Episode 42
Guild Chat - Episode 42
- Title
- Fourth Anniversary Livestream!
- Host
- Rubi Bayer
- Guests
- Anthony Ordon
Gaile Gray
Mike Zadorojny
Jerry Schroeder
Peter Fries
Drew Cady
Matthew Medina
Jessica Teddy Croft
Stephen Hwang - Date
- August 30, 2016
- Official video
- YouTube
The 42nd episode of Guild Chat aired on August 30, 2016. Host Rubi Bayer and members of the ArenaNet studio team take a look back at some of the most memorable moments.
Summary[edit]
Transcription[edit]
Halloween and Wintersday (0:25)[edit]
Rubi Bayer: Those were some of our launch day memories, but since Guild Wars 2 is an MMO, and MMO worlds keep growing and changing, we didn't just pat ourselves on the back and call it a day. We kept working to grow the world of Tyria for you. Another huge part of the world of Guild Wars 2 is Tyrian holidays. We brought over Halloween and Wintersday from Guild Wars 1, the Zephyrites came and brought us the Bazaar of the Four Winds and the Festival of the Four Winds, and we can't forget about Super Adventure Box, which arrived in Guild Wars 2 as one of our favorite April Fools' Day pranks in the history of Tyria. Let's talk to some of the developers behind those holidays.
All right, now that we are all emotional, over the past four years. It's time to talk to you guys live. Hi guys, welcome to our Guild Wars 2 Fourth Anniversary Livestream, we have a whole lot to talk about today, so we're gonna jump right in. Gaile and Anthony, you guys were two really good people to talk to us about the first Guild Wars 2 holidays.
Anthony Ordon: I don't know about really good.
Rubi: You really are, you're the best. And you can't leave, I'm sorry. It was a good try. Halloween and Wintersday were the two first holidays, and we brought those over from Guild Wars 1, so these have a huge history.
Gaile Gray: They do.
Rubi: And you've, Gaile, you've been around as both a player and a part of the ArenaNet team since the very beginning, so, -
Gaile: yeah
Rubi: do you want to talk about these first two holidays?
Gaile: Loved it. I didn't know how much we would be able to do in, in the first game, in Guild Wars, because we launched in April and we, the team was smaller and was very busy creating Sorrow's Furnace, the first,
Rubi Bayer: Oh yeah!
Gaile Gray: kind of, the new content that we rolled out, so I wasn't sure what was gonna happen, and I hadn't kept up with development, and I got into the game and saw Lion's Arch, and it was amazing. It was so amazing to see what they have done, the decorations, the décor and then, and to take part in the ever-evolving events, and so, Wintersday, I had a high bar, and they exceeded it.
Rubi: Yes!
Gaile: You too right?
Rubi: And for Halloween you probably had the highest bar.
Gaile: Oh oh well yeah and well I love Halloween and so it is my favorite holiday of the year. And to see what they did over the years and then to see bringing it to Guild Wars 2 again, new Lion's Arch.. hmm how's that going to work? You know and it was just amazing. I love our holidays. I think I've really said this, players are in the game for the first holiday and like 'wow you guys really do it up well' and I'm thinking-
Rubi Bayer: We know.
Gaile: -we do and I say it right out, I say best holidays in the industry. I'm telling you people, you know, cause I'm a big fan and they do a great job. People like Anthony, they do a great job.
Rubi: Yeah, so you worked on this. What were your goals in bringing this over from Guild Wars 1?
Anthony: If you take it back, shortly before the game launched, why are you laughing at me?
(laughter)
Rubi: I'm not laughing at you!
Anthony: So just before the game launched, we started dividing everybody up into groups so who's going to work on what after the game launched, and when they pitched it to me, we'd just done all of the beta weekend events, so I was ready to jump back in and so I didn't have any expectation about what Halloween was going to be cause we'd recorded some stuff for Mad King but that was it, so there was really no plan and we didn't really even have an idea of what the live updates were going to be yet. So we sat down, we had this big planning session and we were talking to, I distinctly remember talking to Josh Foreman and some of the other environment artists and they were talking about, I think it was Justin, and we were talking about how we wanted to, how many maps we could get, how many new areas we could add and we were thinking maybe one, maybe two, and they were like four. We want to do four, and so we just ended up pitching this giant Halloween update and then we had this crazy idea for how we were going to release it, cause there was no expectation for how the holiday was going to be so we wanted to like, yeah the first day there wouldn't really be anything going on, just some decorations in Lion's Arch and then we would slowly start unravelling the mystery of Halloween in Tyria and then it all led up to the big fountain explosion which everyone was super excited about.
Rubi: That was amazing. That was just, seeing the Mad King come busting out of that fountain-
Anthony: Yeah.
Gaile: Oh my God.
Rubi: -for the first time was so good.
Anthony: It was nuts. We were so committed to this idea that we were going to do something in the game and actually have it change the world and we totally did. We blew up that fountain and then it was just broken for a year.
Rubi: And you set a precedent that we will talk about later.
Anthony: Yeah, we totally did wreck that thing.
(laughter)
Anthony: Over and over and over again.
Rubi: Okay, you don't need to look that pleased
Anthony: Oh no, I'm really happy about that.
Rubi: Okay, so our players have really done a good job celebrating. Gaile and I were talking earlier this week about how much player art we see outside of the game I mean there's cosplay and the most amazing pumpkin carving I've ever seen in my life.
Gaile: That was amazing. We had somebody who was sending this to us from across the country, sending us different, like, they did the Guild wars 2 logo the one year that was launch year-
Rubi: Yeah, that was great.
Gaile: -and I wish I had pictures of those but can I show you a couple -
Rubi: Yes please.
Gaile: -we've got a couple of images that I think are fantastic. Here's the first one. This is the new Lion's Arch with the new Halloween and I think it just blows me away. It's so beautiful. Got the same lunatic luna or moon and there's another one here that's going from this is the beautiful, and this is the spooky.
Rubi: Still beautiful.
Gaile: It's beautiful.
Rubi: Bit spooky.
Gaile: Really well done, and then this one here, I mean that's the cute.
Rubi Bayer: Awww.
Gaile: I think it's super cute, and we've got all those and it's wonderful. We put out the call. You know I do the little show Community Showcase Live and we put out the call "Hey, share your Halloween art" and people really came through and we're doing another one coming up in October of this year, so we're hoping for more wonderful images like those.
Rubi: Yes please.
Gaile: For sure.
Rubi: And we've had, you and I participated in this last year, I mean we've kept expanding Halloween, we've done some more with it over the years, we have the whole thing going on with the Mad King and his wayward son.
Anthony: Yes.
Rubi: And the labyrinth that I'm kind of in love with. It's super super fun. It's a lot of fun and then last year we had an in game event that we held where we got to play with players a little bit.
Gaile: That was a surprise and I have to thank Izzy because he made it possible-
Rubi: Oh, yes, thank you Izzy so much.
Gaile: -What he did was amazing and we were very close to the vest about it and we didn't talk about it with other people, we didn't let players know what was happening, but what he did was give us the ability to convert people into various Halloween creatures. So imagine you're in Lion's Arch and Rubi's chatting with some players in one of the zones and I'm in another world and Regina and Stephano, all of us are in different areas and then we kinda synced up and said "okay now, start using that toy, and go with it as you will". So, for example we turned the whole city into bats, all the people.
Rubi: That's right, we turned them into bats.
Gaile: Yeah. Halloween cats, that was great, we had the kitties, we definitely had the kitties.
Rubi: Oh yeah, here.
Gaile: Yeah. Here's the bats and they were great and people were so startled, like "how can you do this" "What did this happen" "How long is this going to last?" and didn't you have one person...
Rubi: I, okay, I really need to apologise to this guy again, because one of the things that the toy did was shoot players into the air and it wasn't enough damage to kill them, you took a little bit of fall damage when you came back down, so we-
Anthony: (Laughing) Rubi committed the first Tyrian murder.
(laughter)
Rubi: You freeze, I'm looking at you! No, it wasn't bad, but we were playing and everybody was having a really good time and then one guy very nicely whispered me and said "I'm trying to craft. Could you not?"
Gaile: (laughter)
Rubi: It's like oh my gosh I'm really really sorry.
Gaile: But imagine those bats, you know, they're all bats, and then they suddenly start shooting in the air-
Rubi: It was a good time.
Gaile: -And then we got things really organised and we said "okay, we are going to get these players and order them and present them in a very organised manner here and we have this image here which is everyone as, as I've called them the fire doggies-
Rubi: That was from Stephanie wasn't it?
Gaile: -Yes, Stephanie over on the EU team made this and I thought it was a great idea. She didn't just do this she did candy corns, she did kitties and so forth so it was a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to doing that again, I think the team is (unintelligible)
Rubi: Yeah, it would be fun, Stephanie was so organised in creating these beautiful screenshots, I'm turning everybody into cats and leading a cat parade and I was a little crazy cat lady.
Gaile: Yeah.
Rubi: So it was, you know, some of us we find our own fun, we find it in different ways.
Gaile: It's so true.
Rubi: So those were the first two holidays in Guild Wars 2, what was your favourite part? You have to pick a favourite. From either holiday what was your favourite aspect of one?
Gaile: In the old-
Rubi: I'm giving you time to think about this.
Anthony: Yeah.
Gaile: In Guild Wars, the original game I think that I really loved the battle between Grenth and Dwayna
Rubi: Yeah
Gaile: That was a lot of fun, and the ways we learned to cheese it hopping from map to pull...I didn't properly say that out loud.
Rubi: It was player cooperation.
Gaile: Yeah, that's it, but in Guild Wars 2 I think that my favourite is the Mad King's Labyrinth.
Rubi: It's a lot of time.
Gaile: I spent way too much time in there.
Rubi: We need to talk about the Labyrinthine Horror because he just wrecks my face (unintelligible) but that's okay. I'll just get better.
Gaile: Yeah.
Rubi: Alright. That was Halloween and Wintersday but we have more holidays to talk about, so we are going to be back in just a couple of minutes and we'll talk about another one. Thank you guys.
Gaile: Thank you.
Anthony: Thank you.
Super Adventure Box (11:55)[edit]
Rubi: Alright, we are ready to talk about our next holiday, which is...
Peter Fries: Super Adventure Box.
Rubi: Super Adventure Box! Jerry's shirt kind of gave it away.
Jerry Schroeder: Oh, sorry.
Mike Zadorojny: Spoiler.
Rubi: Yeah. So, Super Adventure Box is known as being Josh Foreman's baby, but there were so many people that worked on that and we want to talk about that, too. But thank you Josh for all of the hard work on that. So, Mike you were the lead on that?
Mike: I was the design POC which basically meant that I was overlooking a lot of the high level stuff that was going on. Josh was really there in the trenches, kind of. It was his brainchild. He and Lisa were like the two that really conspired of most of this. And so like Lisa was the one who was actually spawning everything and putting everything that went in the environments. And then we had, you know, Jeff and Trevor who were actually making all the art assets and making all the animations. And then we had a very dedicated QA member at the time known as Byron Miller-
Rubi: Ohhh!
Mike: So he was the one who was actually going through and making sure that it was all working. And it was just- It was a cool evolution because this was a project that started as just one brainchild, and it evolved into something bigger. It was something even larger than what the team started as. Like when we started seeing what they were doing with the physics engine and with everything else, it was, "Cool! Let's- How do we make this bigger? How do we make this even bolder?" And then you saw like it devolved into like the commercial and everything else. And then even when we brought it back in the future, for future runs, like the team changed. Like Byron was now designer at that point so he was helping on additional.[verification requested] We had a new QA member who was helping- take his place and do those things. So it was, I mean, it was a great festival to creativity and originality that we hadn't seen in a long time.
Rubi: It really was. That was one of the greatest things about it to me was that it was just this fun little side thing because Josh's brain works in amazing ways. And it was this fun little side project that turned into this huge thing that you guys love and that we've had a ton of fun with over the years.
Peter: Right.
Rubi: So you worked on... (laughing)
Peter: I'm sorry.
Rubi: No, it's okay! I'm just thinking about how much we've got you scheduled to be on this particular episode and that you're just going to spend most of it making me laugh.
Peter: Hope it will be good.
Rubi: So you have done alot of Moto's dialogue?
Peter: Yes I did. That was voiced by Steve Blum who does Rytlock. And he does- Some of our voice actors do different characters along with their main characters. So it is kind of cool to hear somebody that you are used to hearing as one character doing somebody completely different. I wrote some of the ambient scenes that take place around the outside of the Super Adventure Box.
Rubi: Like at Rata Sum?
Peter: Yeah, in Rata Sum. So when it first appeared that there were like you know, different characters walking around Rata Sum talking about it. It was fun stuff.
Rubi: Did it feel like you were breaking the fourth wall when you-
Peter: A little yeah.
Rubi: I mean there is a super fine line there
Peter: Yeah, a little. There is a little meta stuff going on there. I think there is even a reference that sounds like it's about Arenanet's (unintellible) design.
Rubi: Really?
Peter: Yeah.
Rubi: Ok, I don't remember that, now I have to go. I'm going to be like digging through lines of dialogue now.
Mike: That seems to be a trend for Peter, I feel. He will hide those all over the place.
Peter: It is like a game within a game so it is neat.
Rubi: (Laughing) Yeah, I'm immediately thinking of some of the other things you have done and be like "Oh yeah, that is right".
Peter: Yeah.
Rubi: And you named the Bee Dog?
Peter: I did not name the Bee Dog.
Rubi: I was really trying to invoke bitterness here.
Peter: (Laughing) Bryon named the Bee Dog. But it was supposed to be called Bumble Pug and they made me change it so-
Rubi: Why?
Peter: Because Bryon wanted it to be Bee Dog.
Rubi: I like Bumble Pug.
Peter: He is a bad man.
Rubi: Ok! (Laughing)
Peter: That is why he is not here today. So Bumble Pug, never forget Bumble Pug.
Rubi: Jeez...Alright, Jerry what about you? Do you want to talk about- There is totally different sounds inside of Super Adventure Box.
Jerry: Yeah, it was just super fun, super creative. Able to just kind of go back to my roots, you know, old school gaming. Just, you know, to fit the look and feel. I did a ton of the voices in the studio for infantile cloud. You know the uh- (Imitates Happy Cloud) That kind of stuff.
Rubi: It is good.
Jerry: And the hillbillies of course and you know, the ninjas and all that stuff.
Rubi: I forgot about those Raccoons. Ohh, those jerks.
Jerry: Sure, it was great. We used you know, some interesting plug-ins that emulate old console chips. So, you know, we got alot of them blips and boings and all that, that sounded like authentic stuff. So, it was a really good time.
Rubi: What was the most fun about making all of the sounds for SAB?
Jerry: You know, I think it was just the working within some self-imposed limitations was really cool. You know, just ok, I want this to be very simple, very to the point, you know. Tells from everything before it happens, that way it would be really obvious and just yeah, it was refreshing.
Rubi: (Laughing) Did you need something? Alright what is your favorite part about Super Adventure Box, each of you? Bumble Pug? You can't say something besides Bumble Pug.
Jerry: No, just the general look of it is really great. I mean you go, you first appear and it is totally different than regular Guild Wars.
Rubi: It is awesome.
Jerry: Yeah, it is so colorful and pleasant. Yeah, everyone loves jumping puzzles, so it is jumping puzzle taken to the nth degree.
Mike: Everyone asterisk loves jumping puzzles.
Rubi: Scare quotes.
Peter: According to judge, everyone loves them. They like what we tell them to like.
Rubi: (Sighs) Jerry, how about you?
Jerry: I think the frog boss is still my favorite.
Rubi: Oh my god, yes!
Peter: Oh, I like the guy that is in the shop where you are wrecking all of his stuff and he is asking you "Please stop".
Rubi: He makes me feel so bad! (Laughing)
Peter: That is the best part. I'm sorry.
Rubi: You are like breaking everything he owns and he is going "No, that is ok. I didn't really need that". I am like waiting to steal his lunch money and stuff them in a locker or something.
Mike: So are you one of those people that like, that after you finish the level, there is that destroy the cart. But if you don't actually damage the cart, he will come out and give you a bauble. Are you one of those people or are you actually destroying the cart to get the bonus baubles?
Rubi: I am the person who did not destroy the cart because I felt bad enough.
Peter: Oh, nice.
Mike: He only had like 11 payments left or whatever.
(Laughing)
Rubi: And here we come. I tell you what I did do though. I don't know who made it, so you can like go into one of the little hidden rooms and pick up their furniture and run away with it outside. But it made me so happy. I have like this enormous side table and my character is carrying it all over SAB. So, whoever was responsible for that, thank you so much cause it was the most stupid fun I have ever had in this game.
Peter: It was probably Josh.
Rubi: It was probably Josh.
Jerry: Probably so.
Rubi: What about you, Mike?
Mike: All of these festivals- Anthony kind of alluded to this in the last section where we are talking about like the beta weekend events and things that- These were all chances to express things that we hadn't done or were outside the normal of what the rules of Tyria would allow us to do. And so it gives us new tech, it gives us new ideas and new things to do. So it was cool to come to something new, fun, original. I think the fact that it was kind of this April Fool's joke for us was amazing. And you know, the legacy that it is. There is such a fan following about it and this is one of those things. It starts from a small idea and you never really know what it is going to take off into. And watching kind of the evolution of it and you know potentially, where it goes in the future, that is the fun part.
Rubi: Yeah, you just reminded me of the players who pop their commander tags and spell out SAB in the harbor in Lion's Arch. Because they love it absolutely so much. And it is so much fun getting to make that departure and do something that is absolutely dead opposite of everything else we have done. It has been really neat. Seeing it continue and turn it into a yearly thing.
Mike: Yeah, I am super happy that it has come back as one of those yearly festivals where we were struggling for a long time to figure out how to place it in the world because it was so outside the box. Pun intended. So like I am happy that we were able to find something there. It becomes a tradition now that players know when to expect it to come back. That there is always something to look forward to in that you know, that month of April.
Rubi: Yeah, thank you guys. We have more holidays to talk about so we will be back in just a second. We are really like blasting through this but if we didn't, there is so much stuff to talk about that we would be here for 6 hours. So, we will be back in 1 minute.
Festival of the Four Winds (23:32)[edit]
Rubi: Alright, we are back we have more people and more holidays. So, we were talking about, we kept naming things four winds we cannot do that again. Its super confusing. So some of the next things we brought to the game were bazaar of the four winds and festival of the four winds. See? This is hard for me.
Matt: Bananza of the four winds.
Rubi: Stop, (laugh) No more four winds anything. So lets just talk about what some of you guys worked that you did some of the ambient scenes in the bazaar that i hadn't noticed until you mentioned them.
Peter: Yeah, there's a marketplace with traders. They're doing their business at different stalls, and if you were just walking around you would hear these ambient scenes fire off with different characters. There was one guy that was trying to get rid of a bunch of stuff that he had stolen and the Seraph were like on his heels and he was trying to get rid of it before they caught up with him. There was a young kid and a thief partner that were trying to also get rid of things and so like if you listened, you could hear these things playing out over the course of the event all around the marketplace.
Rubi: That's one of the things that I love that we do, and we do this all over the world, is put these little B-roll scenes going on in the background.
Peter: Yeah, yeah, it's fun to do that stuff.
Rubi: So much fun. And this is where we introduced - we had the Flying Dolyak Race, we had the - you had to escort Trader Owen's Dolyak, and we brought in the Zephyrite skills. That was fun.
Matt: Yeah, the aspect skills was a designer who is no longer here unfortunately - Lina. But yeah, just some amazing stuff to be able to like do things that again our engine wasn't necessarily designed to do, so we like pushing the envelope a lot and so doing these movement skills and being able to jump around on all these different platforms and create a new way of movement. The theme for that release we were told consistently from, you know, our teamleads and stuff was "joy-movement, joy-movement, make it all about how much fun it is to just get around". So we created all kinds of things that were like events that took place on multiple layers so you had to like jump across and use the tether to get across platforms and then the crystal scavenger hunt being able to like: go and find all the little hidden nooks and crannies that our map artist Curo had put in. We did that conjunction with our alpha-testers as well, we basically said them "listen, find all the little places that you can use to get the skills". So they came up with all kinds of crazy like, you had to use this skill to get up on the wooden platform and then another skill to leap across so it was lots of fun.
Rubi: Okay so we have joy-movement, and you just knew you wanted to move in a new way. How did you get from there to these cool skills, what was the baseline for that?
Matt: Really it was just down to: our game is very combat-focused, you have the skillbar. So it's a matter of: "how do you do interesting movements using the skillbar?". So we came up with the idea of all these different sorts of gadgets around that you could either tether to or ground-target and so that is kind of the basis for that. We kind of roamed in the narrative out to: "what would this group of people who we have never met before in Tyria, how would they interpret things?". So we took a look at elemental skills and refining those down to a: "what if they were speacilized into a very particular thing?". Once we had that brainstorming, skills was kind of fun and we had a lot of ideas. The three skills that were in there were the ones we though were the coolest.
Rubi: Yeah and learning to get around with those was a good time. Just-
Matt: It was.
Rubi: -once I got past the challenge of "wait a minute I keep banging into this waterfall and I can't get past. What do I do?!"
Matt: Yes
Rubi: I don't understand!
Matt: It was the release that had I think probably the most fall deaths. At least, I mean I don't know. I would love to see if we have analytics on that
Peter: That's something to be proud of.
Rubi: It kind of is. It's fun.
Matt: Seeing lots and lots of skulls and crossbones on the bottom layer. I had some fun running around and-
Drew: Shoot off. Go back up and shoot off again.
Matt: Yeah, yeah.
Drew: As you learn these new skills. That's part about learning new skills.
Rubi: It's true. I'm suddenly remembering that part of- I mean, you know. We're all running around in there with our friends and I was running in there with some guildmates and one of them, we were still refining our use of the skills, and it was hard. And we were way up high and one of my guildmates he fell all the way to bottom, just landed with a splat in that water. You know that little puddle of water that isn't deep enough to save you from death?
Matt: Yeah.
Rubi: And he landed on two Sylvari who were having a roleplay session. And it was *that* kind of roleplay. And here comes this 9-foot cat just splats on top of them.
Matt: Ruined the moment I'm sure.
Peter: That's tragic.
Rubi: I'm sure it spoiled the moment. It had- It was a lasting lesson in how to use the skills. So all of this took us to the flying dolyak race which was absolutely one of my favorites.
Matt: Yeah when we brought it back for the second time, we wanted to say "ok, we don't want to just recycle the same event over again, so how can we do this in a different way that takes advantage of some cool stuff?". I can't remember what it was that I thought of; because Trader Owens, who is by the way named after my son-
Rubi: Yay!
Matt: -I wanted to do something with his dolyak because his dolyak was his faithful companion and we thought "well what if you were a baby dolyak? Wouldn't that be cool". So I immediately grabbed onto that idea and we did it and I actually kind of pushed the animators to give us the animations because the dolyak did not have all the animations for that. There was a long period of time during development where it was pretty rough. But thankfully-
Peter: They begged you not to do it.
Matt: They begged us not to do it.
Peter: You did it anyway.
Matt: Herron was having the heart attack I think.
Rubi: Ok, but we say thank you.
Matt: We do.
Rubi: For making it happen, because it was pretty awesome content.
Matt: Yeah. I really enjoyed being able to do something that was also outside of my comfort zone. I never worked with transforms to that degree before. So that was kinda nice.
Rubi: How do you feel it turned out?
Matt: I thought it was really well received. I really loved doing it. You know taking the spirit of Guild Rush you know which was the basis for that event and doing it in the open world with PvE and having you know just zip up to the top while being a dolyak was kinda fun.
Rubi: Nice! I like it. Alright so this festival brought us a whole new map. This brought us Labyrinthine Cliffs. Which we will talk about their fate later. But that Drew, that gave you the opportunity to do all kinds of cool things with sound.
Drew: Yeah.
Rubi: And this is the point where I just sit back and have fun.
Drew: Just kinda, uh. Yeah, I mean we had some new skills, we had some Zephyrite skills. Jerry did a fun job of kinda giving it this (whoosh sound) wispyness, and it's kinda hard to show that. So, uh. 'Cause that's kinda in our little workstations. But I did bring some toys.
Rubi: Do you need somebody to hand you things?
Drew: And, uh-
Rubi: They're kinda far away.
Drew: Actually that would be awesome.
All: (chuckle)
Drew: As I was thinking- As I'm sitting here, oh my god, I forgot to bring my toys over.
Peter: Your lovely assistant will hand them to you.
Drew: Yes, thank you-
Rubi: Thank you, Mark!
Drew: Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Mark. Okay.
Rubi: He's gonna be handing him, like, the sound baffles in a minute.
Drew: Uh...
Rubi: He's just handing him everything.
Drew: Okay! Now, that's- that's fine. Okay, so. We have, uh. So we have in... in town, there is a, uh, just a kinda- sprinkled around, some- some wind chimes. Near the temple. Here's a little one. (rings chime) And we- we go bigger. We go bigger. (rings larger chime) So it's just kinda like this pleasing, nice vibe thing.
Rubi: And this all sounds familiar to me.
Drew: And we got a big one! (rings largest chime) Uh, these are elephant bells. And, uh, this would be for a big elephant. This would be for a small elephant. Or maybe a newborn.
Rubi: (laughs) Yes!
Peter: So you put that on an elephant so that people know they're coming?
Drew: Yes, exactly. Yeah.
Rubi: (laughs) Peter!
Drew: And, uh. My friend, Serge Gubelman has, uh, I think we have probably 15-16 of these? So I just took three of these- um, actually I have a smaller one, a little dinky one, too. Uh, so. There are a whole bunch of different levels, and they're all made of these wood decks, y'know? So I thought, we'll make them outta bamboo. (bamboo creaking sounds) So you have that kind of- going into it, as it tensions up. And then you can step off of it, and then you have this tension down. So you- it kind of ebbs and flows. We did bigger and smaller, uh. And so, y'know, it depends on where you step and kind of what landing you're in. And that was a lot of fun, kind of coming up with, uh... with some- with some newer things-
Rubi: I was gonna say, how much fun for you was that when they came to you and said "Okay, we're gonna have, stay with me, a whole city made of bamboo."
Drew: Yeah.
Rubi: "And it flies."
Drew: Yeah.
Peter: It's really squeaky.
Drew: And the winds- uh, I think, I'm trying to remember. We did a, uh, a wind trip, kinda, through my Subaru Outback. It's got a sunroof. And so we would hang stuff out of it and-
Rubi: What!
Drew: -and record 'em while we're driving down the highway. And, uh, people thought we were absolutely nuts and, um- which is true. And, uh-
Rubi: But in a good way!
Drew: But yeah, we were putting out like, tennis rackets, and, uh, just odd things. But the wind would whistle through there-
Rubi: Yeah.
Drew: And then we would come back and kind of, y'know, stretch it out or kind of take different frequency bands and... (high wind whoosh sound) so this was a little more wispy so when you're on a ledge, you'd have this kind of "ohhh, I'm up top", or if you're down below it has more of a lower vibe. You know you're safe, (low wind whoosh sound) just a nice, gentle breeze. So you can kinda contrast where you are vertically by changing up the winds.
Rubi: That's extremely, extremely-
Drew: Uh, four winds, I think.
All: (laugh)
Rubi: Stop that! (laughs)
Drew: But I think we have many more winds than that.
Rubi: I'm trying- I'm stuck on this whole sticking things out of the sunroof of your car, so is it like- Tennis racket, microphone?
Peter: Subaru, it was a Subaru.
Rubi: Oh.
Drew: So, yeah. We had a microphone right underneath the edge so it wouldn't get the wind, and then we were just putting other stuff- yeah, it was- we drove all the way to, uh, past North Bend and back. Which is-
Rubi: Jeez.
Drew: Which is quite a ways.
Rubi: Yes.
Drew: Um, it's like, okay Jerry. I think we don't need to go to the Cascades, we can turn around.
Rubi: Jerry's like, "But I wanna. :( I wanna."
Peter: That's a long time to be in a car with Jerry.
Drew: It was like-
All: (laugh)
Drew: It was like a 45 minute drive one way. I think we ate in North Bend and came back.
Peter: Wow. And he's like, all full of sugar and stuff.
Drew: Yeah. Him- yeah, you don't wanna- like a hamburger and a shake. Yeah. Problem is it's not a good idea, but, we prevailed.
Peter: Oh boy, wow. That's a long ride.
Rubi: I feel like that's- that's more, like... Jerry high-pitched noises that you could've recorded and done something with. This might've been a lost opportunity.
Drew: Yeah. Yeah, and used for SAB. For those creatures. A kinda amped up (unhinged gremlin sounds). Yeah. And then you 8-bit it. Y'know. Grunge it up.
Rubi: Somebody please get a gif of that, please. Alright, we have one more festival to talk about, so give us one second and we'll be right back. Thank you, guys.
Dragon Bash (34:55)[edit]
Rubi: Alright, we have one more festival to talk about, and Steve, do you want to introduce this one?
Stephen Hwang: Um... We're gonna talk about Dragon Bash and bashing dragons.
Rubi: Yay! Now you have to sing the song!
Peter: Can you sing the song for us?
All: (laugh)
Stephen: Well it's... The song's kind of interesting because of like, you know, I remember, you know from the beta weekends, you know, Matthew Moore's you know, uh, there's a song, Slay the Dragon, right?
Rubi: Yeah, this was... Yeah.
Stephen: And he's like, well I approached him I was like well, can we use that? And he's like yeah! And then he and Maclaine just went off on that and created this awesome pub song that like... I don't know, this is weird like there's this weird vibe that was happening in the studio at the time. Cause we were all, you know, getting used to the live kinda cadence and it really galvanized I think, not just you know players to you know fight for Tyria but like to the... You know the studio itself got behind it, you know people were singing and chanting and doing the...
Rubi: It's so catchy!
Stephen: Yeah.
Rubi: So, the thing that you and I were talking about was wanting to give the players this shared sense of challenge and we're coming, we're trying to go get this dragon, we wanna get everybody pumped up.
Stephen: Right, I mean, uh, it was uh, I like trying to give the player a like, a greater sense of purpose, kinda unify them, feel like 'oh yeah we're in this fight against the dragons together'. You know that's... 'This is awesome' feeling you know.
Rubi: Mhm.
Stephen: We're not just different races and you know, in real life and in-game, we're working for this common goal, kinda bring Tyria together and bring them to LA and have, bash these dragons. And the funny thing about how dragon bash came about was, you know... In GW1, Dragon Bash was this like, you know, let's celebrate dragons, they're awesome! But in GW2, dragons are feared. They're the big bads of the world. So I was having this discussion with Ben Miller and he's like you guys should kinda do it like the snake day in Simpsons where they're just bashing on them.
Peter: Whacking day.
Stephen: Yeah, whacking day.
All: (laugh)
Stephen: And it's like, wow, we should try to do that. And it was like along with the 'slay the dragon' song, you have this great thing where you can call it 'Dragon Bash' and there's this double entendre with 'bash' as a celebration and 'bash' as a, you know, you're hitting things.
Rubi: As you're actually bashing the thing.
Stephen: Right. So I actually talked to Localization about this and tried to make sure that that conveyed in other languages a little bit...
Rubi: Oh.
Stephen: Yeah, so that was kind of unique.
Rubi: How did that go - or did that go in other languages?
Stephen: They said they tried their best, yeah. I think it did.
All: (laugh)
Peter: (inaudible)
Rubi: Trying to remember why I let you stay.
Peter: (inaudible)
Rubi: It's just because I really like you so you get away with stuff.
Peter: You needed this chair filled.
Rubi: I needed this chair filled. So do you feel like the whole festival of Dragon Bash came across the way you originally intended?
Stephen: It was really amazing because, you know, we were just forming up--this is when we were just starting up all the different Living World groups and that was the first one we had with this really tight cycle, we got our artists together, Phil made this awesome pinata which we ended up making and bashing in the studio, that was...
Rubi: That was fun, that was so much fun.
Stephen: My son, who was like three at the time, started singing the song at home, that was awesome.
Rubi: It is incredibly catchy. It's ridiculous how much that song has hung on.
Stephen: Yeah. It did what I wanted it to, which was bring the player base together and kind of really celebrate Guild Wars in this unifying cause. It was timed together with some interesting things like um CSRs (?) was starting to come out and I remember like a year or two before GW2 launched I read a preview of the book and there's all these things in the book, and like we have to make sure these things are in Lion's Arch. And so I worked with Josh - he was working on Lion's Arch and making sure we had these spots where Cobiah went and so like...
Rubi: Yeah, ohhhh...
Stephen: Yeah, under the docks, a place for his sister's grave, things like that.
Peter: Yeah, you could do the tour that takes you all around the city...
Stephen: Yeah, the tour. And you know we didn't have Malchor's Fingers at the time either, so, you know we added that to Cursed Shores and made sure the Indomitable was the name of one of the ships. So that was kinda interesting how years of planning ahead got revealed in Dragon Bash.
Rubi: You know, you mentioned living world a minute ago and provided a very nice segue to me because that was, we had all of these holidays that we've come through but Living World is a huge thing that we added to Guild Wars 2 over the years so we're going to talk about that in a minute. Thank you for coming on and talking about Dragon Bash with us.
Stephen: Thank you, no problem.
Rubi: So stay close I'm gonna need you again soon. Alright, be right back.
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Note: Current transcript up to https://youtu.be/pA1YCkGfL7k?t=2604 |
