Guild Chat - Episode 78
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Guild Chat - Episode 78
- Title
- Game Development in 2018
- Host
- Rubi Bayer
- Guests
- Joel Helmich
Matthew Medina
Mike Zadorojny - Date
- December 7, 2018
- Official video
- YouTube
The following is an unofficial, player-written transcript of the episode. The accuracy of this transcription has not been verified by ArenaNet.
The 78th episode of Guild Chat aired on December 7, 2018. Join host Rubi Bayer and guests for a discussion about the changes and evolution of industry processes.
Transcription[edit]
hi everybody and happy Friday welcome to guild chat thank you for joining us I'm your host Ruby and we're going to talk today about development of Guild Wars 2 and 2018 one of the things that we've talked about previously on guild chat is that with an MMO you're never really done developing there's no point where we shut the door and say ok with this the state game is done we are completely finished working on it we're constantly adding improving changing things so I've rounded up a couple of our guild wars 2 developers today to chat about that and see what we've done in 2018 let me have you guys introduce yourselves talk about who you are and what you do here - Raymond it so I'm Joe Helmick I make I make things ok they're like hey we need somebody we need someone who made stuff this year and like I made some stuff this year so you made great things so so they're like you should you should talk about stuff and like cool I can act on Buzz's Here I am tucking fun stuff no way that's rescission happened all right I'm Matthew Medina I'm a game designer I design stuff so yeah I specialize in a lot with story and narrative stuff I work pretty closely hand-in-hand with those guys but yeah we we have done a lot of stuff to sort of improve the store the quality of our storytelling in the last several years and this year in particular we've had some new cool tech so talk about someone hi I'm Michael Eisner I'm the game director on Guild Wars 2 if you couldn't tell stuff is the word of the you direct yeah pretty much mostly I'm the the player advocate so when working with the teams I spent a lot of time trying to look at things from the from a player from a veteran players perspective from a new players perspective and identify kind of direction that we should be focusing our efforts on and and how we can make either the game more approachable or adding more compelling bosses rewards those types of things into a larger package that is Guild Wars 2 how do we you know take Guild Wars 2 from where it was last year to this year all right that works all right let's talk about stuff that we made I want to one of the things that we kind of brought back into Guild Wars 2 and brought it up to snuff for 2018 was the festival of the four winds and I wanted to start with that because that was one of the earliest things in 2018 I remember talking about because we talked about that like in January yeah that's when I first got involved with the project and I actually was sort of like a bit surprised myself because it was like oh wow we we were considering doing this awesome having been involved in the previous two iterations of the festival I jumped at the chance and so it was really good but after sitting you know in our perforce Depot for four years untouched it certainly needed a fair amount of you know bringing it out taking it down polishing up the bits that we needed to bring back but also then take a look at what are we gonna add that's new we now have mounts how do mounts work in this map because it was definitely not designed for mounts so there were some definite concerns there about how that would work thankfully it's you know it was really easy to turn mounts on in that map and start playing around and immediately it was very clear that they were going to be really good I mean we had to do some map updates to make sure that you couldn't get too far out of bounds and we weeks expanded the boundaries of them a little bit to account for the extra space that mounts need to move around in but like getting on the Griffon was the first thing I tried and it was just glorious because it's such a vertical space I mean that's one of the things I really loved about the evolution of of coming from path of fire into living world and looking at how the mounts play a part of that you know we had a lot of fun building the maps designed for it we had a lot of fun taking him to the the old world but this was a map we had never really seen at that level of verticality that had as much content crammed into such a small space and so being able to take advantage of that I think was really all we're gonna see that there was another evolution of what we wanted out of the mounts and that system and having just layer on top of festivals was just awesome for us yeah and that's you had mentioned it was sitting there for four years and that kind of speaks to what we're talking about overall today in that this is a very different game than it was four years ago Guild Wars 2 at the core of it is what it is but there's so much that we've done in four years and it's not just like a matter of wood rot yeah it's yeah a good example that a specific example that is the aspect skills which is the thing that was central to that map when we released it yeah pick up these crystals and then you could move around and you could jump and lightning together across chasms and and that kind of stuff and those were great and they they they mostly worked but you know the test the tech was definitely competitive you asked yes there was definitely some some things that didn't like the lightning tether when I first loaded that map up I tried to tether across two things and more often than I just fell into the into the pit yeah because we didn't have some of the things that we do now of you know taking the player and launching them across a you know a thing which is now technically have and so I had to pretty that up but then also that was authored in a way that was similar to the way mounts got authored and so the two things couldn't coexist so as soon as you mount it up you lost all your aspect skills and you'd have to go back and get a crystal and that was just super oh that's knowing unfriendly to the player so I took it and I was like ok we're gonna have to do this the entirely different way so I made it a different way basically re I mean it was taking scripts repoing them through another pathway that was friendly so that when you got on a mount you kept all your buffs and you kept all your skills and then the two things played well together and I think it was really important for us to do that because it allowed us to design a lot of the events around being able to pick and choose because the whole point of that festival in that map was joy boomin and Mount obviously in impact of that a lot but so did the aspect skills so like we wanted to make sure that you had the choice and you didn't have to just pick oh I'm gonna do mounts now and then later I'll do the crystals um so we wanted to have that play well together so we could design like the treasure hunt for example is an event where I saw people doing everything in their you know in their arsenal some you get off a mount hop on a mount spring her up to the top you know get off your mount again lightning tether across to the thing you know so like just being able to do that was it was so important I think one of the themes that you're gonna see is part of this conversation is programmers give us a box to play in designers will go cool I found a way out of the box by doing this really crazy thing over here and then you know it might work in that particular instance but what programmers will come back and say hey there's a better way a safer way to do this and we want to give you that tool and in this particular case because it's been so long since we went back and looked at that all of our like the tools that we use to build these things which are now faster more efficient better performance on the server didn't translate one-to-one so there's a lot of kind of replumb in this is kind of the thing we talk about when we look at season one and trying to bring it back because we know is there's a lot of you know good memory just a lot of really cool content than yeah but it's it's this kind of almost archeology that that Matthew had to go do is this is on the same level of every single piece of content we've done that we need to make sure works in the new space and plays with a lot of the new features that we've built over time as well yeah and that's from a non programmer perspective the aspect skills are a really good example because yeah these were great and like you said they were all about the joy of movement and you have different methods of moving through those aspect skills but they don't take what happens if you mount up we don't we don't think of that if you're not a programmer if you're not a designer off the top of your head or even gliders I mean we haven't even mentioned adding gliding in there to and how those are factors now and what they might do and how they interact with that box and how they explode that box yeah I mean Blighty was another one that was like it seemed like such a natural and so but I I had to add up drops in there like we didn't have updrafts on the map originally but I was like well if you're gonna jump off and glide like you have to be able to get around so like adding but all that was stuff that we didn't know about at the time that we built the event yeah yeah that was it's just all of those little things that you have to think about and it took a long time but I think it was worth it I mean the festival turned out beautifully yeah I was really happy with with the reception and and just how how well I think everything came together yeah speaking of things that seem simple to bring back I have a list chairs okay so actually I think we're moving on because that's a big topic like it would be but yeah on since we're talking about like let's look at old content oh dear there's problems light and Heather's was mentioned so before we get to chair they will the lightening Kathryn particulars is a good like example of this is a thing that was made in the past with the tools that were available at the time but better tools now available and so anytime we look at older content we're like well did we made this what we had but maybe this tool sucked or thick they just didn't do what we needed and so they kind of faked it and kind of worked and so the way that light and how they used to work is it would it would jump you upwards and then the animation with Neji for to sort of simulate the parabola and it was the gnarliest Cruise's thing and so when we're working hard thorns like we want these like mushrooms or I know if we knew through mushrooms originally but we wanted way to like jump you see refer and they're like this this little text night it's not gonna work it's it's so gross and it's laggy and it feels bad and so let's not do that and so we we put the programming team guy worked right by make sure there's interesting um we're like okay we'll make like a real clean versus it doesn't nice work and so then coming back to the festival were like cave you know we have this tech now that launches you to a spot why don't we fix those skills goes the group instead of just simulating a pro yeah just actually actually do that so like with that kind of stuff comes a whole time we're like we have a better way to do it now and so if we're gonna go look at some what piece of content and the resurrected or let's do something similar let's make new content but it's similar the old stuff and rather than just copy pasting about just stuff like wow this doesn't work last time let's keep using it or like we could do this about make it more efficient that was my that was my thing on playing tiller Cheers so chairs are fun in that there's there some history here when I was originally working on Mount things way back like two years before pacifiers she probably freaked when they started on it but it was like one of the first things I did on the mouse team was get a character to attach another character you know we had a live stream or that guild chat long ago where I was like flying around the river and stuff in this one right yeah no thanks but so when I implemented all that I so little history first in our game there's a concept of a character it was conscious concept of a gadget they're similar ish but they have some differences and the kind of arbitrary gadgets or a little sheep or sometimes I'm it doesn't matter too much but the point is when I implemented on the mount stuff it only assumed characters could attach to characters it's like well that was just I just made that decision arbitrarily because like oh the beach a little cheaper did and then like surely will never want to do the other thing why would you want to character to attach to a gadget that's silly and so that that got embedded in all of our piping all of all the layers all the code everywhere and then sometime after we should paths fire rather than even we were working I was like we can't receive detached we catch it but yeah that's a lot of work it's not it's not bother and and then we time went on path fire ship like oh that were that worked and then well could we attached to a gadget and so at some point last December it says yeah I'm just gonna I'm just gonna do that just as a thing okay so let me interrupt you for a second to find gadget yeah well people are you that's a problem so so so in example five words are yes an example to get it would be like we placed like some share in the world and it doesn't have a care it's not a character it doesn't move I guess there's a really the main difference is it doesn't move under its own power okay it's not the precise scientific definition they say because we have moving tip on the list not a precise scientific definition but like they this is why is this hard I had a herd definition I would just give it but anyway the point is it would be great to sit in chairs that's actually I mean that there's ultimately where's like this would be pretty funny we should do this and so they all right let's let me just reflect your stuff and so I went through code and the largest changes to have ever made here gnarliest three factors like hundred forty files suitable chairs for the biggest refactor you've done it is the largest single like you can there's the second icons one of my local programmers and decoder being it is it's the only time that's ever gonna work man it was almost fortuitous because like I don't think we knew what we were doing for April Fool's yeah until about a month before when they were showing me the prototypes is like okay well how how fast can we get this cleaned up like yeah we got this and we and when programmers say that it's like okay well they didn't say interesting interesting is the scary one yes I think is interesting then you don't know how long it's going to take but it's like hey you know it's awesome that we we had people working and being creative with the technology let's go for this let's go all in and figure out because whenever these types of things happen it opens the door to what designers can do with the content and so you'll see an evolution of how we've been telling stories in the open world with the idea of like an individual owning an individual character in the open world which is something we hadn't seen before this year these are all things that like programmers were just experimenting seeing what they could do with our system and again it's about like okay we originally had this box and now the box is getting oddly shaped in other areas and bigger in certain areas which gives us the designers to freedom to kind of explore in different areas more space to play in and it also opens windows into how strange game development can be sometimes because when I first got hold of because I was on the festival and and the chair's team were sort of Co coexisting on a certain branch for us development wise so I was able to see some of the the chair stuff early and was able to put some of that in festival for ends like at the bar at the top you could like sit on them stools and like actually have you know a nice experience of sitting there and I also put the chairs on the the boat that went around there the tour it's also the first like crazy like hey chairs on a moving platform we've never done that before let's do it we'll be back yeah but when I when I dug into it the first thing I thought of is as a story person especially I was like I really really want Queen Jennah to finally sit on her throne because she has been in that place in her instance for the longest time just sort of standing there and so I went in there and I cracked it open I was like I'm gonna make this and I and I attached a gadget to her throne and realized that her throne is the entire room no because she has this large sort of clamshell thing behind her but it's attached to everything else so I was like this is not going to work because she was gonna be sitting up and like it picks the you know it tries to find the place to for her to sit and I don't know where for her set so it was the hole so so her her throne is technically the entire did you get far enough to where she attached and actually tried to sit no I think it I think it just failed Oh cheers on a moving platform I wanted to I just look mark that I know so so the with interesting historical note the first chair we actually shipped alive was in episode two but players could not sit on them the char NPCs the they all come were there like leader people's they were station yeah they had like these great big wooden Thrones and they would sit on them and the fun thing I discovered fun thing I discovered there so the the way the way attachment works in our game it's it's you just take a bone like a skeleton bone on the sitter and a skeleton bone on the attaching thing and you stick close together and the bone that they wanted the chair peoples to sit on was not centered it was kind of off to like one side cuz I can't cuz they're at their chair I think they were using like the doom throne animations originally maybe yeah cents and so doom Thrones not gadgets that's different story so anyway the the problem is that the designer working out was like hey hey droll the char doesn't sit in the right spot and like why cuz the bones right here and sits there but then the charge over here why is the chair over here I don't I don't understand and someone digging into I was like okay with and it turns out that there's some gnarliness in our how our gadgets work versus characters where the their base rotation is off by 90 degrees like rotated 90 degrees some characters and so if you said I have no rotation whatsoever I have an identity rotation matrix it's the world rotation of that is different for a character in a gadget so I had to go through all of the code that does they like put if if I am attached to this bone this is where I should be in the world I'd go through all that coding a well fit stick if you're attached to a gadget rotate 90 degrees don't say like whatever this vector is rotate it like that and I know and then like counter where these Chris so that was fun that's what it was it was lady was mind boggling to for cuz I didn't I was not the first thing I jumped to is I obviously why would that why so that was worth it but so the car suffered so that you may sit on benches the thing that the thing that's interesting to me about how you're explaining how all of this works is something that that I realized in watching people ask for suitable chairs for so long is that from a non programming perspective a lot of people and not everybody not like all of you are doing this but I saw a lot of people the way they were asking for it the way they were talking about it was that in your mind you're equating it to your physical body in the real world just walking up and sitting in a chair and it's very simple and why is it not simple it seems like a very simple thing and you're not translating it through all of this stuff that you were explaining when we're building games we tend to make a paradigm for us to make assumptions so that it's easier for us to approach a problem and that is this is a prime example of past us going okay well sure for whatever reason we decided that characters need to be one way and gadgets need to be another and then future us coming going hey look the system we want it to do more than what we've done before and when we look at the two technologies it's they're not as compatible as we would think or there's not as uniform a decision now I can't I don't know why we ended up with the 90-degree offset like it'd be fun to you know good time machine back and figure out why we actually made that I'm I'm almost betting it's like a gw1 legacy thing at this point because like I don't remember that coming up during she'd be too development well you never know this until you cross them that's the thing right cuz they're all in their own little local world okay sometimes you find out things the hard way right exactly and so this is where it like I'm saying it's like when you come up with a plan to make things easier for us in the short term you sometimes don't think about what the long-term consequences of those are going to be or you are and you're willing to accept that because it means that you can either get better performance today you can make it look better in certain ways with certain graphics cards or whatever but there's a sumption you're making for an individual reason that don't equate to the new formula that we're applying and which is something that we're always trying to push is okay we want to do things we haven't done before which means we have to think about problems in a new way and that which also requires us to go back and look at our old assumptions and see if we need to make changes to them as well thank you so moving platforms or a thing that they had they have a rich history mmm that was like a pained grunt yeah yes yeah for a very long time they were certain this space were so that they got added I wasn't here when this happened but my understanding of the history is they got added so we could put them in victory death so we should have the the airship flying thing we're like what if we were on the airship and it was flying out as you were gonna fight say it was I think one of the last major pieces attack we added to the game ship and there is nothing inherently wrong say nothing but their dairy there's not too much inherently wrong with how they're applied they're fine but there are a lot of little details that you only notice after something has been hammered on for a long time oh wow that was that was wrong we should have fixed that that's hard to do when you have to ship things very quickly after you implement them so as a result moving platforms had this thing where they mostly work but then sometimes they don't and so coop and so design goes well they mostly work but sometimes they don't I don't think we can use them and because nobody use them programmers like well no one uses them we're not gonna bother fixing bugs or them because we have so much other stuff to do so you have this cycle of look platforms in my head is exactly what happened I mean kind of and then we'd also discover new interesting ways of using them we wanted to use yeah we always wanted to and so when we use them in victory or death it was really expensive so we made the clear cut rule hey don't use them in the open world because the processing of doing all the moving navmesh yourself was just too expensive for our servers to handle and then we kind of left them by the wayside and it wasn't until super venture box in world 2 and they were using them on the logs okay which was interesting it was a nice accident because we when we actually went back and looked and were like there's no way that this should work but the way that they got away with it is there's actually no navmesh on those gadgets so it was never calculating like having of NPCs on it which made them a little bit cheaper so we just started discovering new ways that we could actually use the technology or push in different directions that made it so like moving platforms weren't nearly the taboo word that they were and when we initially shipped the game and and so anyway as they start and then like Razer practicals they have some adventurers folks those seems like what we use them more and then because people started using them like oh now people are using them I guess we should start fixing bugs so the the most common kind of bug on a living platform I guess if you try to visualize it if you are standing here on a platform and you're facing that way and then the whole platform rotates so now you're facing that way you still think you are facing toward that end of the platform you don't think you've turned at all according the world you'd like turn 90 degrees and a lot what we do in a lot of places as we say okay here's the direction that you were facing like have sir off some vectors somewhere like this is reaction I'm facing and so if you're walking along and there's this platform facing that way you're walking along and then and then you cross onto the platform it's like okay you're on the platform now what direction in my facing it goes well I didn't change so I should be facing forward is okay for they know what that is that's this way now they're on the platform so you be walking and then you turn suddenly and and we've fixed some of them but then others would be messed up like the like one random example a fixed like there's this this this cameras layer you can i slide it sideways right worked on that years ago and it's just it's just this like horace it of the target position of the cameras like okay i want actually look at this points to this point and that did not translate correctly when you would go onto and off with moving platforms and so we go from being here to like maybe being here and so you'd see your camera move whenever you get onto a platform like strange and we just no one really fixed it stuff happens right like yeah first weird stuff happens amounts were loaded with problems they had all kinds o lots the store effectors they all need to get updated and so i spent a while some amount of time i don't remember how long just going to okay it what went wrong and you walk onto platform okay what we wrong this time and then they were pretty good now and so and then they just hope people use more then we fix my problems and then people used to more and then and then we end up with movie stuff platformers have always presented designers with this sort of I could do this and but then oftentimes you're you're often like oh but it doesn't work the way I wanted it to so I it is nice to see how how it's continues to evolve I mean even path a fire starting that first instance on the air Charlotte's right coming in presented so many problems because like normally we are used to the player spawning and at a set point we know where that is and like well you can put that on a movie platform but when we first did it like I put you there and the the airship would go off and everyone would stay behind and so you have all the characters the NPC's and you're like Oh drop it's that wily coyote whoa no you're looking down like if I move I'm gonna fall and then that we had the parameter come in and they took a look at it they said they shipped a fix we got it across to us on the design team and then we had the opposite problem now we are moving and the airship is behind us we're like that's not right either and then you know went through a number of iterations and my favorite though was we finally got all working and but we wanted to have it so that players could have the agency to fly off if they want to because we had gliding and we were gonna have mounts in the expansion so I started testing that and as soon as you got off the airship it kept the airships momentum yes and so you would jump off and you'd glide and you'd be going twice as fast because you had both your speed and the airship speed and it would add them together and that actually was like that there's those elevators were the real problem I like we're another were like as it's going up you like well I guess we're going up still and so you jump off and like I go so I added another thing where the you because you kind of want that you want like if you jump if you're just jumping on the platform you want to move with the platform it feels a little better if you don't but if you're like off for a while that the percentage of velocity of the platform that you hear it starts to decay then go back to okay now you're from tiger their friction I suppose you back to reality I think moving platforms is also one of those examples let you look at other games and go hey look this is this seems commonplace over here why is it so difficult for us and again it goes back to that original design assumptions about how we were crafting the game some of the things that we wanted out of the pathfinding system how like creature he hate deals with players and those types of things and so there were certain assumptions I think coming from gilbert warning to Guild Wars 2 that made it harder for us to kind of look at those style tech later on in the game like and and that just becomes one of those hurdles that as we push forward we're like no no we really want to do these things and they should be simple like we look at the common foot the common case of this and we we realize that we have to do a little bit of extra work because we had made assumptions earlier on that are hurting us today yeah it's it is an interesting example just overall I feel like we could keep coming back to the whole moving platform question because like you said we shipped victory or death and that was the first moving platform that you saw they popped up again in super adventure box world 2 and in the ensuing years we've piled all of this other stuff into our game like shares and had to figure out how to make moving platforms interact with that correctly without the weirdness of Oh double speed gliding I think seems awesome and I'm a little bummed it fixed but I'm assuming it was not as awesome as I think the thing for design is that they're always looking for what is the coolest experience that we can give the players and so this is where it becomes that kind of that cost analysis of ok we want to do this cool thing we can do a hacked version which might work but we'll make programming want to kill me or we can spend the time actually going back and looking at that tech which opens up the door for us to do things we hadn't thought before or to push in new areas that we hadn't thought we had access to and I think this is some of the things that you see like I look at the initial moving platform of what we saw in victory or death compare it to the way the raids team used it in the Kadeem fight and it's like that was cool stuff and so that is like we haven't even really thought about that back when we were doing the original tech and this is just what what excites me about working on a live game versus that you ship and your one-and-done is like we get the opportunity to go back and look at the things that we did before and say that was awesome we can do it better let's try a new way let's come at it from a different angle let's look at the problem differently and try and figure out what is the next exciting way or the next cool aspect of whether it's storytelling whether it's open world events whether it's you know how the hub plays into the larger scheme of things these are all things that we can continue evaluate and make additions to or changes because you know it's not just the players that are coming along for the journey we're along with them trying to keep up and go hey you know oK we've told you the story this way and you've gotten used to it now we're going to try a different way to kind of you know turn it on its head and give new expectations to where the game can do or what the game can do and where we want to take it yeah because you're constantly learning you're constantly getting access to better tools and better methods and it makes sense to apply them but there's a little bit of learning curve there sometimes you mentioned unless we have something else about chairs or platforms jolin I didn't mean it like that we could go in for a while I mean I definitely the back to the the opening instance about the fire with the platform the first time of some programming so they're like oh no it's a no but you know you have to use it as we're saying after you people have to use them before we bother trying to fix them because right away when my favorite bugs on that that I fixed that thing some people were said is a it used to be that if you were on the Mount and then the platform is sort of dropping a little amount would stir over to clean and it just it just wasn't inheriting platform velocity correctly just deal but I much prefer the fix than me having a seizure ah yeah that's all I could think was like all the sand is shaking off there everything's ruined yeah no that's it's uh it works down that's good thank you yeah well you know he's always kind of work it just it just it works better or worse better now which is the whole point yeah we had mentioned open world and living world and story several times and I want to touch on that because there's a lot that we did there I mean starting and I had to get my list because there was a lot um like moving from story instance to story instance without that break making them Maps bigger and better I mean there are a whole bunch of things what would you guys like to talk about first the incident instance thing is certainly one of those that we had talked about it for the longest time and anytime it came up it was like oh don't it's impossible it was missing platform so and you know there was just I think it was just the the Texas wouldn't have been there to do it when we launched the game but it was something that we continually wanted to push on because it is jarring sometimes to have a story have to take a break and you have to go out to the open world and the open world maps follow different rules you know because they're you know there's cycling events the the world can be in a different state than when you left the instance and it can be this sort of like take you out of the story moment yeah you lose a little bit of your immersion so we tried constantly to find a way to solve this and I think it was season three living world worried for first sirup toyed with the idea of hey if we could do this how do we do it I don't remember exactly if it was the first one but I know we did that with when you were doing the hologram tiny yeah I think that was the first time we used that tech and then we began to slowly you know sort of and again a lot of times we will do this is like we're gonna do this here and make sure that it doesn't completely blow up in our face that you know we think we've considered all the cases but there's always going to be an edge case there's always going to be a strange thing that we you can't always account for every single variable and the way every player is going to approach content and so like what if the err on the instance boundary and you leave you know that kind of stuff what I was gonna say is it possible to is there a situation where you could possibly consider every case I don't that doesn't that doesn't seem likely thing that could be done yeah to me like no no you a is for to think of these things yes so what were some of the hurdles in getting that instance to instance up there the biggest one I think the biggest challenge that we were presented with is that our party system didn't know what to do so when you enter instance you have an instance owner is what we call it internally they are the person who controls the instance and everything sort of feeds off of them and we can direct things at the instance owner and say hey do this to this person's party and so a lot of our scripts rely on that a lot of the the underlying quest tech result has to have an instance owner and the problem with going in since instance was we would lose track of who the instance owner was because if somebody had a faster connection in your party they might end up in the instance first and then their the instance owner now a linear instance and so the mg's there was and a lot of times it would just move players individually so you'd every like if you went from one instance with a party and you send them to another instance everyone would get their own copy of the instance so was there's just a lot of sort check ethical hurdles about keeping the party together between the two and I don't know what magic we've made yeah it was funny because there was actual a bug with it to that because of all the ways that we used it up until episode 2 of the season we just naturally maxed the bug because we had the the way that the quest steps had in order and then we did the final instance where you were jumping through the portals and fighting that one boss and then you ended up kind of at the end of kind of space all of those started discovering new issues of like hey when I leave the instance and come back like it puts me like it was resetting quest steps and kind doing all these things I was like no no that's what the system has always been doing we just never knew and so for us it was like it's just broken this one instance but it works over here it's like no no it's always been broken we just we just never could see it before and what was interesting about that and I I don't know the history of this but it felt to me always that this was one of the things kind of led the even solving this problem led to us solving another problem which was checkpointing in instance one of the things that we had always been sort of hobbled by on the story team was like you couldn't have a checkpoint you just had to have start to finish you had to finish the instance and if you disconnect here you had to log out or whatever you just had to restart the instance from the start point which is still true but in order to solve the problem of like well how are we gonna have instant instance we ended up breaking up story quests into smaller chunks and then when we do that it's like oh well if we're doing that now anyway why can't we now have these things sort of bookmark where you are in the quest and so that enables us to start thinking about quests in terms of instead of a quest is a long series of events with all these different things no let's have smaller discrete chunks of things that you complete and then each of those break points we now have a way to set up picking up right where you left off it does require us to have to contend with that but I mean that's on us to do it's like that's what we want we want to be able to give players the option of logging out and saying oh I beat this really hard fight and I don't have to go do it again so let's put it instant checkpoint it's not always easy you know we're trying to do it more and more and more now I think that's now becoming the standard that every instance has to have certain checkpoints along the way just so that we don't have to the problem we kind of run into when testing the game on our dev environments and from either open world or from story perspective is the game is not deterministic so as characters are running around as your interaction we think you are changing what the state of the world is and it's reacting to you so like in the original story quest area I was like okay if everything is going into linear and I say okay I just want to start from this point because we had not said discrete breakpoints before it's you can't just like save state and then reload because the game would go okay I gonna run through that path and things are gonna be different this time because maybe this NBC was was spawned as a child instead of an adult or was male instead of female and so the interaction is slightly different so this the the way that the technology has come about and the way that the designers now thinking about the problem allows us to do things differently and frame it in such a way that we can do things like checkpoints and and make more kind of quality of life improvements to the system that makes it easier for us to respect players time and that is I mean that was a thing that as we were improving it could be rough if you got disconnected and okay I got it or something happens because life exists and okay I have to I have to stop and logout yeah too bad we just I'm gonna have to do all this again and being able to eliminate that was such a victory yeah I mean it's it like I said it's more set-up time for the designer but it actually saves us time in the end because having checkpoints also benefits us while we're play testing and we play tests I mean so much I would say you know taking one instance from start to finish you're gonna have played it as the designer you're gonna have played it hundreds of thousands thousands of times so like having the ability to like I'm just gonna checkpoint myself here and be able to pick up and test each chunk you know discreetly and then at the end coming back through and make sure that all the things flow together well nicely but it really helps it helps QA as well because if you're saying hey I just made this change to the back half of the instance they can check point to that point and then you know test the back half thoroughly make sure that that's clean and then again go do their their full pass so it helps development tremendously to have in checkpoints you mentioned just integrating a lot of that stuff and making it a smoother experience something that you had talked to me about a little bit was taking story and since like cinematic moments and story instances and and we've moved those more into gameplay yeah that was definitely a mandate from upper management and our directors that we want to stop so pulling player out of out of the game as much as we can it's cooler is to be in the moment as opposed to be a spectator of the moment yes yeah and so that was one of those things that we really wanted to focus all our efforts on that this season yeah and so it's just it's it's it's actually made us work more closely hand-in-hand with Cinemax team with artists because now we are trying to present something that typically we've sort of pushed off on them and said hey make us this awesome cinematic moment and you know they did and they would go off and do it and you know we would see a you know regular updates but now it's more of us having to have regular collaboration and having them come in the the most recent example of that was when we did at the end of Episode four of this season at the first instance when you come out of the the keep and you're supposed to see the shatter air fly in and you know that was a big moment that we initially had pitched as a cinematic and then we decided that at some point no we we need to do this in game which presented a number of challenges because you're dealing with a lot of million parts and we workshop that with Cinemax team with producers with everybody because it's it's a moment that it's very fast really in game it's about an eight or nine second sequence and so it can you can blink and miss it and so we were bringing people in out of the halls are like have you played this episode yet they're like no all right like cool get to get you in a room I wanted to make sure that everybody we showed it to would actually follow the action and so it's it's a different skill set it requires a lot of different thinking about the way that we construct story but I think overall it's it's a great direction for us to be moving in one of the other things the biggest challenge is when you're doing a cinematic there's a fixed camera and when you're in the world and you want to highlight the same actions or same moments you have to change what the sight lines are for the player - or that expectation what can you do that calls attention to make sure that players are going to want to go naturally to that spot I think just before that in that same instance when the council or the the kind of congress's meeting and then there's a roar and we wanted to call people's attention to the door it's like okay we NPCs we had everyone looked there we had a screen shake we had an effect out there we had all these things that were building up towards kind of basically putting a giant arrow saying players walk over here so we can do the next day surprise you it was actually happening and these are there again it's its new challenges or new ways of thinking for designers who are used to building content a certain content in a certain way that I think opens up the doors for how we can deliver things better in the future and that's I have to say as speaking strictly as a player and stepping aside for a second that was one of my favorite story steps because of that particular kind of work that you put in your comment about this okay we're not we're not coming out and we're gonna watch this little movie and then we're gonna get back in the game but that roar and that screen shake happening in the world as a player makes such a big difference and all of those little touches that you have to think about to draw the players attention you go this way look this way go over here I mean this is the the value and the the potential of a game as entertainment versus a movie as entertainment right the the player is not a spectator they're an actor and so we need to make sure that the game recognizes that and revolves around that and then highlights that as well and so this is again taking more like the approach towards cinema events as we're kind of calling internally versus actually doing a cinematic I think there are times and places for cinematics and we're gonna continue using because we want to because there's really cool things that they can do that we can't do in game but if it's it feels almost cheap to remove the player from the action in in specific cases so we want to put those back into the end of the game and now that you have a way to do that and you've got a solid direction for that it it would feel cheap to go back and you know what you're just gonna watch again because experiencing it is it's so good yeah I mean it even I even translates down to the little things like one of the things that I I don't know that anyone's even noticed it but I was particularly proud of was in the very beginning of that instance you meet up with Bram and the two of you get out and mounts and you ride down towards the thing and so I did a number of little things to try to make that cuz really you're just having a conversation and that's traditionally an area where we would just probably just have characters you know walk and talk but I'm like no let's not just have it be that so like Branwell will stop if you get too far ahead he will stop if you lag behind he tries to keep pace with you I put a lot a lot of little critters that kind of direct you you know like they're on the same line as you I have a little thing of antler antelope type creatures I can't really cold the rock gazelles yes yeah they hop out and like you know they kind of guide you you know because I wanted to tell players hey you need to turn left I don't wanna have a big game II arrow of like I mean the map markers are always there but like but in the world I want you to experience stuff in the world so like I tried to do a lot of and it's it's all little techniques like that that we're starting to try to implement to make it so that you're experiencing the story and not just you know passive witness to what's happening you're actually controlling the action honestly I'm not sure how many people have noticed that but I almost feel like that's okay because it's one of those little subtle things that you've put in there to make the entire world a lot of guide a lot of the way that we know we're doing our jobs right and the way how we're presenting it is the things that go unnoticed but that players are going wow I had this really cool experience I had this emotional bond with a character with the game with a friend in living the in the game and so for us it's it's a lot of the making sure that the little things support what's happening but don't overshadow kind of what the experience we want to give right that makes sense can we if we can't can we pull it out of story instances for a second because there's a bigger part of living world that I really wanted to talk about because it was something where we had to overcome hurdles and challenges and figure this out and that's the changes that we made in open world maps and making them bigger and better and doing more with them and that was the thing that we figured out and turned out really well in the end so not without headaches though I think the I think what you saw was an evolution of us developing or coming into land expansion or pacifier at the same time is already going into four or five months of development on Episode one and so with path afire we knew we wanted to build these big expansive Maps and we wanted to capture the exploration that you had in the original game the first time you you walked into teria in the Guild Wars 2 era and so we we put a lot of effort into trying to make it so there was a lot of mount usage and what this ended up being is teams were looking at the expansion human development and then trying to capture that same element on a smaller time frame or feel like they have to go bigger on a smaller time frame and so we've we've kind of had to readjust how we approach map design and from a level our perspective but also from a Content perspective because I think we've discovered new tricks and ways of you can build cool content in the world that doesn't require you to have a flat open space and that was the natural tendency that everyone was kind of gravitating towards the beginning of the season and so we've been finding it more interesting ways of how we can make the content more meaningful and not have it spread out as far but the some of the things that we discovered through this is we originally were cataloguing how expensive map was based on its CPU performance so whenever we do our test remember you are all calls we were always looking at one metric as saying okay this we know this map is performant because when things were much smaller and contained that was the the key indicator that was our canary in the coalmine and week I discovered with episode 3 yeah that memory usage became a much more bigger thing and so because we were doing bigger maps because we were loading everything in or with also with the dynamic loading of of or evolution of instances like the boundaries changing as you were getting because we want to help but have that better direct experience we were still loading in the full map which would mean that the that was all getting chunked into memory which meant that even we were though we were checking our CPU performance memory uses was going through the roof and this is why we saw a bunch of problems and initial crashes with Episode three when I first came out is we thought we are goodbye all over internal metrics and we discovered there was a metric that we had now put back into play because of the way that we were approaching design that we hadn't considered for a very long time you mentioned I want to call that out because you mentioned that there were headaches and there were struggles but I feel like that's a part of continually making this bigger and better because it's not going to be just like alright yeah I feel like doing this thing now it's done and now it's perfect you're you're improvising and you're improving the game the gratification that or the excitement we get when we solve these major hurdles is hard to describe because again it's it's that opening up doors of potential that we couldn't do before but obviously one of the questions is to come in like when programmers initially discover early designers find the problem or QA helps us find the problem and then programmers go okay this is an investigation that might be very scary because of you know touches 174 files those types of things and that's where it becomes a you know we have to look at it in terms of what's the benefit we get out of this how much do we want to invest in the current problem solving or do we want to develop something new and I think this is one of the balances that we've we've been dealing with for at least the last you know since six years since we've launched the game is do we do we go back and refine something we've already done or do we do push forward in terms of building new concepts new maps new ideas new things that we we didn't conceive when we originally got to the game and I think there's that delicate balance that we've been trying to how can we bring up the rest of the game while still pushing forward and I think the thing that we've seen is that the quality bar of the whole game has been you know getting higher and higher and that means that we have to also spend time making sure that we are making the system robust that we're not leaving things permanently behind and this is the delicacy of an MMO right like it's so great to be able to say like we're not done yet but that's a double-edged sword right we're not done yet building new cool content we're not done yet also making sure the rest of stuff doesn't crash while we do the cool new things as well and you have to get into what seems like almost the pedestrian problem of how do we allocate our resources which is just a constant thing to think about right so yeah and if it was if it was easy it's just part of the learning curve it was all easy it's part of the game as part of the developments part of us working on a franchise or a game like this and it is a huge challenge and I don't want to undercut that or sell it short but no that's that's part of the excitement of why people are working on this game because they've liked this challenge they want to step up and they want to do more better faster than we've ever done before and so like when I was talking about one of the previous episodes being delayed it was us going back and looking at the how we can better support our technology moving forward and obviously that comes at a cost at current development rate and so I think we've already seen some cool things associated with it and there's plenty more where that's coming that's awesome can when you talk about mounts a little bit because we did a whole I said a little heaven note here that's like beetle tech lifts but not for the whole hour yeah what do you want to start with Auto dismounting like yeah that's that is probably my favorite single mounts bug so that's a good physics buster so that we had this bug it's like a pleat jump from what we were just talking about but like it's it's still fun like we fixed probably find funny problems and fix them like it's part of our job and so there's this bug where if you were so one step back if you are on a mount and you are unsupported like you're like you get stuck in some crevice or something and so you're like you're not really on the ground but you can't move the we ran this problem when we were working up how the fire was like wow sometimes happens this really sucks because you can't move it it's terrible you're like okay fine use your solution we just dismount you no problem and so there's this code that detects hey if you're like if you're stuck and you haven't moved for a while but you're not only you're not supported yeah if we should probably smile to you and so the fun thing we discovered with that is the way this implemented is that the lowest layer is sitting on top of Havok were like hey like it should happen other layers above us who should smelt and so it sends it up the chain and then somewhere up further up it goes hey I got the signal saying I should dismount so I guess I'm going to take my character and dismount him problem is it's take my character and dismount them so what happened is you would be standing somewhere if there be ten other people around you all mounted and something that probably lot of people don't think about is you as an observer of other players have to simulate all of their physics because that's that's how I'm in those work and so you would be simulating oh I see that he is unsupported or he's he's like supported but not really and then like you should dismount of so he's clearly stuck and so you the second coming up going alright this guy's doing the dismount just another thing gets to the layer it actually does a dismount he goes I should dismount because I should take my character and dismount not that character dismount and so what happened is you're the one mount would do the thing everybody's seeing him would also dismount because they all thought I should just mount to this it's peer pressure peer pressure and guys it's just a we had never really it almost never happens unless you intentionally earthly someone figured out oh I can just intentionally like stand in this spot and I'm like it'll happen after isn't and because I think doesn't the raid Lobby where someone post a video about that was funny you get some weird stuff when you because you are simulating everybody else's physics and whatnot like what actually ends up happening just very brief you get like broad seems like and you didn't move this way I need you to like turning the spun you need to jump whatnot and then so the other thing of the client who's watching it's like okay you wanted to move that way you want to jump you want to like move that way and this is our and I will move your body around like that and then everyone somewhere the services you should you should be hearing like oh I'm wrong I guess I need to jump back but by and large you were simulating what you see other people doing and so you end up with strange things like this sometimes were if you are not careful and assume obviously it's me that's doing the thing then anyway wonderful bug there there are other bugs I don't know how how many we want to go into any time we have because I could also talk forever about mules uh you talk about the jackal bug first bit oh yeah that was them that's just a nice quality real life thing that was that was a and oversight from this is is they sometimes we go back and look at old content go house that's wrong so check portals you'd supposed to jackal a poop and you go the portal and out you go on the other side right easy problem is the way we actually detect that is we put buff on you it says I can go through portals and that buff is not being someone who's trying to be clever when they were that originally like okay well what if you're on a jackal and you unlock the mastery to use a portal while you're still on the jackal and then you try to use a portal that should work so it has this check that's like every three seconds in the background that checks hey do we have the master you have the master how about no how about now but now and eventually once together he's like cool I got it I put the buff on me now and the problem is that like little little pulse timer in the background doesn't trigger immediately when you mount up so for the first three seconds he doesn't check sure they put the buff on me so for a second round three ish actually is you would smash into portals like a and so and so it happened I'd run this all the time I assume there's just some lag issue or into it I get on the jackal and smashing smashing to plain and so fix that and now it's better and I just I just wrongly assumed yeah there's just some lag issue and I tried fixing it so sometimes it pays to deeper you just you have to get frustrated enough well that goes back to what she was saying about making the game better and thinking what make a better experience for the player and he made one and this honestly those little quality of life changes here they're they add up they make they make the world better so good work yep yeah there's a number of updates this year that we were looking at kind of the fundamental mostly specifically with a skill system right like when we did the the underwater rework it puts a light back on all the under water content and players being underwater so it was like okay well now it's weird that I can't look at what skills I have unless I'm underwater so back in started cleaning that system up and part of that work was also looking at like okay I used a skill but now I want to slot somebody else in there but we had this assumption that you can't change unless the skills not active so we started again it's it's digging in deeper and smooth lining or trying to smooth out those those those bumps so that it's it's a much cleaner experience the game feels more intuitive and it's not like I have to learn oh there's this one rule I have to keep in mind that I can't do this thing because there's an exception over here and that's just that's not great so you know this is just kind of where a lot of those efforts came from the season there's like paving over all of this teams like yeah we did like system steam stuff for a while I'm going I'm gonna let you talk about roller beetles but first if you guys have questions drop them in chat we'll try to get to some of them here at the end I just looked at the clock it was like oh yeah let's talk about my stuff somewhere although I shall have the skill stuff too so be like it there's all kinds of good fun stuff that I had to do to make that thing work so I guess I'll just I'll just pick one of the heavy tech low side to do which was friction not exactly rotating collision so talk about this on the a little video app I remember well anyway talk about it now it's still one of my favorite is things they had to do mostly because the reaction I got from other programmers so basically normally when when I mount collision visits I can't really with my hands but it's like top like it's got silicone on the bottom and then I saw someone run up and normally they just kind of move like this and they bump over things and you smash them into the things have like if it goes up over the bump and then you keep going the problem and for the beetle it's like well if you're going really fast I'd like you to be able to go up steeper Hills it'd be cool to like go up a really steep slope we don't really steep one like well how we're gonna do that because you slide up into the thing X cameras this way it was propagating grains on the cliff and then and it doesn't doesn't move so like a well easy solution we'll just take the thing rotated easy and so ever in this past a me or resident havoc experience she was like oh my this what are you doing no it's fine this will be this will be perfect there's no way that this carefully laid plan could possibly fail I feel like there's a little bit of a designer in you yes a little bit well I mean and so there that I added about a month to things but it's fine and so that means is I guess as it rotates up a hill now like it can like go over steeper surfaces doesn't grant into the hill looking like bounce over pumps and things but like they were just there there's a lot of gnarly yeah I again I could go into like so much cruise detail but I don't know you're fine you have you have some time do I have infinity time from well done you know is this what it's like working with Jowan yes okay I have infinity times wheat I feel like you you are definitely getting the most out of all the mathematics you took yeah in school for all of the reasons like translations and yeah matrix operations definitely like you find the actual parts that are useful like do math kids like you won't use most of it but some of it man you'll use it anyway yeah I like it we like that so other minor details so the way that I was explaining this top shape right and do you've any handy things to like point on the bottom and then Randy on the top and and what the way that actually works internally is is like if you hit a thing here because I can call so anything under the on the the pointy part will support you you can like stand on anywhere on the pointy part and so when you once I wrote a they're like oh I guess I need to like a rotate the whole plane I didn't think that originally put thumbs like oh yeah I need to like still anything on the pointy part here should support you and the problem is that slope now of like the like I touched like a super steep surface and it's like 80 degrees or something and how it's like I don't think you should stand on something this 80 degrees that's way too steep and so I hadn't do some creative lying to ya and then in like fix about her third it's a I'm sorry is like if only the world was nice and clean though the inputs were nice then everything we worked perfectly and looking yeah you can't have that no we're going to do what we want to do it'll be fun havoc just rolling over like okay yeah this is fine world is on fire I do like the the fact that the top speed of the roller beetle when you're normally moving non boosted is not actually the top speed value we put in the game and in our client that you're faking it with friction and holding the player the player character back look what you've done no no the whole thing is like I have to go gosh down a now I mean well I was like I said I could talk about this for an hour if you wanted but let's answer a question from our viewers okay yeah let's do question if there's a question kiss like otherwise we'll just guys this question what language is G W humanely programmed in it yes C++ is correct we also have another layer of like our own sore the in-house baked scripting stuff that designers usually use you have a name I mean no as we know the tools in the actual language having a name yeah although I believe all most of our tools to over now is in C yes that's correct yep cool system you know those things sit there just no no no we've got to give the tools programmers like to hear how oh I remember what you said on the Gil Chad yeah this is recorded I'm sorry yeah no yeah any of you guys can grab any of these questions too okay well what's good okay so so like the fun thing about beetle physics is and just design this whole thing is it's super fake like under the hood it's beautiful it's beautiful thickness and Griffin is the same way where it does this kind of like with the way that you can like take turns at high speeds and stuff like that it's just like well if I just you know this is your forward speed and now you've turned and we'll just like well ignore physics we'll just like keep your forward speed the same and just assume friction turn to you and so like there's no we're not actually doing like friction forces turning it like kind of water but we aren't allocated anyway there were fun bugs though where when I built Griffin using that same sort of tech you could only accelerate with gravity past its natural speed limit as you could accelerate up with gravity and then it would slowly die off but you could keep that speed for a while as he does he turned that leak-proof new things and so on the beetle though it's like well gravity's not the only way you can also hit the boost button so there is all kinds of gnarly math okay well when when you're doing this specific thing that speed can increase but only sort of kind of sometimes reasons and that took a lot of that codes also really gross it was that was another case of something that started nice and clean and pretty and then we kept adding pieces which happens and someday I'm going to go back to it and like we should fix this and make it more efficient this is just like a smaller scale version of it was gross actually we should make it end gross that's the story for another time everybody help me remember that yes I am a mess burger rush says joel is a Mesmer shattering all of the game's illusions but in a good way yeah something like that I hope it's good anyway so there's just a couple beetle things there's they're there many beautiful things they spent a long time on that sort of like December of last year I think oh my god it was long ago long ago and then so they often they're working on skill stuff too and like tears are kind of the same era yeah because I got frustrated it's not a year you don't like let's build chairs instead that wheezing my favorite early beetle stuff was when we first got access to one version of the beetle and I was like oh I can't wait to get on the beetle I want to try it out and I got on it and I instantly started floating up in the air infinitely so so so there's a fun story behind that so I added a thing where there's more beetle physics when you are going up I think up or down the hill I don't remember what there is normally head like gravity like straight down I'm like okay well so the components of that you have like a perpendicular component of it and a parallel component of it and so the parallel component will slow down and the perpendicular component keeps you on the ground and I found just been trying to to numbers that I wanted to individual control over those to compose just kind of sheet physics cos x and so I added these two new parameters for multipliers on the perpendicular and parallel components of gravity and the problem is when you add new movement parameters in our grand movement system that we built for mounts they all default to zero so any old mounts where I hadn't gone back and updated them or anyone who didn't have the content yet for like hey I updated these numbers see them as zeros like I guess we don't have gravity now he's jumping and you are off into space I guess we don't have gravity now yeah W suck its w3 it's ten after so you can afford more beetle story oh and then because it's fair I can give each of you one more sternum out there's only one that's like ha it's so hurt pink your favorite well he thinks about that yeah Oh ask an astronaut not the example asks is Sunspear i'll fit new physics a teaser for more on where we works to come i don't know if we will go back and do more armory works like that one particular atom the character lead made the original Sunspear outfit gave it to us as a bonus when we were working on path the fire and so we're like okay we think we can give this way as part of the i think was the pre-order bonus and then he self shamed himself by playing Assassin's Creed and was looking at all the cool physics and things that they were doing and he was like man I feel so bad about the work that I did on this particular one and so he went back and he was like I need to fix this and so he made the the the changes to it and then pitched like hey I want to change this because I feel like this is such a better version of it I think you'll definitely see that tech being used a little bit more moving forward and then maybe in the background you'll see the character artists picking up pieces here or there but this was specifically a passion project of one of the artists and and I try and get out of the way of passion projects on the team as long as they're like moving in the right direction oh really as well as they're moving in the right direction I mean chairs was another one of these things yeah that's true just did that said yeah I did right before winter break do so no one could stop me that's coming out because another show that this if to go on stories one question raised its questions I feel some time Pam I'm not qualified to answer any of those questions I am remembering what we're talking about all of these things that we did I invited to you man back in like it had to have been like 2010 2011 like eight years ago before launch one of my first looks at Guild Wars 2 and I remember just being enchanted at this little detail of oh my gosh this character is standing on an incline and her leg is like cocked up to account for that incline and how that was such a cool thing to me and how far we've come I was 8 years of the first pax we had the playable demo and you were there I knew you were gonna bring that we're going back that far I was like I had very 2009 something like that it might have been nine or ten or so nice well and we they warned me they're like okay so we have Ruby oh god stop superfan who knows like everything about our game so you better make sure that you know you're you're able to show off the cool aspects of it and you're like have you met me Yeah right so I was like okay so here's you know I think we can see God's law swamp and I was showing did all of the kind of what happened to the temple the ages I was freaking out it was so great news adorable thanks man I'm older than you that was amazing but that was the moment like those are the types of moments like that's what I want all of our players to feel and so that's let's it's those types of things that are inspiration about like when we're introducing characters for introducing storylines I want people to feel those moments and that connection of I mean we tried a little bit of this with season one of hey you were there for the moment and there was a really cool thing actually even before that with the lost Isles the original kharka invasion and stuff and I think we hit strong on a couple of those notes but there's a problem with if that content goes away you can't feel that that same connection with the next player and so that's kind of where a lot of the focus is is how do we give those cool moments how do we give that aha excitement that that general enthusiasm that we haven't necessarily been able to that we lost a little bit by not doing those types of content anymore so it's it's all through evolution of the game through the storytelling through the content we're doing through the system through the rewards through quality of life all of this has been what's fueled this past year I'm sorry I'm lost in nostalgia and I'm no good to anybody that was it was such an amazing moment it was incredible okay so Asura hole Smith asks what considerations do you make when design features you can fight over it yeah yeah well I was gonna say is it cool what's our budget look like okay I think I feel like this is like we should do this awesome thing there's like I think it's the first one more than the site's usually we'll usually do the jumping off and do some of the exploration yeah well the lake mallet is like just do all the budget yeah and then secondarily will come okay how do we actually feasibly make this work one of we so we've been there's an analogy I like that says that jutsu designers are generally raised by wolves like we don't have well as the organization it's not formal to trained like here's all the things that you're supposed to do but we generally get to good ideas and good results and so a lot of what's been going on internally for the last year and a half has been putting us more on to it more or less to an individual gate structure allows us to do things like identify like an innovation gate like what is the cool thing that we want to do for the next season what is the thing we want to do for an expansion level feature or those types of things and it allows us to refocus our efforts and allow programmers and designers to take off the producer hat and protect them and go go develop a cool thing or go pitch a cool thing and then come back talk to us and we'll figure out how to make that work or if we can't then what's the next thing on that list that we can do so a lot of the stuff you saw moving into path of fire or even sorry heart of thorns originally was joy of movement we saw that with the the festival of the four winds with the crystals we saw that in dry top how do we how do we capture that that element of joy of movement and so gliding became an element of lighting mushrooms they have those two yeah okay obviously it's the next next evolution of that and then looking at mounts it wasn't about how do we do a movement in speed increases like okay how do we how do we have that joy of movement and have it meaningful and having the mounts be characters as like having a giant bunny sounded cool idea was really awesome to kind of go and you know be able to do that versus writing a raptor and being able to do long jump so that was kind of that the joy of finding the new ways to traverse and have those things and I think this is part of the the design challenge we have looking at mounts is like all of the mounts have been innovating in different spaces and there's only so many of those before you start squishing all the previous ones yeah so that's the fun challenge that we get to deal with internally but for us in terms of how do we we look at features is its what's cool what's fun and and what do what do we want to see or what do we wanted to experience what would player be excited about yeah exactly what will get the most I mean it's going back to Mo's adage wait let go surprise and delight like what are the things that we think are gonna be really cool when players get their hands on it and be able to experience it yeah I think that's it's almost 20 after one and I am officially keeping you guys from your work for a very long time and kind of your lunch so yeah we could go on forever but alas we could but I'm gonna have you back on so you can go on for like another hour and it'll be wonderful I will tell you all thank you very very much and all of your works is here yeah this year has been fantastic from a development standpoint from a player's standpoint from our interactions with the players it's been a lot of fun to see the game grow to what it is and I mean we're not done yet we've got a lot of cool that he has a lot of cool things that we're trying that we want to share with you so obviously stay tuned as we move into the holiday season obviously enjoy it and hopefully we will see you next time well thank you guys see you next time buddy