Guild Chat - Episode 79

The following is an unofficial, player-written transcript of the episode. The accuracy of this transcription has not been verified by ArenaNet.

The 79th episode of Guild Chat aired on January 11, 2019. Join host Rubi Bayer and guests for a discussion about the newest living story chapter!

Transcription[edit]

Guild Chat Studio [6:50][edit]

Rubi Bayer: Hi Tyria. Happy Friday and welcome to Guild Chat. I'm your host Rubi and we have had a week here. We have a lot to talk about, so we're gonna jump right into the show and our- the first couple of our eight dev guests today. I do want to let you know that we have- The spoiler doors are open. We are talking about everything today.

Spoiler Alert!

SPOILER ALERT!: [klaxon sound effect]

If you have not played the latest episode "All or Nothing" and you don't want to be spoiled, this is the time to stop watching. I won't be hurt. It'll be on YouTube. You can watch it after you play. But we are spoiling all the things here. We're talking about everything. All right? Everybody clear? Okay, let's start with our first two developers. I will let you guys introduce yourselves: talk about who you are, what you do here at ArenaNet, and what you worked on for this episode.

Mike Zadorojny: Hi everybody, I'm Mike Zadorojny. I'm the Game Director on Guild Wars 2. So a lot of my daily tasks is just making sure that we're bringing you guys the most impressive, the most amazing, unique experiences that we can do in the game. And so obviously with this episode, we're going to be talking a lot about the music, we're gonna be talking a lot about the sound design and everything else and that's just gonna segue to...

Jason Wolford: Alright, hi.

Rubi: Jason, welcome to Guild Chat first.

Jason: Thank you. Hi, I'm Jason Wolford, Audio Lead for Guild Wars 2. Um, this was my first episode release here at ArenaNet and-

Mike: So, the bar you've now set is pretty high.

Rubi: It's great.

Jason: Yeah, so we're going up from here. But yeah, I was responsible for just working with the team, making sure everything was covered, and hitting the quality bar that ArenaNet has set and yeah.

Rubi: Awesome. Well, thank you both for spending some time on here. Let's start out with the Zephyrite choirs, since we just got to see that, and you flew out and were part of that.

Mike: Yeah. This was actually Maclaine's first piece writing for vocals and he was super kind of worried going into it. Like the amount of key changes that he did going into the recording session. And the two of us flew down to Salt Lake City and we recorded with the 25 piece choir and it was just- It was phenomenal. Like the emotions that we were getting just from the initial recording of them. Like hitting just the the simple tunings for the key that he had requested. It was just- it was fantastic. And so, I know we recorded a bunch of that. We've got a bunch of pictures and stuff that hopefully we'll be seeing very shortly. But specifically with "Aurene's Theme" and the piece itself- Maclaine is in the final- finishing touches because we did actually some changes on the fly down there and he's going back and changing the sheet music and we're gonna release that publicly. Hopefully soon. So, all of our fans will get chance to take a look at that music because we're really excited about what we did with it, but we also want to see what fans can do with it as well.

Rubi: Yeah, I really love the fan takes on a lot of our music. So what were some of the highlights of going down there to watch all of this happen live?

Mike: There is a huge distinction from hearing something through a computer and then hearing it live. Whenever the- There's a number of concerts that tour that will play Guild Wars music and it touches me in a very emotional way. And so hearing, you know, when you hear the culmination of what you've been working on brought to life, it is just- It's very powerful. It's a very touching experience. And so particularly because we knew, and you'll hear a lot about this from Cameron when he starts talking about the instance later in the episode, the way that that final instance was designed was built around the idea of resonance, of tonal, you know, of the choir being a very important aspect of this. And so, you know, Maclaine was like, "Hey, look. I think I can't do this with samples. I need to do this with a live group. Can we do this?" And just all the dominoes lining up just right for us be able to pull this off. And so, you know, in middle of November, the two of us went down there. Spent just one day with the recording session and, you know, you hear the end result and it's just- It's fantastic.

Rubi: Yeah. Having seen those videos while Mark and I were working on them, watching player reactions, watching all of you guys hear this music in the game for the first time was just incredibly gratifying and knowing that it resonated with everybody playing, too. And one of the things- one of the immediate feedback that I saw after this episode released on Tuesday: so many people saying, "If you don't usually have your game sounds on, turn them on. Turn them up. Don't listen to anything else. Listen to the music. Listen to the audio because it is unbelievable." Which actually takes me over to you, Jason, because audio, that's like Z said: you guys set the bar really high.

Jason: Yeah, this was a really good time. One thing we worked really hard on was the overall mix of the episode. There was so much happening, particularly towards the end of episode, 8 to 10 to 12 battles happening at once, and they can get really noisy so we worked really hard to cull that and make the mix as clean as possible. And we put a request in the notes with the release just saying play your audio on default and a few people have taken that direction and done it and have found some happy surprises.

Rubi: Yeah, it's super gratifying. There is a video that I think we showed on Guild Chat ages ago and you guys finally get to see what that was for. So do you want to kind of tell us what we're going to be looking at and listening to here?

Jason: Yeah so, as beautiful as the Zephyrite choir is, I was tasked with doing the sound for what we're calling the Kralk ultimate attack towards the end of the episode and it's Kralk bearing down with all his might. And it was an interesting piece for us because it's the first discretely surround moment in Guild Wars 2. We authored content specifically to be played in all four speakers. And the recording itself that we used for part of it was- The audio team went out and did the recording of an old railway turntable and it made this hideous creaking noise as you pushed it around and it was perfect for the Kralk- for the charge-up leading into Kralk's attack. Yeah. It was a lot of fun to design.

Rubi: Let's take a look.

[video of the audio team recording the hideous creaking noise of an old railway turntable, followed by in game footage of its use in the episode]

Sound design team recording the noise of a railway turntable

Caithe: We, um, have his attention.

Braham Eirsson: Behind me—I can shield us!

Rubi: I have to pull myself away from being distracted by the amount of sunshine in that first video. I was just watching it like, "Oh, I remember that." Well, you commented that this was a lot of fun to work on so, that was a huge project. How long did that take?

Jason: Uh, more time than I care to admit. It was my first big moment in Guild Wars 2. Period. So I put a lot of time into it, stayed late and did a lot of iteration, getting feedback from designers and the person who did a lot of the VFX. Yeah, but it's so fun. I can't believe that's my job. Doing things like that, so.

Rubi: That's a good feeling.

Jason: Yeah, it's great.

Rubi: Alright, well I'll tell you what. I will let you guys get back to work and thank you very much for talking a little bit about the audio in there.

Mike: Yeah.

Jason: Yeah.

Rubi: I appreciate it and thank you for sharing your Salt Lake trip with us.

Mike: Oh, no.

Rubi: That was fantastic.

Mike: It's another way for us to look at how we can elevate what we're doing with Guild Wars 2 and I hope all of you take away from today's Guild Chat the passion that came from every discipline, from everyone coming together. This was a culmination of not just the episode 5 team, but this is a storyline that we've been building towards for so long. And to kind of have it all play out this way, you know. We've been touched by the reactions of the fans, we've been touched by the reactions of our partners and the streamers. And it's- We know we've got something special here, and I keep saying this, but we're not done yet. So there's a lot more to come for Guild Wars 2.

Rubi: Yeah, alright. Thank you both. Stay put we will be back in just a minute.

Open World Content [18:03][edit]

Rubi: Welcome back, you guys and thank you for sticking around with us. We have a whole lot more to talk about. Once again, and I'm going to do this at the beginning of every segment, we are spoiling everything. We are not holding back on any spoilers on today's episode. If you do not want spoilers, this is the time to not watch.

SPOILER ALERT!: [klaxon sound effect]

It'll be on YouTube later. You can watch it there after you've played the episode. It's not going to hurt our feelings. We don't want you spoiled if you don't want to be spoiled. So, with that in mind, here we go with our next round of dev guests. I'm gonna have each of you do the same thing that Z and Jason did: introduce yourself, talk about what you do here at ArenaNet, and what you did for episode 5.

Kye Harris: Sure. Hi, my name is Kye Harris. I'm the Producer for this episode, which involves making sure that we ship on time, making sure that everybody is collaborating well, to just bringing all the pieces together for the episode.

Lily Yu: My name is Lily Yu. I'm a Narrative Designer at ArenaNet. I worked on open world story for episode 5 along with Aaron Linde. Armand Constantine was the golden path writer.

John Jarynowski: I'm John Jarnowski. I'm a Content Designer on the Living World team. I chiefly work on story instances and open world story content.

Rubi: Awesome. Well, thank you guys all for being here. Um, I want to- Every time I look down at my paper, I have like a huge note everywhere that says "spoiler warning, spoiler warnings". I'm going to let you guys pass this around because we have a whole lot of pictures to show today. I want to start by talking about some of the highlights of creating this episode and let's start with some character and NPC design. How about some dwarves first?

Kye: Dwarves? Yeah.

Rubi: Cause we have lots to talk about on dwarves and this is amazing to me.

Kye: The dwarves were pretty fun. I don't know if we actually have pictures for them.

Rubi: So we have that one for the end of this little group. We'll talk about him after the dwarves because... I don't why. I don't have a good reason.

Kye: Okay. Great. That's fine. So with this episode, we knew we were going back to Thunderhead Keep, and obviously Thunderhead Keep features the dwarves a lot, and so we had a bit of a task of- So far in Guild Wars 2 we've had Ogden and we've had Rhoban who is nearly a head, so we have part of Rhoban, but not all of him. We wanted to get some more dwarves in there and this was a challenge that we gave to the art team to see how we can work this out.

Rubi: Make us dwarves.

Kye: Make us some dwarves that we can fit in, knowing that we also have a large dragon that needs to fit in this and a lot to do with Aurene and and everything else, so balancing that. And our character lead, Adam Hogseth, came up with a- came to me once with a brilliant solution saying, "Hey, I made you some dwarves!" And I was like, "Wow, that was really fast! How'd you make us dwarves?" And he said, "I scaled down the norn."

Rubi: [laughs] I don't know why that's so funny to me.

Kye: And I took a look at the screenshot that he sent me and I was like, "Yeah, that looks like a dwarf. Wait. Did you really scale down a norn?" And he said, "Yeah, mostly." So thank you, norn, for giving us dwarves for the first time in Guild Wars 2 and I hope that everybody out there is enjoying them.

Rubi: I feel like everybody needs a minute to just deal with that. But didn't he fiddle with the proportions a little?

Kye: He did, he did. So it's not just like he took a norn and just shrunk it.

Rubi: A shrunk norn.

John: They won't grow heads. It's all very- Their anatomy's very different.

Rubi: I'm so concerned.

Kye: It is different, but he started with the norn and made adjustments by scaling different parts of the bones and the model and that's how we got our dwarves.

Rubi: That's fantastic because you commented that you went to them and you had this big art request. And they were like, "Well, we're a little busy with the huge dragon."

Kye: Right.

Rubi: But we kind of need this and finding a way to make it work, and make it work well, because I was shocked when you said, "No, it's just a shrunk norn that we fiddled with a little bit and it worked."

Kye: Yeah. So kudos to the art team for being creative in their problem solving there.

Rubi: Yes, seriously. Yeah, you guys are amazing. Really everyone really, really, really stepped up for this episode so while we don't have the entire team, there's no way we could have everybody who had a hand in this episode on, but all of you are unbelievable. All of you are incredible. I know we're not really supposed to have favorites, but we do have some favorite dwarves. And I'm looking at Lily because I think you wanted to talk about Frodak a little bit?

Lily: Okay, so Frodak- I think a lot of the credit goes to Armand Constantine here. He is this "gives no skritts" dwarf that has a graveling in his tomb and wants you to get in there and get it out. The story has Kralkatorrik in the Mists, eating up the Mists, so ghosts start popping in. And my favorite ghosts in the whole episode are the dwarven ghosts throughout the catacombs, courtesy of Charlie Engelhard. It was his design. Writing for them was fabulous. My favorite, because it's really me, is the librarian dwarf who just yells at the player for carrying torches around near books.

Kye: Don't try this at home.

Lily: Don't do that. Please don't do that. Please don't carry torches into your library. This is not a good idea, especially around 500 year old books. I don't know why people would do that.

Kye: It's dark!

Rubi: I'm sorry! I don't know why I'm apologizing, but I am really sorry, Lily!

Lily: But along with the dwarves, we also have, I'm not sure players have discovered it yet, but we have a room with 2 dredge ghosts. A long time ago, these dredge ghosts burrowed into this place, fell through the ceiling, and got stuck there because they didn't have the means to get out and you can hear them squabbling non-stop, and it was a joy to write.

Rubi: That sounds like dredge. So what are they bickering about?

Lily: Oh, sandwiches.

Rubi: As you do.

Lily: I mean they were tunneling together. One of them thought he had a pack of sandwiches, and they eventually starve to death which is why they're ghosts now and they've just been popped out of the Mists back to their old place. One of them is like, "Went to open up a pack and what do I see? Not sandwiches." It's the sweetest old couple afterlife argument that you can imagine.

Rubi: Oh my gosh.

Lily: One of them says, "Search me." The other one says, "You're transparent!" And he says, "Makes it easy, doesn't it?"

Rubi: I love it. I don't know, I actually don't know if anybody has found this couple yet or not, but that's fantastic.

Lily: They just keep arguing for a very long time.

Rubi: And then you have Frodak and you have the librarian screaming at you. You mentioned Rhoban earlier, like Rhoban is just a head.

Lily: Oh, yes. Rhoban knows how to get ahead.

Rubi: Lily!

Kye: We love her. That was too easy.

Rubi: I feel like that wasn't really chastising coming from me. It's kind of a big thank you.

Lily: So Rhoban is currently a head being held by a Priory charr. Thanks to Clayton over there, you'll see him in a bit, we figured out the tech for how to put two different voices on a single character, because that is what it is technically.

Rubi: Really?!

Lily: Um, to fire off the two different dialogue voices from different bones in the charr. So if you go near Rhoban and the charr who's holding him, you could hear them arguing. If you open up the conversation with them you can see them interrupting each other. And it makes me really happy because that kind of really close, spatially close and intimately close, relationship, I mean, it's pretty unique having a large cat scholar holding a giant dwarven stone head.

Rubi: You're not wrong. I mean, like, tell me if any of you have ever seen that before, because, yeah. That sure is a thing you can-

Lily: We're breaking new ground.

Kye: Only in Guild Wars 2. Oh, man.

Rubi: I'm honestly fascinated. I didn't realize that that was two different- Those were two different dialogues firing off from what is technically one character. Is that something we've- I can't think of a reason we would have had to do that before.

Lily: I think that's the first-

John: We have before with- If there's conversation from a backpack or something for the comms.

Rubi: Oh, yeah.

John: That will fire in places. Sometimes hard to tell because it's only a wee bit off on the model, but it was particularly great here because it really highlights the juxtaposition of what's going on and I think it's a great reason for the dialogue.

Lily: She threatens to drop him at one point.

John: Yeah.

Rubi: Oh! "What? Are you gonna break me worse?" Oh my gosh, I love that so much. So what about- I'm just like running through my list because there are so many delightful things that you guys have put in there. What about Sergei?

Lily: Oh, goodness. Sergei. Steve Blum, if you're out there, we love you.

Kye: He's my favorite.

Rubi: Steve Blum, thank you for voicing Sergei.

Lily: He did the incredible voice for Sergei: the extremely depressed dredge who is up there and has to shoot all his friends and family because they've been Branded and turned into terrible monsters. And he's up there with his rifle and he's going- and he's saying things like, "Just wanted to make you proud, mom." BAM.

Rubi: Poor Sergei!

Lily: It was a joy and delight to write. Aaron and I were in a room just riffing on this, improv-ing with each other and we were so happy with how that went.

Rubi: That is a room that I would have loved to be in because you and Aaron individually are a delight to talk to and riffing on something like this had to have been like the best meeting ever.

Lily: Together, we create a black hole in aerospace.

Rubi: Yay.

Lily: The challenge we were facing was how to balance the extremely, emotionally fraught golden path, and all the tonal and and thematic resonance of that, with the open world content. How do we keep it from being overwhelmingly sad and tragic while not stepping outside the boundaries for what makes this a beautiful tapestry. Like how do we pick the right tonal colors for the characters? How do we pick the right dialogue to make people laugh... and then hurt more later.

Rubi: Yay. Of course, as you do. Actually, I do want to- I want to pause for just a second because we have- I don't think we've explained it, in case people don't know, but we have referenced the golden path on there. So do you want to explain what that is and differentiate it from Living World story?

Lily: Okay. The golden path is everything you do on quest steps where you have a green star, where you're going into these instances, where you're completing that kind of content chapter-by-chapter. It's tracked in the journal in the hero tab, and then open world is everything else. It's where we get to be insanely silly. And creative and dramatic and depressing.

Rubi: In the best way.

John: Yes.

Rubi: Yes. So, well okay. So we've been a little dwarven heavy. Do you want to talk about some skritt?

Lily: Oh, skritt.

Rubi: There it is.

Lily: Oh skritts. Probably my favorite species at this time. Again, Aaron and I would get into a room, we jam on stuff together. He reminded me today I forgot that I'd done the "skritt math" line and there's one point I was just like: you know what, you are going to write the first skritt poem, I'm going to write the second skritt poem, we're going to put them together. So it was not actually 30 skritt, in case you were wondering, it was me and Aaron. But I think one of the favorite things I've written here was that sequence of skritt poetry with Matthew, the Priory's Explorer, who's completely disillusioned about love, following the skritt around, and the skritt just believes in love. The skritt are so innocent and idealistic and eager and they believe in all the good things and for so much of this episode you're walking around disillusioning them. Like you kick them to get them to go back to work at some point and they're like, "No touchy!" And also, "Skritt has worked 12-hour day!"

Rubi: I do- I love that disconnect because they are like these idealistic little guys, but- And you go through the game and I see them treated so poorly in different places and I'm just like, "Oh, sweetie!"

Lily: Social commentary.

Rubi: Yeah, well, now I'm really sad. Oh, speaking of really sad, I don't know who has the thing, but-

Kye: I think I do.

Rubi: Okay. Okay, so this was another person who showed up and there was a lot of attention to Logan's armor so I wanted to make sure that we called this out and got a look at some of the design of his armor. This might- I don't know if this is any of you guys or if this is strictly an art thing, but I wanted to make sure we threw it in there while we were talking about character design.

Render of Logan's armor.

Kye: Well, I can tell you a little bit.

Rubi: I always look at the producer.

Kye: We knew that we wanted to bring Logan back because we're kind of rallying everybody together. And we wanted there to be- We went through varying levels of like, what that reunion was gonna look like with Logan coming back and him reuniting with Rytlock in order to fight Kralkatorrik again. And something that some of the art team and, I think, some of the commerce team wanted to do was bring in an updated armor set for Logan to show some of his evolution in the series, how he's changed.

Rubi: It's awesome. It looks really good.

Scion and Champion [30:15][edit]

Rubi: All right, so this takes us into the first instance, Scion and Champion, which... I'm just- I'm looking at John because-

John: It was my child for a long time!

Kye: That's all you.

Rubi: Yes.

John: Um, yeah. Getting into that, it was- We've clearly been to Glint's Lair before, I mean, you were going back there. It was a really poignant emotional beat for us to make sure that was involved in it. And going back there, just working with the team and trying to figure out what were the highlights that we need to cover. It was an absolute blast having so many people throwing their ideas there. Initially, we were going more of a Fortress of Solitude- Thank you! I have the projector! A Fortress of Solitude-type feeling. But we knew that, because we didn't have the late Marlon Brando, we were gonna go with something else. So we brought Glint into it, and we really want to actually have her be a physical presence here. I know a lot of people myself, I'm playing oh really to having these emotional beats that was really impactful for them. Resonates with folks. We had all these different ideas passed around how we were going to present her. We researched her old look and how she was in the- How we'd stage her. I'm controlling this [projector] at the same time, so my brain is going in multiple directions. Here we go. And this is of course where she crawled and had her final moments here. Oh! We're going the wrong way.

Rubi: It's a preview of what's coming.

John: Preview of what's coming! Yeah. And so we looked into how she looked in GW1. You can actually go in to look at her model. Kyle Bash and a bunch- and the prop team did a fantastic job with her. He was actually brilliant enough to take, it's actually Aurene's model we based this off of, and then he and I kind of threw- We dug into what Glint used to look like and we built her a kind of porcupine-esque neck. She has got a fantail and you can see all that on her body and it was just fantastic setting this moment up. Also working with the animators and having Aurene so she's stationed in such a way that it feels like she's nuzzling up her mother and trying to reach out to her for answers, which clearly also is an amazing piece of concept art we use for this episode. But it was fantastic setting up a big kick at the beginning. We didn't want to have you just walk into this gorgeous chamber you've been in before, very crystalline, but we wanted to have that emotional character moment that really kicks it off.

Rubi: Yeah, and having that- You commented about having Aurene kind of nuzzle up to her mother, reaching out for answers.

John: Yeah.

Rubi: And having that moment of "we haven't really thought about this from your perspective, have we?" was just- That was a little gut punch that I guess was kind of leading up to a bigger blow and I appreciate you, I guess, softening us up for this. But yeah, Glint's design and to use Aurene's model I feel like drew this character, drew this connection, between the two characters.

John: Right.

Rubi: That was an amazing idea.

John: Yeah, and it works wonderfully. At first we were so confused, like, "What? What are we gonna do?" We could build the model from source but it's clearly the old one from GW1. It's very outdated. How are we gonna update that? We thought why not take inspiration from her own child? It makes perfect sense for us.

Rubi: Yeah. That was a good start out for that. Let's talk a little bit about Aurene's design, too, because there was a lot. I mean she's grown up from this tiny little hatchling, um, and she had a couple of different looks here.

John: She did. Um, we knew that going into these trials, and that she was going to mature and change, that we had to actually have some physical depiction of that. And beyond that was we also had the Branded Aurene, which was the boss fight at the end of the trials. And so working with the creature designers, with Kate and others, it was just fantastic. Kind of throwing ideas around how she could change, how she could look different without drastically changing who she was and losing her identity. So, let's put some slides up, so the original Aurene. Here's what she looked like originally before we really finished the trials. This is the Aurene we know and love. We've seen her as a young adult for long enough, for a good while now. And we decided to give her a little upgrade! This is after she's completed the trials, the chat she had with her mother, the ascendancy and the fact that she has really embraced what she's going into next. So we gave her an upgrade. She's got these energy flows through her. It was great just throwing these ideas around how we're gonna change her up, not change her identity. We originally had an idea to give her eyes this glow, but realized she looks kind of alien, demonic and whatnot? Oh, that's not the right way for us.

Rubi: No, thank you.

John: Yeah. And it was just a blast working with the team to get this to work. Some people didn't notice it. When you first- When you finish the trials and after you get the prophecy, when she first comes out she actually has this upgrade. And it's highlighted as well throughout the rest of the story in the episode. You look at her and you kinda see these shine points. And then there's Branded Aurene, which was also a fantastic endeavor. We originally started and it was just kind of a purple-black Aurene, but we decided to amp her up. Make her look like truly a minion of Kralk. Her mouth is absolutely amazing. And when we made her, when Kate made her, we thought, "Well, she looks- This looks so good, we have to make her larger." And so she's actually- That's why in the branded Aurene fight, she's scaled up because we want players to see this and the grand effect of her. You can't actually see it in the image, but the energy across her chest actually radiates, and it like flares up whenever she does big attacks and all that. So it was a ton of fun to bring that forth.

Lily: No foreshadowing at all, right?

John: No! No! Not at all!

Rubi: Yeah, the first time she landed and just this enormously scaled-up creature was, "Oh! So that's- Okay, I could see why you'd be upset."

John: Right! And it was- When we first did that and we- I was working with the animators to set up the- with Matt and others to set up the roar that she had in the pushback. Originally, she didn't have that pushback and the wind. It's like, "This just doesn't feel right. She's twice the size of Aurene. She's this dark manifestation of who she is and all of her power. Let's have her push you back!" And so players stand there, you just get shoved up against the back wall. If you actually get around her she doesn't push you, so you can kind of get behind Branded Aurene and have a laugh at her. But, it was tons of fun setting up those really heavy moments to show this fear amaze in the Branded Aurene version.

Rubi: Yeah, pointing out that being killed isn't the worst thing that she should be afraid of.

John: Right, exactly. Right! It's paralleling Glint on the fact that she was enslaved by Kralkatorrik and that she knows that there is a fate worse than death and that Aurene hadn't recognized that yet. All she saw was her own death. And that really becoming a minion of Kralk is, if anything, more frightening than that. And so we want to show that to her at the final trial here. She has to surmount that and show really how far she's come.

Rubi: Yeah. I think we have a few more images if we want we to indulge a little bit.

John: Oh, we do! Yeah! Here she is. I mean, yeah. Here she's flying just to show off the different colors that she has. She kind of has this electrical flow that goes through her wings that also has this little like a pulse beat to it as she's going around. There she is staring you down, looking like almost a baby Kralkatorrik.

Rubi: It's not at all terrifying.

John: No, not at all! When she swoops by, there actually is a fly-by attack she does. It's one of her main attacks in the fight and you can look up and see her flying by. We actually put Aurene chasing her so you can actually see Aurene fly behind her in there and as it goes on she gets closer and closer to the final one, so she's getting stronger throughout the fight. Here she is: that energy she has charged up. And this: this is the original version we had. So as you see, it's upgraded a little bit. Originally it was- she was more stone-like, dark purple. Beautiful in its own right, but I think the final product is just that much stronger.

Rubi: Yeah, um, that was- Doing that upgrade- And it's interesting to note her fly-by attack with our Aurene chasing her because, honestly, every time I've done that fight right now, it's just a lot of running and screaming.

John: Right? Chaos!

Rubi: And I haven't looked up. But, and I don't know how many of you guys have, but I'm gonna need to run through that fight again and maybe let some friends carry me or something so I can just like huddle in the corner and take everything in.

Kye: Have John help you out.

John: Yeah!

Rubi: Please. Have you done it?

John: Oh, yeah.

Rubi: Okay.

John: I know all the little hidden places and all that.

Rubi: I wasn't sure.

Kye: He's probably done it too many times.

John: A couple times, I think. A couple times.

Rubi: Yeah. And putting that much attention to detail, and putting that much attention to story, and everything going on around you when it's chaotic and there's not a lot of time to look around, makes me want to go back again and again and make sure I can take everything in.

Lily: You know what? I still haven't spotted the skritt on pigs in the keep meta while you're placing mines and just being swarmed. At some point, a whole bunch of skritt come out on pigs and everytime I've played that event it's been so busy I haven't seen them.

Rubi: What?!

John: Yeah, they drag the resonance crystal in.

Kye: Right.

Lily: Yeah.

John: And if you can watch them, it's this glorious little triumphant band of skritt-

Kye: So like two rows of them going by.

Lily: -and Aaron's written the best dialogue for it. I know the dialogue goes like, "Heigh! Ho!" And they're just pulling the crystal. I haven't seen it yet. It's such a busy event.

Kye: It's wonderful.

Rubi: Oh my gosh. And that's in the keep?

Kye: It's the north section of the map, on the north side of Thunderhead Keep. There's one- I think, one other event also where a skritt rides a pig, but I don't remember exactly where.

Lily: You'll have to remember later and tell me.

Rubi: Like in this release or?

Kye: Yeah, in this release.

Rubi: Because there's a skritt riding a pig back in Amnoon. So that's the only one that I knew of.

Kye: Right. You could guess that probably the same guy did it in both places.

John: Porcine mounting skill is innate to skritt. It's just typical.

Rubi: Hm?

John: Porcine mounting! It's important!

Kye: Yeah.

Rubi: Okay? Sure.

Lily: We love our skritts on pigs.

Rubi: There's going to be a children's book about that in an upcoming-

John: There has to.

Kye: We gave players mounts. Skritt needed mounts.

Rubi: Yeah. Lily's putting all of these amazing little books and poems throughout the game and it's so delightful.

Lily: No one's found the sequel to A Kralkatorrid Affair yet.

Rubi: What?!

Lily: As far as I know. I'm not telling.

Rubi: It's in there?

Lily: Do I tell you the name? Do I tell you the name? Are you going to throw something if I tell you the name?

Kye: Tell them.

Rubi: Tell me the name.

Lily: "Mist Connections".

Rubi: Really, I just want to praise you for that because...

Kye: She's great.

Lily: This is Connor Fallon's brainchild to put that kind of book in every single episode.

Rubi: Thank you, Connor.

Lily: And he does the first draft on them.

Rubi: That's fantastic. I do want to- I want to loop back for just a second and talk about- a little more about Aurene's design because so much went into it and I know that, John, you had mentioned you called her more cat than dragon.

John: Oh, yeah!

Rubi: Like all of this tinkering with her AI and working through bugs and fiddling with her movement.

John: Yeah, it was fun getting into knowing Aurene's gonna be right beside the Commander this whole time, fighting alongside you. And the second we started, I started poring into her animations that we'd done and, "Oh, look! She doesn't actually fight on the ground very much. She sits there, she breathes fire and she goes on her way. She gets back in the sky." Well, here she's actually romping around with you and we had to try to edit a lot and change things around. And, doing that, we found some really strange things in her AI. One of the moments we all found funny in the early testing was that her- when she would run to different places, like in the first trial between the magic pools when she was going to consume them. Now she's got this beautiful movement to her that's very fluid but, before, she was kind of like a sauntering cat and had her hands kind of stuck in front of her in this heavy movement. And she'd do it really fast and she would just do this hasty pace over to the different pools and then slam her head in the pool. And so she was somewhere between an over-energetic dipping bird and the most violent game of bobbing for apples we'd ever seen. And it was amazing because I just kept thinking it was like we gave a cat this full platter of salmon and she just couldn't stop and she had to go into that. But it was an absolute blast to watch and when we- It was almost sad we started eyeing the polished animations. Like, ohh.

Lily: You didn't save a video?

John: No, we didn't. I know, it's sad. It's in our memory. That's really what matters, but I-

Rubi: Always, always, always save a video because if nothing else, I want it for Guild Chat.

John: I know! I know! It existed for months, too, which is actually probably the saddest part.

Rubi: John!

John: I know! Well, next time when we have a petulant dragon, we're gonna go about that.

Rubi: That's a plan.

John: But the other thing that happened is when we- In the second trial, when you're fighting alongside her, assisting her in charging the crystals, originally, her AI- She was really obstinate and would like to- and selfish, and she would drag all the Branded off to corners and just hang there. And you'd sit there, "Hey. Aurene. Over here. Come on, I need them over here. Alright, you do your thing. When you're done, we'll try this, right?" And it was great because we had to find a way to get her to be more synergetic with you, and so we set up an AI- changed her AI so whoever you're focusing on, she's gonna focus on that. But, moreover, we also had that crazy cat skitter thing going on early on and it looked ridiculous when you're on one side of the field and she's coming after you, and she'd do this hustle run over to you. That doesn't look right for a dragon. She has wings! Let's use it! And so I worked with Matt, one of our animators, and we created a lunge attack for her. And some players have noticed this: when you're attacking enemies and focusing down someone, she'll, on occasion, she'll lunge across the field and slam down, knocking things over and coming to your aid. And that was our little like pouncing cat thing and when we were working on her animation and there's this face she gives right before she hits and it looks like a cat, but going for a mouse. And it was just tons of fun going into that and just changing her AI so she wasn't this dragon. It was not only the story saying that she's mature and she's working with you, but we worked in her AI, in her animations, to say, "Hey, look. She's the strong dragon fighting alongside you. She's getting in scuffles with you." And it was just so fun building that out.

Rubi: That's awesome. I love the uncooperative AI thing because I just feel like you've got this: "Okay, I know it's crazy, but stay with me. What if we killed them in this circle? And I know it's wacky, but I think it might work." And getting her to do that- Kudos on navigating all of that AI weirdness and all of her complete selfishness.

John: Oh yeah. It was grand. We had a couple times where she'd get stuck in the crystals. The charging crystals? Like, "Where's Aurene? Oh." And she's just pinned to the side of it.

Rubi: No!

John: Whoops. So we had to change the collision on that.

Rubi: That's fantastic. We've talked a little bit about the resonance crystals and they have a lot of different states and something that you had mentioned to me was that that was kind of difficult to navigate and there was a lot happening there.

John: Oh yeah.

Rubi: So do you wanna talk about that?

John: Sure. I know, Kye, you have some perspective in this. When we were first going into this episode, we knew there are tons of crystals.

Kye: Yeah.

John: We thought, "Well, how do we differentiate 2000 different kinds of crystals? It's like looking into a kaleidoscope-" Let me pull this up. And when we went to the resonance crystal, one of the big things we had- Lily, I'm not sure if you're involved in the story discussions on this, on making it like a, what's it called, a sound tong...

Rubi: A tuning fork!

John: Not sound tong! That's not a real word!

Rubi: Sound tong. You know what? It was real enough that we immediately were like, "Yeah, we know."

John: Tuning fork! And we thought of this unique way to have the sound resonate through this crystal. So we set up, as you see in the final image here, it's more of a tuning fork-like shape and, as it's developing, that's how it's going to amplify the sound and we worked with the audio team to kind of discuss that.

Rubi: I just want to point out that Clayton is like dying over there.

John: We lost someone.

Lily: Yeah, you pick up the sounds with the tongs.

John: Sound forks! But it was great just showing the different evolution through working with the artist. I believe Kyle Bash also worked on this with me. Dana as well. And Cameron was also a major part of this. And coming up with how we're gonna show this development throughout. And that way, when you go into the episode, you see all these crystals, particularly in Scion and Champion, it's not just lost in a blur of color, blue and purple. So it was just great having these different stages. And a lot of people in the final instance, which I won't go into too much, but when it blooms, folks were just really surprised by that. It's almost like a flower blooming, the crystals around it. Yeah, it was just a blast.

Rubi: That's so cool. I have no idea if- And, Mark, just throw something at me if you can't actually do this, but if we can turn off our overlay to show all the crystals for a minute so everybody can get a good look. Sorry. Surprise!

John: Oh, that's not it.

Rubi: I'm just randomly asking Mark to- You really could've just thrown something at me, I'm sorry.

Lily: They're pretty.

Rubi: Yeah, that was really a good job indicating all of their different states and teaching us the word sound tongs.

John: Sound tongs, yes. Oxford approves.

Rubi: Thank you. That was fantastic. Also, I do want to- I got so involved in spoiler warnings at the beginning that I did forget to say all of these guys have said they are willing to answer some of your questions at the end of their segment, so if you have questions, and I can't see chat, so I don't know if you've already been doing it, but if you have questions, throw them in chat and we will get to some of them at the end of this segment. Possibly not all because we don't want to actually make this our permanent place of residence and I know that could very easily happen.

Lily: It's nice. It's cozy.

Rubi: It is cozy, but I want to see my family.

Kye: Heh. Me too.

Rubi: I'm sorry. At some point. Okay, so moving on. We had a lot of different things going on in this instance and the trial puzzles were another thing that I wanted to talk about.

John: I don't want to hog all of the segments here.

Rubi: I know! Like, it's just the order that it fell in, but if we can talk about the narrative scenes in the prophecy chamber, the Branded Aurene fight and the broken portals. Go! Everybody pick something.

John: Alright, throw it here. Dogpile it. The trials was- A big thing which I worked with narrative on is trying to figure out these beats that were both describing what Aurene has to learn about herself and about the- to prepare for the final fight from Glint, but, at the same time, also trying to find unique gameplay that we would then resonate or reflect again in the final fight. And show again as it- to show the teachings of it. And it was just tons of fun working with the puzzle design that, the pools for the first instance- one through probably eight different iterations. We played or I played a lot of Mario going back there like, "How'd you get inside?" But spinning firewalls and all that like, "Oh, that's perfect." But, and, it was just grand fun building that out and then having people test and say, "This is too challenging!", "This is confusing!", blah, blah, "Oh, it's great!", "It feels good!", "I understand what's going on!" And just building out how there's a connection. There's a very literal physical link between you and Aurene when you're in there. Then the other one's the resonance crystals. Once again, I would give to Lily on this as so far as the resonance narrative design and that.

Lily: That would have been Armand.

John: Armand!

Lily: And he didn't-

John: You can speak through him, can't you?

Lily: Channeling Armand. He did a masterful job.

Rubi: Do you have like a stone head of Armand that you could hold?

Lily: No?

John: Why don't you?

Kye: That'd be strange.

John: Strange, but a myth.

Lily: Well, I'll bring it up with him later. But he did a masterful job of writing out Glint's vision. This went through many, many drafts.

John: Oh, yeah.

Lily: How do you make a dead crystal dragon mother have a strong emotional connection with her daughter while speaking through crystals from like- It's basically in voicemail messages from the afterlife and I don't- I wouldn't have said it was possible. He made it possible. And there's this moment between Glint and Aurene where Glint tells Aurene whatever things there are that only dragons can know, and it's extremely powerful.

John: Absolutely agreed. Meagan Glennon and myself worked on the prophecy room a lot going through things and just trying to figure out the best way to present that and have these major emotional beats there because Carmen^{[verification requested]} wrote that fantastic prophecy there and we just wanted to really work with the art team and make sure it was this big spectacle: the ghosts that appear, the images that appear. I won't go into too much details what that is, but I was- Just a build-up and it was a really beautiful moment that we had. That chamber probably went through- Meagan went through about eight different iterations of that as well. But it was great. We'd have a long stairwell you step up with lights! And then we had this platform! Then we had like multiple chambers! So it was great fun building that out.

Rubi: I'd like to actually hear some about the process of how did you decide how to get this- How did you get the Glint communication refined to where you were happy with it? What was that like? Where did you start? And that's more of a narrative thing, so...

Lily: That's more of a narrative thing. So we all get into a room together, the narrative team, and we read through the scripts together aloud. The skritt voices are the most fun.

Rubi: Yay.

Lily: And from what I remember of this process, it was months ago, we would read it through and we'd figure out what we wanted, what was working, what possibly needed to be changed. And I remember this scene just went through repeatedly. And then you saw it in the game and we had to change it some more. But, yeah. Armand did a beautiful job throughout and- Oh, yes. If your hearts were broken, that was Armand.

Rubi: Wow. How's that bus, Armand?

Lily: It's what we do.

Rubi: Awesome. So we get through that first instance mostly intact and now we're in Thunderhead Peaks, which is this like amazing nostalgia bomb for some of us, and we've got the Dragonsblood Forge. And that, I mean there was a lot of collaboration there between the Zephyrites and the Forge and two other things that I'm immediately forgetting. But you could help me with that, Kye.

Kye: Yeah, for sure. So like John was mentioning, even with the process of figuring out everything on the different resonance crystals and how we're gonna differentiate those, we knew that this episode was going to be about these Dragonsblood weapons and how was the original Dragonsblood weapon? Like what are all the details on how that was actually made? What are all the details on how we're going to make our new set to outfit our army? And we've got this Forge- We're showing some of the early concept art here. That was going to be a focal point of the map that players were going to be gathering around and spending a lot of time around. And so lots of collaboration between narrative, between our prop artists, between our concept artists, environment art, our design, to build out like: What's the involvement of the Zephyrites? What's the involvement of the auditorium space where chapters 3 and 5 take place, and the resonance crystals? How does all of this play together to allow us to build these weapons? How do they interact with this Forge? Yeah, John's clicking through showing kind of the evolution of what that Forge looked like as we slowly honed in there. So that was a really cool process and just really cool to see like audio and environment art in a room together figuring out, "Okay, we're gonna build this space, but it's a space where there's gonna be a choir, but there's going to be singing, there's gonna be crystals and it's a space where we need to work out the acoustics just right so that things- that sound waves can bounce off of stuff just right and all get funneled into this one place, to this one primary crystal, that focuses all of its energy into the Forge and then melts down the Brand." It was just a really fun process seeing these different groups who maybe don't get to talk to each other as much get to collaborate.

Rubi: Speaking of the Zephyrites...

Lily: Speaking of careful audio-crafting, there is a section in the open world where Sayida is and one of her ships is crashed. The Zephyrites are there, the Pact and the corsairs are fighting there, and if you listen carefully you hear Zephyrites practicing their music. They're singing ooh, they're singing aah, and the trivia tidbit for the fans is that those are a lot of devs in the audio room here singing, including Kye, I believe.

Kye: Yep.

Lily: And myself and Novera and a whole bunch of people.

Rubi: That is awesome, so that's who you can hear.

Lily: So yes, you have the beautiful live choir doing the professional, incredibly beautiful rendering. Aurene's Theme.

Rubi: That we saw at the beginning.

Kye: Right.

Lily: And then you have us.

Kye: Practicing.

Lily: Practicing.

Rubi: Well, that makes perfect so keep doing it. Maybe you can be the next one.

Kye: Maybe.

Rubi: I don't know.

Kye: We'll probably be too busy though.

Rubi: Presumably. That is actually an awesome tidbit. So they're near Sayida...

Lily: Yep. You walk around in the field near Sayida, you can hear the Zephyrites singing not nearly as well as the Zephyrites in the Forge.

Rubi: Eh.

Lily: Devs.

John: They're learning. It's off-tune. It's only natural.

Rubi: It's probably fine. We also have a little peek at some of the Dragonsblood weapons if we want to take a look at those because they're amazing.

Kye: Yeah, these went through a lot of iteration. Going back and forth trying to figure out, "Okay, how do we-" Because we had the Dragonsblood Spear, but now how do we turn that idea into all of the 16 weapons that players can gain and can equip and work with? So what's the Dragonsblood version of a rifle? What's the Dragonsblood version of a focus or a bow? And these are some of our early renders and some of the concept art as we were working through that, trying to hone in on what are the colors that we want to focus on. I think that they came out gorgeous.

Rubi: Yeah, they did. They are really, really beautiful.

Kye: Yeah.

Rubi: I love the little sketches. I'm sorry, John, I'm gonna ask you to go back one.

John: Okay, yeah. Over.

Rubi: I like the sketches in the top right-hand corner of just: here's how this is going to work.

Kye: Yeah. Showing some of the moving pieces and such there.

Rubi: Those- I'm with you. These turned out beautifully. Those turned out so good.

Kye: Yeah, really cool. That was- Whenever we were getting this concept art back early on in development, it was really exciting for us. It was like, "Well, we're actually gonna do this, guys!"

Rubi: Yeah, those are super fun to look at. And again, thanks to all of the devs who worked on episode 5 for sharing all of these images with us and giving us such a good look behind the scenes because that was awesome. So alright, I have a question for each of you and then we will let the viewers ask some questions. What was one of the absolute high points of getting this episode in front of the players for you? And that could be Easter eggs or something that you put in there.

Kye: Well, the thing that I was looking forward to the most was seeing people's reactions to Kralkatorrik.

Rubi: Yeah, oh yeah.

Kye: That was a very, very long and arduous process for all of the art team of fully building out this elder dragon, this very, very large creature, creature larger than anything that we've built and put into the game before, and making it work and, yeah. It was just looking forward to seeing how people were going to react to seeing him there, moving and they get a chance to interact with him.

Rubi: Yeah, he looked incredible and we're going to talk about that some more here in a little bit.

Kye: Yeah. Yep.

Rubi: How about you, Lily?

Lily: Seeing player's reactions to the ending.

Rubi: Yes, that was...

Kye: Yes.

Rubi: Yeah, I don't have a- words at this point.

John: Neither did they.

Rubi: Yeah. Oh, they had some, but we can't say them on this show.

John: That's true.

Rubi: How about you, John?

John: Of course, Kralkatorrik was the big one, but also when a lot of people I noticed had an emotional response to seeing Glint again with Aurene. And some people didn't notice it. We bookended the episodes with a drag- You start by seeing a dragon who's killed by Kralkatorrik. You see the corpse crystallized and then we ended it with the same and it's her daughter who happens to have been near her for the first time. So it's a perfect little tease there for the dark future.

Rubi: I am not okay.

Viewer Questions [57:04][edit]

Rubi: Alright, well let's see what some of our viewers want to know. And you guys can just pick them out and answer them as you want.

Lily: Well, calamari, can we have some info if anybody else died during the last mission? Any of the NPCs we got at the start. The answer is no.

Kye: No, we can't have any info?

Lily: No, we cannot give you any info at this point.

Rubi: Alright.

Kye: You'll have to speculate.

Rubi: I'm pretty sure there's a question here. I'm curious who voiced Glint? I'm pretty sure that was the original voice actress?^{[verification requested]}

John: Original voice actress?

Rubi: Yep, same voice actor for Glint.

Kye: I don't have the name.

Lily: Not off the top my head. Sorry.

Rubi: I will remember it five minutes after the show ends.

Kye: Probably.

Rubi: -is when that happens. Um, let's see what else. We have some overlap.

Kye: Okay, there's a question here. I know that there are several teams that work on new episodes in parallel. How far ahead does the farthest team work? I probably can't give you a super-specific answer on that, but we're staggered pretty well so that usually whenever one team is approaching the end, there's another team kind of in the middle and then another team kind of at the beginning, so that we leapfrog over one another, and then some other teams around who are supporting those, and kind of supporting all of the teams at various levels of development.

Rubi: Yeah, I mean like episode 5 has been in the works for six- more than six months.

John: Oh, absolutely.

Kye: For... yes. A very, very long time.

Rubi: Yeah.

Lily: There's a core team of devs and then there are service teams like cinematics, narrative, localization, who support simultaneous episodes at once.

Rubi: Yeah.

Lily: What about Logan? We love Logan.

Kye: He's great.

John: He came back.

Rubi: He came by. He has new armor!

Kye: He had new armor!

John: Kylo said Glint and Aurene had those bright blue crystals and Kralk had purple. Also Vlast had yellow ones. Does that have any meaning, say, corruption or evilness? I'll talk with Lily about this in particular. I don't think so. I think it's just color distinction to these characters, these different dragons, so that when you do see- they're put there- what they've affected in the world or see them, it's very unique and they stand out because we've had them against each other before, and when we do see them side-by-side, it's important to make sure we have distinctions there.

Rubi: Verticality has a question that we've actually already answered, but if you want an easy one.

Kye: Sure. Was it deliberate? Yes.

John: Yes, it absolutely was.

Rubi: The question was: was it deliberate to essentially bookend the episode with the corpses of dragons?

John: And absolutely it was. First, there was some idea that we weren't even going to show Glint's, but then the second I came around we knew it was happening. We absolutely had to do that. And that's why we wanted to start you with seeing Glint's corporeal remains and then end you with seeing Aurene's.

Kye: Uh, was the charr serving food before the Kralk fight a reference to the Meowscular Chef from Monster Hunter? Uh, stay tuned? For more information.

John: Stay tuned!

Rubi: I was like, "Ooh! Ooh!" Hold on to that question.

John: What was the most difficult part about deciding to kill a character, especially an important and/or loved one? The tissues in the office. We really ran dry in those for awhile.

Lily: So, I think what players should know is that any character death goes through a great deal of discussion at extremely high levels. So we take it very seriously and we look at what we gain from it, what the trade-offs are, what we can do with it, how we can add as much meaning to it as possible. So they're very carefully thought-out.

Kye: We have to make sure that it's worth it. That it's done right.

Lily: At this point in development, yes.

Kye: Yeah.

Rubi: And we'll talk a little bit more about that in the next segment but that was- I mean there have been conversations happening surrounding this for an incredibly long time. Let's see. Do you have any more that you'll be able to answer?

Lily: At the end of the last instance, Caithe kind of just collapses. Was that intended to make us wonder if she's okay? Okay, if you're not wondering if everyone's okay at the end of the chapter, you are a monster.

Rubi: Wow. I mean you're not wrong.

Kye: And how far in advance was the writing of this episode done?

Lily: Open world writing started in July, but a golden path was just about done by that point.

Kye: Right, but then we continued to go through a few little edits-

Lily: Oh, many, many iterations.

Kye: Many, many iterations, and then even beyond. Just the dialogue or the voiced work then all the text goes through further iterations until just a few months-

Lily: The unvoiced text.

Kye: Yeah, anything that's unvoiced, until just a few months before release.

Lily: Unvoiced text writing does not start until we have all the voiced writing in.

Kye: Right.

Rubi: Alright, well you guys probably have a lot to do.

Lily: Oh yeah.

Rubi: I really appreciate all the time that you've given us today. Thanks to all of you guys for hanging out and watching. We are not done. We still have another round of devs coming in. Thank you all very, very much for all of your work on this. You raise the bar so high and watching player reactions this week has been incredibly gratifying and I'm sure for you too.

Kye: Absolutely.

Lily: Thanks for having us, Rubi.

Rubi: Thank you guys. Stick around. Yes, again. Huge, huge spoilers. We are letting fly with spoilers and I'm saying that because it's going to be really, really important for the next five minutes. If you do not want spoilers- I'm just gonna keep saying this. I've never actually told anybody to stop watching the show before, but if you don't want really, really big spoilers: stop watching now, watch on YouTube later. We will be right back.

Interlude: Player Reactions [1:02:48][edit]

twitch.tv/birdofchess: Oh no, stop, stop it.

twitch.tv/kroofgaming_: Heavy breathing! Oh no! Aurene, Aurene.

twitch.tv/aurora_peachy: Yeah, she's so powerful.

twitch.tv/woodenpotatoes: Oh damn.

twitch.tv/dawnwhisper: Don't touch my sweet baby Aurene. Don't touch my sweet baby Aurene. Don't you dare.

twitch.tv/birdofchess: I don't like those squelching noises. No no no no no she's fine. She protected us but she's fine because she's a strong girl.

twitch.tv/kroofgaming_: What? What is happening?

Rytlock: No NO.

Savida: Kralkatorrik is- He's just leaving.

twitch.tv/kroofgaming_: What?

Rytlock: What. HAPPENED.

Canach: Is... everyone in one piece over there?

twitch.tv/kroofgaming_: What?

Canach: Hello?

twitch.tv/kroofgaming_: Are you serious? He's just leaving.

twitch.tv/aurora_peachy: Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. We're not ok.

twitch.tv/woodenpotatoes: Oh my god. Holy crap. What a cool environment to stagger through as well.

Zafirah: I don't understand. There was a vision. A promise. That we'd win.

twitch.tv/kroofgaming_: No.

twitch.tv/birdofchess: We're fine. It's not over yet. You're ok, we just got caught in a blast.

twitch.tv/woodenpotatoes: Whoa. I don't know, we're not even going to stop and help are we? Look at the stagger animation like behind us. This isn't normal is it? Yeah, it's brand new. Oh yeah yeah yeah.

Braham: Commander... Oh, Spirits, we thought...

Pact Commander: Where is she?

twitch.tv/woodenpotatoes: Uh oh.

twitch.tv/birdofchess: Don't say it like that. Oh don't say it like that. Braham, you tell me she's fine.

twitch.tv/kroofgaming_: Oh no no no no!

twitch.tv/deroir: She is hurt or dead?

Taimi: No, no. No, Aurene! Noooo!

twitch.tv/birdofchess: No, no, no, no!

Taimi: No, no. No, Aurene! Noooo!

twitch.tv/deroir: Dead. Oh my goodness.

twitch.tv/dawnwhisper: Noooo!

Caithe: She's gone.

twitch.tv/dawnwhisper: Oh no.

Braham: What do we do now?

twitch.tv/birdofchess: Anet you monsters. I-

twitch.tv/aurora_peachy: We're screwed dude.

Pact Commander: I don't know.

twitch.tv/aurora_peachy: Oh my god.

twitch.tv/dawnwhisper: No, that can't be real. They got to like go back in time like- We got to reverse time or something right? There has got to be like an alternative reality ok like somebody does dimension magic right?

twitch.tv/luality: That's so cruel. Why did they do that? Why did they do that? It's so cruel.

twitch.tv/kroofgaming_: Is this how it ends? You've got to be kidding me. You've got to be kidding me.

twitch.tv/birdofchess: I've gone to a dark, cold place inside, in my hearts.

twitch.tv/dawnwhisper: Noooo! The episode can't end now. You can't just do that. Just like her visions. No, she was fried.

twitch.tv/kroofgaming_: That was hard to watch. Oof I felt a pit in my stomach.

twitch.tv/deroir: We lost. Ok, for real though, can I just say how much I appreciate the fact that we lost.

twitch.tv/luality: That's so sad.

twitch.tv/aurora_peachy: Oh my god!

Game Designers [1:08:22][edit]

Rubi: Welcome back. We're sorry.

Cameron Rich: That's hard to watch.

Rubi: That was super hard to watch. I've seen it about ten times now so I'm slightly less weepy, but the first time I was like, "I'm not gonna make it. I will not get through it." But I don't want us to sound cruel like, "Yeah! We wanted to hurt you!" because that's not it. Let's jump in, but I will have you guys introduce yourselves real quick. Talk about what you worked on, if you're willing to admit it.

Cameron: My name is Cameron Rich. I'm a Game Designer and for this episode I worked specifically on the last chapter.

Clayton Kisko: My name is Clayton Kisko. I'm the team lead for this episode and Game Designer here at ArenaNet. I worked on some open world stuff: adventures, hearts, events, stuff like that.

Andrew Gray: I'm Andrew Gray. I worked on the two main metas on the map and the volatile magic nodes.

The Kralkatorrik Fight [1:09:21][edit]

Rubi: Alright, well, let's start where we ended in the last segment with the Kralkatorrik fight because that was huge! Like that was a lot, a lot of work. And you still look a little shell-shocked.

Cameron: It's a little hard to believe that it's out, right? Like we've been dealing with this development for so long and he's been such a huge and rewarding challenge to work on. And it doesn't feel like it's out? Feels like there's more to do? But there's not! It's kind of mindbending.

Rubi: You do have other work to do, so please stay, but- Well, tell me a little bit about what it was like getting this huge dragon and this fight up and running.

Cameron: Well... man. I think the the hardest challenge that we had at the very beginning was how are we going to fight something that big?

Clayton: Yeah.

Cameron: And so we...

Clayton: Do you remember the original pitches that we had?

Cameron: Yes. Yes, I do.

Rubi: I don't.

Cameron: We thought about like, "Hey! What if you like drawed him into this place and just like shot him in the head with like a huge like cannon or if you just like executed him with like a bolt gun or you dropped, like, these pillars on him." And every single time that we would, you know, just sit in a room and talk about this, we were like yeah, but... time! And money!

Clayton: Time, yeah. We also thought about like jumping on him. I don't know if you mentioned that. There is- We went through a lot of different kind of iterations and our main goal, one of our main goals, was to just make it feel like you were definitely the one doing the damage. That you had that "face-to-face" with him as close as possible. Um, and yeah.

Cameron: Yeah, we definitely wanted to make sure that you didn't feel like there was some magical thing that was doing the damage to Kralkatorrik. That it was you and it was your weapons and anything that you interacted with was only possible because you were there and you were doing it or Aurene was there and Aurene was doing it.

Clayton: He's a huge elder dragon, right? So like, also needed to be believable that like enough damage was done to him that it felt like he could be hurt, right? So like thinking about all the different ways that the whole like team, like the different heroes in our story, like contributed to that damage. That was a big factor to it as well.

Cameron: We really wanted it to feel like the all-out battle. You're bringing the best of the best to this and you're doing everything that you possibly can. And we wanted to show that a lot too with like damage states to him and then seeing his body just starting to crumble, and the places where you're fighting him are breaking, and you're really getting that visceral feeling of taking down one of the biggest baddies in this whole franchise. And I think it came along kinda well, you know?

Rubi: Kinda well?

Cameron: Yeah. Kinda well.

Clayton: People seem to like it.

Cameron: People do!

Andrew: It didn't end so well, but...

Cameron: Yeah, yeah. You know, you can't always get what you want. But we actually have a couple of pictures here from early in development.

Rubi: Yeah! I love this!

Cameron: Marcus Jackson was the creature artist for this and he had been working so long on trying to figure out how exactly Kralkatorrik was going to look for the first time that we were going to be up close and personal with him. At the end of Path of Fire, we had Kralkatorrik kind of up in the sky and he was a little bit more of his ethereal, kind of stormy, form and you saw his head, and you saw a little bit of his neck, but you weren't close enough to really get the details. And so for this episode in particular, we knew- Okay. You're gonna be really, really close to him, so let's redesign him from the ground up. Keep some of those like very important elements like his huge chin.

Clayton: Yeah, it got bigger from this picture, by the way. They, I think, to, I don't know, balance out his giant horns on the back. I just- I remember at some point, his chin just like clipping into the rocks, and we're like, "Uh, okay, that's one way to tell that they definitely increased that neck."

Cameron: Yeah, so we sent him over to the plastic surgeon and then... Yeah.

Rubi: Oh, there it is!

Andrew: All of his powers are stored in his chin. The more powerful he gets, the bigger his chin gets.

Cameron: Right, yeah. That is the source of his power. Yes. That's the secret. So yeah! So this was one of the first pictures that we got back of like one of the more detailed sculpts. And I just remember, first: getting that email with that picture and all of us just like crowded around each other's computers and looking at the picture and we were just like, "Oh my God! It's so cool!" And then immediately was like, "How are we gonna do this? Oh, God!"

Rubi: Excitement followed by terror.

Cameron: Yeah. And so...

Rubi: These are different.

Clayton: These are definitely the highlights of game development, right? Like because you're almost like the consumer who's like, "Hey, art, we would really like this cool thing." And then they're like, "Here you go!" And you're like gasp. There you go! It's like Christmas! I mean you got the thing you want, right?

Cameron: It happened!

Clayton: Yeah, yeah. So that works out.

Cameron: Yeah. And this was going to take so long that we knew that we were going to have to figure out how to develop his look and his feel, in-game and through gameplay, through a different means. And so one of the first things we did was we kind of created a low-poly model, no textures really, and just kind of used that for animation. And you can kind of get a sneak peek here, if you haven't seen it yet in-game, you should go do it. But this is Kralkatorrik's-

Clayton: Why are you here?

Rubi: Why are you watching this show? I told you!

Clayton: Yeah, get outta here!

[laughter]

Rubi: Well, that's what this was!

Cameron: He may have eaten a giant balloon and then a traffic cone.

Rubi: I forgot that that's what this was. And then he blows a really big bubble.

Cameron: Yeah, and I remember working with Ron Harvey, the animator, on this and him shooting this over to me within like a day, right? Of just like, "Hey, you know, how's this look?" And like Clay was saying earlier: it's a bit like, you know, opening up a Christmas present on Christmas morning. You'd just be like, "Oh! It looks so good!" Yeah, and that is...

Rubi: That is terrifying.

Cameron: It's come so far. And then another thing that we really wanted was- We wanted to have his mass and his weight really shown in the content, you know. This is one of the biggest creatures ever in our world and so we weren't really content with just, you know, like putting him into a cavern and having him, you know, just like move around. We wanted to show him crashing into objects and destroying them and so James Barr worked- the prop artist here, and I just kind of sat down and talked about this and James was like, "Yeah! You know, I can probably do that with a couple of, you know, tricks and tweaks and smoke and mirrors." And he sent this over to us. And this is another one of those things that's like I didn't even realize we could do this in our engine! This is just mind-blowing and he just really knocked it out of the park, you know. Blew it up!

Rubi: Yeah, that looks incredible. Doing this boss fight, cause you had talked to me a little bit about how this is a prop boss, but on a much bigger scale. A much more terrifying scale.

Cameron: Yes. Man, prop bosses. So that is our internal name. I don't know if players kind of call it that as well, but if you've fought the big creatures in our world like The Shatterer, Tequatl, the Ice Wurm at the beginning of the norn starting area? Those are all prop bosses. And the difference between that and a creature is that a creature kind of uses behavior intelligence to make decisions on the fly, and prop bosses are very strict and they follow a set of rules that they set for themselves and they cannot break out of those set of rules. There's not a whole lot of like dynamic behavior. So one of the biggest challenges with Kralkatorrik was, you know, how do we make this really feel like a creature? Like it's this mad crazy elder dragon, right? He's out for blood. And so Ron Harvey and I, again, the animator, we sat down and we just kind of plotted out all of the different animation states that Kralkatorrik was going to have and how he was going to move in the story of this instance. Kind of progressing through his movements and his animations. And in order to kind of chart that out and make sense of it, I ended up just making a flowchart of how this was going to work. So prop bosses work off of a set of states that they can be in at any point in time, based on a number of conditions, and the state has to play out to the very end before it can make another decision to go into another state. So we can't like have him just be in the middle of moving around and then just make a decision and do something and do an attack at the exact same time. So that was a bit of a challenge to figure out how to make it work and make it very responsive and feel like you are fighting this creature and he's fighting you back. So with this flowchart... This is kind of just a snippet of the larger picture. We broke it down into his different major states, which are these alerts. So his AlertA is the first thing that he does whenever he pulls into the cavern and that's your entrance at the very beginning. So he pulls into the cavern, goes into his alert, and then from there he can go into a number of other states, where one of those might be "he pulls back and tries to break out of the cavern a little bit" and one of them might be like "he looks over at you and roars and lightning goes around." And we tried to keep those those interactions, those states, to about like four or five seconds or so, so that he could dynamically be moving through those and kind of just really feeling like a real creature. And so that then ends up going into, "Okay, you've got the resonance crystal charged, so you've got to hit that." And one of the first challenges we saw with the system was that going from "I am sitting like this and I'm roaring and blah" to "I am over here and just kind of stunned in the corner", we needed a transition animation to get over there. Which meant that that was also its own state because, you know, nothing's simple.

Rubi: Not this guy.

Cameron: So this very quickly blew up too like a huge proportion. I think, in total, he's got like 21 different states and in those states they could have like anywhere between like five to seven sub-states. It's crazy. And somehow it works? Right?

Rubi: You actually had to create new tech for him to work.

Cameron: Yes! So, fun fact: animation-blending, which is a really common thing that we do to make animations really smooth whenever you're going from like a walking animation to whenever you're idle or whenever you're like running around and then you do an attack, that didn't exist for prop bosses. So the animator had to painstakingly make sure that each animation that was going to go into each other ended and started on the exact same frame.

Rubi: Oh my gosh.

Cameron: And we were dealing with this for about like, what? Like a month and a half, two months? And then one of our programmers, Alina Chadwick, was just like, "Yeah, I could do that." And then just, you know, provided it and we were like, "Oh my God! This saves us so much time!"

Andrew: The magic of programmers.

Rubi: Because she's amazing!

Clayton: Yeah, because she's a rock star.

Cameron: Yeah! They are wizards. I don't know how they do it. It's just magic and they like, you know. And it did save us a lot of time. So we got new tech for that, we got the ability to kind of make sure that triggers fired even if the animation blending was happening. It's a lot.

Rubi: Right?

Cameron: It's a lot.

Rubi: Worth it?

Cameron: Yeah. Oh yeah, definitely. I think so.

Rubi: Yes, that's a little bit of a closer look.

Cameron: Yeah. So we can see that he goes from his entrance to his alert. That sends him into his first loop of different alert variants that he can go through, and then that sends him into his Stun state where you're doing damage to him. And then that'll also take him to his "Okay, I'm gonna move further into the cavern and now I'm back at my alert" and this whole thing starts over.

Rubi: And that's a whole other flowchart.

Cameron: Mhmm. Yeah.

Rubi: Yeah. Moving back a little bit from the technical side of that. The goal was to focus, something that you were telling me, Clayton, the goal was to focus on more of the fight as a spectacle and like the spectacle of the fight and feeling like you were actually having this fight and not just a thing you were watching and occasionally kind of half-heartedly contributing to.

Clayton: Right, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I'm not sure like...

Rubi: There's a lot that went into that. I mean, this was just a whole different fight.

Clayton: Yeah, yeah. I mean, we had Aurene Branding him at one point. Cube stock.^{[verification requested]} We had Sayida using her ships to attack him. You know, you have the spears being launched and attacking him. It was pretty insane.

Rubi: Do you feel like it came out how you wanted it to?

Clayton: Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. It was a labor of love and I think like we- It hit our expectations if not more. And that's a credit to Cam and that's a credit to like everybody who worked on that, like from cinematics to art to effects, creatures... Everyone just- We had like a whole Kralkatorrik strike team and those like set of rock stars just- They killed it and they did a really great job.

Cameron: Yeah. We would meet like once every week or so while development was really hardcore. And every now and then, we would just come into the room and like things would just be on fire and we were like, "We're never going to finish this! This is never gonna happen!" But kudos to Kye, who was on here earlier, just keeping us in line and just keep chugging us forward and breaking things down and, you know, getting us through the hard times. Yeah, it's good stuff.

Rubi: You guys absolutely nailed it, so congratulations. Seriously.

Cameron: Thank you.

Caithe's Branding [1:23:25][edit]

Rubi: Going back to something a little quieter but no less cool... I'm sorry, but you have to have the thing now because we're gonna talk about Caithe's Branding.

Cameron: You have the power!

Andrew: Oh, no.

Rubi: You can click it one time. That's all you need to do. It's okay. Frosty was like, "Don't give it to me."

Andrew: Alright. I can handle it. Don't give me things.

Clayton: Alright, give it back now.

Andrew: Alright, take it away.

Rubi: Clayton, just help him.

Andrew: Uh, yeah! So in Chapter 3- I also worked on Chapter 3, I forgot. We did a lot of things!

Clayton: We did a lot, yeah.

Rubi: You're busy. It's okay!

Andrew: We knew that we wanted- Caithe has a very close bond with Aurene and we knew we wanted to expand upon that. So, early on in development, we had the idea of: well, what if Aurene Branded her? And that, of course, spawned a lot of conversations of like, "Well, is that technically possible?" And it's funny, like you actually hear at one point Taimi having a sort of internal debate really, because nobody's responding to her, like, "Well how is that possible? She's a dragon minion. Does that mean- Is it because of Mordremoth?"

Rubi: Oh yeah!

Andrew: That was basically our meeting communicated through Taimi.

Rubi: That's fantastic.

Andrew: And we definitely feel like all the pieces are there. Like we might not go into the intricate details of it in an episode cause it's gonna bring everything to a screeching halt, but, yeah. Like we wanted Aurene to speak, but not just out and speak. So giving her a spokesperson and somebody who she's so close to made a lot of sense.

Rubi: Yeah. Alright, so there are a number of different looks on here.

Andrew: Yeah! So Bo, one of our character artists, went through a lot of iterations. We definitely wanted to play into the bioluminescence that the sylvari naturally have, but also add some Aurene flavours in there. And the flowers were actually something that I don't know that we actually ever asked for initially, or they just were in one of the concept arts, but we really latched onto that because it really sort of blends the two aesthetics together really well.

Clayton: Though, if I remember correctly, it was definitely like a core piece that we wanted from the get-go because that moment where we knew when Aurene died, that the flowers were going to just like, fall?

Andrew: Right, right.

Clayton: Like we wanted that to definitely be incorporated and foreshadowed when she was Branded.

Rubi: Yeah. Watching those flowers crumble was... That was a moment.

Clayton: Right? I believe that was a all-new animation as well. For Caithe to fall on her knees, right?

Andrew: Oh yeah. Her falling on to the knees and everything? All of that was a custom animation.

Aurene's Scene [1:26:01][edit]

Rubi: Alright, so that brings us to the hard part. And we round that corner and we see, "Oh! Things are actually not okay." And I want to call this out, because I have been wishing that I remembered clearly enough and that I had marked it on the calendar or something, but Cam was the one who told me that this was going to happen and do you remember when that conversation in the kitchen was? Cause it's been awhile!

Cameron: Yeah, it's been a while. That must have been back in like May or June of this past year?

Rubi: Yeah, it's been that long and I had this moment just like standing there- All the good meetings happen in the kitchen! Do you guys notice that?

[laughter]

Cameron: Yes. Yeah. We're more at ease, you know? We're getting food and drinks.

Rubi: Yeah! And that's where we all run into each other.

Andrew: It's less awkward than in the bathroom.

Cameron: Yeah. That's for sure. Well, you know, it's only awkward if you make it awkward.

Andrew: Sure, sure.

[laughter]

Rubi: I'm just- Wow.

Cameron: Yes, that was a rough scene. The impetus for that scene is pretty cool. We had this outline of everything that we wanted to do with the episode as a whole. And as we were going through development, kind of earlier on, the cinematics team eventually got to a point of where they just came to us and told us, "Hey, there are so many cool things that we want to do in this episode and we just don't have the time to do them all. This episode would just, you know, take forever." And so the conversation initially was like, "Okay, well, you know, what do we cut? Well, we can't cut Kralkatorrik. We can't cut that ending, so you know, is Caithe's Branding gonna have to get cut? Are we gonna have to show that in game?" You know, are there things that we're gonna have to take out of the story as a whole? And there's a bit of a scramble for a little while and you know there are a lot of really great games that came out in 2018 that really inspired me to try and put the narrative moments, the moments that are gonna like really affect you as a player, into gameplay so that you can experience them, so that you are moving forward and you're not just watching a movie play out. You are living that moment. And so I talked to some of the narrative people, I talked to Clay, and I was just like, "Let me just whip up something in like a couple of days. I'll put something together that's really, really rough, you know, no polish at all, and let's see if this is something that we might be able to do", right?

Clayton: Cause we weren't sure how much like budget resource we were gonna be able to put that on. I remember us having that conversation. I was like, "Put this in the chamber because if we need to go this route like this is something really good as the safety net to have."

Cameron: And initially, we actually thought it was going to take a lot less work than it ended up taking because we just decided, like we latched onto that, and we were like, "Oh, this is awesome. How much can we push?", right? "How much can we really make this a unique experience in Guild Wars 2?" And so the first initial looks at it, like the narrative team loved it and Tom Abernathy, our narrative director, was just like, "Yes! This is awesome! Let's do it!" And that was really inspiring and so I worked really closely with the cinematics team. They helped out and gave a lot of resources for new animations, like we were saying when Caithe falls to the ground and flowers just kind of explode out of her hands and dissipate. That was all unique animation.

Rubi: Thank you, cinematics.

Cameron: Yeah. Da-Hee Im, Chelsey Shuder, those guys are awesome. That whole team was just incredible to work with and we had weekly reviews where we would just get into a room and we would just pick at it and poke at it and figure out, you know, like maybe this line's not working here and it just got down to the very nitty-gritty details of like, "What if it was 0.8 seconds into this that the line was said instead of 0.85?" Right?

Rubi: Well, that level of detail, and that was the thing that struck me when you were telling me about this, because the thing that really resonated with me at that point was: you were saying this is going to happen and there's so much that needs to be done and there's so much that needs to be figured out to do this right and to do it well and to do it the justice that it deserves. And that was such a huge weight.

Cameron: Yeah! It's definitely one of those moments that can just like... It's easy to fail, right? It's a really hard moment that- This is a character that most of the community has really been invested in for years.

Rubi: Yeah. Well, yeah! That hatching was such a huge deal back in the day.

Cameron: Yeah! All the way back from like season two, right? You know? It was daunting and we knew we were gonna make some people very unhappy, but I'm very proud of the team and what we were able to do.

Rubi: You should be.

Cameron: Because watching those day one reactions and seeing people genuinely feel the sorrow and the pain of that loss. You know, I made the joke earlier like, "Yes...!" But honestly, yeah! It's just like, "Yes, we did it! We affected them!"

Andrew: It's not like reveling in their sadness. It's having that sort of emotional response to a game is just what we strive for. And like we strive for joy, but there are other emotions out there, too.

Clayton: It's interesting because like a lot of people were, I think I was reading the chat earlier, they're like, "Did you bookend the- Glint's like death scene with Aurene's death scene?" And yeah, that was on purpose. And this episode was an emotional roller coaster and to see someone like Aurora Peachy like cry, kind of like sad, but like it's because Aurene's cute and she's like cuddling up. And then like we see her, like the sorrow at the end like and all the different emotions in-between. Like we were watching the different streamers, like the whole like floor was, and just feeling that with them. And it was a highlight of my career to see people just like laugh all together and like just sigh all together and clap all together. It was awesome.

Rubi: Well, that's the thing that we, and we say this so much but this really, really brings that out, we do this- All of this exists for you guys. We do this for you. And yeah, all of Tuesday was, "It's finally in front of them. Did we do it? Did we nail it? Did we get it right?"

Clayton: Yeah. So scary. A little nerve wracking.

Rubi: You guys had to have been so stressed out on Tuesday. But that's, like you said, we had that conversation in May and June and it was already weighing on you guys then. How are we going to convey every split-second of this? How are we gonna get this exactly right for you guys? And spending all of- So many people spent all of Tuesday just watching all of you and watching reactions. And I know I was pulling reactions and sharing them with you guys. And at one point I think all three of you were probably at the table and I was like, "Listen, I'm really sorry if I'm spamming your email." And there's like six devs going, "More, give us more." It was amazing to finally get it in front of the community and see I think we got it right.

Cameron: Yeah, this was a labor of love from so many different people. From like FX artists like Scott Allan working on making sure that the ambience in that scene was correct; to our map artists, Meagan Glennon, working really hard on the level design and making sure that the pacing was correct and that it was just the right amount of room that you needed to walk towards; to the amazing writing. When Samantha Wallschlaeger came to me with the first draft of the script I was just like, "This is great! If you're asking me for approval this is it! Done!"

Andrew: Ship it.

Rubi: Fantastic.

Cameron: And it just- It was something that a lot of, you know, a lot of game developers will say is that games are greater than the sum of their parts and this was, I think, one of the highest caliber of that statement.

Rubi: Shoutout to our amazing voice actors, too, because they had such a huge hand in this and they knocked it out of the park.

Cameron: Oh, yes. Yes, Debi Derryberry, right?

Rubi: As Taimi.

Cameron: Yes, oh my gosh! When we first heard her cry and saying, "No! No! Aurene!" I had to walk away from my computer.

Rubi: Yep, yep. That was- I did not see that recording in person and I'm sort of glad because, yeah. I couldn't have coped with that. But Sam Riegel as Braham and we had, you know, Sayida and you've got this whole- You're doing this walk down the corridor. Which I also want to talk about because there was a- The walk animation down that corridor was a thing.

Cameron: Yes. So this, back whenever I said we didn't think that it was going to take as much work as it did, initially we were just going to use the cripple animation. And the more that we poked at it, the more that we looked at it, it just didn't really convey the tone that we wanted. Especially for certain races where the animation was- it was almost comical. And so we tried slowing it down, we tried just like tweaking it a little bit, and ultimately Da-Hee, the animator for this scene or the primary animator for this scene, just was like, "You know what, no. Let's do a whole animation set for walking down this path specific to this scene and she did an amazing job." We first tested it with a human female and we were like, "Yep, this is right." We need to do this.

Rubi: Seriously, thank you, Da-Hee.

Cameron: And that just added so much to the feeling of isolation and that you lost. But you didn't quite know how badly you had lost.

Rubi: Yeah and that- Even down to like that fall and that painful getting back up.

Cameron: Yes, yes.

Clayton: The amount of time it takes for an animator to get a suite like that done speaks to the volume of that moment's importance because it's not very long relative to the rest of the content in the episode, right? But it's impactful.

Rubi: It felt so long.

Clayton: Yeah. And like you were saying, she has to do that for the female human and then every other combo, right? And, like yeah. That stacks up real quick and we don't have the largest budget, you know? I mean, like that is a thing that we have to consider when working with the new episodes like, "Okay, this is gonna be part of our animation budget, right?"

Cameron: Yeah, and it's something that you see for like five minutes.

Clayton: Right, right, yeah. Yeah, it was awesome. It was really well done.

Rubi: I want to shout out to the design of corridor as well. Because you can't- And this is a thing that I've done before. I found myself doing this. [cranes her head sideways as if peering around a corner] It turns out that doesn't work. But it was deliberately designed so you can't see until you hit that moment.

Cameron: Yeah. We painstakingly made sure that it was impossible to see Aurene until you were right there. Until you already knew what was coming. Because we wanted to keep you guessing, we wanted to keep you kind of trying to convince yourself that no, this-No. Things are gonna be okay. Nope, we're not done. She's not. She's not... But...

Clayton: There was also like, in like just that whole scene like, and Tom has a lot of- our narrative director has a lot of experience with like staging and stuff like that. For like Broadway shows and stuff like that?

Rubi: Yeah, Tom's very good.

Clayton: Amongst a couple other people. And like that was a huge thing to consider like: Where is everyone? How close are they relative to each other? Where's Braham? Where's Caithe? Like how, when you turn this corner, what is it that you see?

Cameron: Yeah. And every little change and just where someone is placed was just a domino effect. Because we were like, "Okay, well, let's move this character a little bit more that way. Well, the environment doesn't really work for this, but we really like this placement of the characters, so, Meagan, can you go back? I know you've been doing this a lot." And we just did that over and over and over and it's just like, "That one little crystal that's pointing that way? Can you like turn it like this?"

Rubi: Just a little bit.

Clayton: Such a trooper though. Yeah, it was awesome.

Cameron: She did a wonderful job.

Andrew: We owe her a beer.

Clayton: A six pack. Nice.

Rubi: Yeah. Well, I feel like Tuesday was so gratifying. It just- You guys, you did it. You really, really did it. Watching the reactions, the vast majority was, "How dare you!" and "Thank you." It was like this combined thing. Well, and I told Cameron, I think yesterday, when we were tweeting like, "Hey, Guild Chat's coming." And somebody- One of the first replies was literally, "How dare you." And I was like, "Well, we're gonna be answering questions!" so hopefully that answered your question of "how dare you?" with a ton of time and effort and love.

Cameron: Yeah, it's definitely one of those things. Well, first off, I want to give another shoutout to the audio team because they came in and brought that entire scene to another level. It was just- It was wonderful to see their work just make the whole space feel alive.

Rubi: Yeah, if you haven't listened to the audio and that absolutely painstaking crippled walk through the corridor, do so, because, well, and even before that, I mean, right? From the moment where Aurene jumps in and takes on Kralkatorrik head-to-head is-The whole thing is just unbelievable. So yeah, if you haven't listened to that, make sure you do so.

Cameron: Set it to default.

Rubi: Set your audio to default. It's like the slogan of this episode.

Cameron: Yeah.

Clayton: It was just great like jumping in the world and like listening to players like stuff and we just take it all to heart. Like every little bug that creeps in, we're just like, guh!

Cameron: It ruins the whole experience!

Clayton: We're like, guh! And we're definitely giving praise to a lot of people, but like I just want to loop it also back to the players of like appreciating their like comments and their love and like their support throughout everything and during. So like that's what makes us feel like we're on a high right now. That feels really good, yeah.

Rubi: Yeah, you should.

Cameron: I parked my character right outside of that entrance and I was just, like, "Okay. Now I wait." It was lovely.

Rubi: Here we go.

Clayton: I was like throwing fireworks everywhere. Like as people were going in, [waves] "Have fun!"

Cameron: I know you're going to cry later and I'm sorry for that.

Rubi: Wait, were you in the Durmand Priory or did you go on to Thunderhead Peaks?

Clayton: No, I was in Lornar's Pass as people were jumping into that waypoint. Seeing them all like run through.

Cameron: And I was outside of the entrance to All Or Nothing or, sorry, The Crystal Dragon.

Rubi: Okay, yeah. I do, yeah.

Cameron: So we were shepherding players into that experience and then just like being there with cookies and milk and hugs.

Clayton: A lot of people would come out of that instance and instantly /cry, notice that there's a bunch of ArenaNet tags and be like, "Why?" Just like cause we're like up high. And we were just like, "Sorry..." /hug?

Cameron: Or just immediately just be like, "Why?! That's not it. No!"

Rubi: We have seen, yeah, we've seen a lot of that in that compilation video we showed during the transition earlier. That was a huge thing, but, yeah, congratulations.

Cameron: Thank you.

Thunderhead Peaks [1:41:03][edit]

Rubi: So speaking of Thunderhead Keep and Thunderhead Peaks and this enormous nostalgia bomb, thank you. Let's talk about that a little bit: about bringing Thunderhead into the future, making it look good but still allowing for the passage of time because that was a whole big thing. I think you have to give him the thing back.

Andrew: Again?

Rubi: I know. Or you can just do it for him, but whatever.

Cameron: This is why we can't have nice things.

Andrew: I guess...

Rubi: I mean, but there was a lot of work put into that.

Andrew: Yes, our map artist, Dan. Well, to back up a bit, when we first realized we were going to Thunderhead Keep, all these guys, I wasn't there that day, but these guys all grouped up and- What was it that you guys...?

Clayton: Yeah, we decided to play the old GW1 campaign {{gw1:Thunderhead Keep|Thunderhead Keep}} and we all decided to roleplay as NYSNC because one of the characters had like the cornrow kind of like thing, so I was Justin Timberlake. I think Kye was Lance Bass and like we just made those characters. Melina guided us through because she's like an OG GW1 player and so she told us like what gear to get and like toured us through the place. And it was a lot of fun and Dan took copious notes and he even went back to like YouTube's and Let's Plays and watched it over and over and made sure that like he could get as close to one-to-one with our map as the original map with also, you know, allowing the space to grow and evolve naturally, so. Great job.

Andrew: So this right here is the dwarven city area. If you played Guild Wars 1, imagine some Dolyak Riders and some Stone Summit in there, and it'll look a little bit more familiar. And obviously, like the graphics have evolved a bit over the years and you can see that there's more cloud cover and everything. But if you look through that you can see that the actual geometry is very similar here. Same here. This is another part of the city. I should probably go a little bit slower. Sorry. This is...

Rubi: Somebody take that away from- Who gave him that?

Clayton: That's me.

Andrew: I told you about the button-pushing.

[laughter]

Andrew: So this is another view of the city portion. This is sort of south of the city. This is the path you took to get to the city in Guild Wars 1. I believe this is down near the Zephyrite Docks in the Guild Wars 2 map?

Clayton: This is where basically, the Troy Baker skritt, his event started.

Andrew: Oh, okay.

Clayton: For those people who don't know, Troy Baker is the one that voiced that skritt and also a lot- He's got a really great range. He's so talented. People know that, right? But like yeah, he's that's skritt's voice, I think.

Andrew: Yeah, there was a lot of good skritt stuff in this episode, I just gotta say, which was nice.

Rubi: So much good skritt stuff.

Andrew: There's obviously a couple dark notes in this episode, if you hadn't noticed, so having some light-hearted stuff mixed in there was nice and the skritt are always kind of a good comedic relief. And they are also part of the Pact and they were actually able to come here and help out a bit. So here's another view. This is the bridge. The bridge has evolved a little bit. Props have gotten better as well. But you can see again it's the same general flow of the map and this one really shows it, I think. Oops! That's the last one.

Rubi: Yeah, and we'll get to that one.

Andrew: Ooh, outtakes. That sounds exciting.

Clayton: Yeah, outtakes are the best.

Cameron: Spoilers!

Rubi: Yeah, you guys, you did a really good job with Thunder- I just, I can't stop calling it Thunderhead Keep but, you know.

Andrew: We had a big old thing about that. The name of the map. Oh man, we had so many names!

Rubi: Did you really? Oh, tell me this!

Clayton: Oh my God! I don't even remember the first one, but it was just placeholder, right? To like- What was it called?

Andrew: It was Thunderhead...

Clayton: Like, Range. Thunderhead Crown.

Andrew: Yeah, there were like 8 different variations and then at some point we would finally have consensus and then one person would come over and be like, [disgusted] "Uhhh."

Clayton: I think- Cam and I had like- We have a very great relationship, so like when- I'll just start with that.

Rubi: So you can be awful to each other.

Clayton: Yes! So when Cam turns around with his face like "Cascades" and I go, "NO!" And we go into this crazy fake battle at like 9:00 in the morning without coffee about why Cascades is a bad name. And then like people just start overhearing and they slowly flood in. And I'm just like-

Cameron: Just because it's the name of a place doesn't mean it's also not a noun!

Clayton: No, doesn't work! Cascades doesn't work! Thunderhead Peaks!

Andrew: There was a whole lot of trying to look up, "Is that a proper name for a mountain or is that a descriptive name? Is that an adjective, or?" You know? Oh my God.

Clayton: Right. There was a lot and every day just felt like someone would come over and be like, "I see you've changed it. I have this problem with it." And then Frost would be like just going over to them... [glare]

Andrew: I was guilty of that at least once.

Rubi: I think you guys are just like, "Well, life is hard."

Clayton: Yeah, and as per usual, narrative comes in to save the day because they collect all the feedback and go, "Hmmm... And, Peaks!" And we're like, "Yeah. That's great."

Andrew: Yeah, okay that works.

Rubi: We're extremely tired. That seems fine.

Cameron: It's such a nice juxtaposition to episode two, where the first name ever for the map, Sandswept Isles, we were like, "Yeah! Yeah, that's great. That's good."

Rubi: Wait, seriously?

Cameron: Yep.

Andrew: Domain of Istan, pretty easy. Because it was Istan.

Cameron: Oh, man.

Clayton: I know, right?

Rubi: Why couldn't you do that this time? Were you saving up all the angst for this one thing?

Andrew: Well, because the Keep itself is an actual part of the map. It's the actual Keep part in the north, and so that was named Thunderhead Keep so we could use it as a point of interest. And so then you can't have a point of interest and a map of the same name, for reasons. And so, I... [shrugs]

Clayton: Thunderhead Mountain was like- That didn't seem like grandiose or epic enough. You know what I mean? And Cascades clearly is not the right one. So like every other option had a problem except for Peaks.

Andrew: Yeah, it just worked. Either that or everybody was just done fighting or was like, "Yeah. Okay, fine."

Rubi: Again, we are very tired.

Cameron: No more energy.

Rubi: We are done here. We are over this. So, well, I'm sorry, I'm stuck on "you can't have two things with the same name" and...

Andrew: Right, yeah. But the Keep itself- A nice transition to that. We did want to make that as true to the original fight as possible because like, more so than most other places I can think about, this is one location, when you think about the location, you actually more think about the gameplay from the original game because this was the hardest mission in the original campaign when it was launched. I think we probably toned it down a few times since launch.

Clayton: Yeah, and then hard mode!

Andrew: Yeah. This place was so hard that monks actually went on strike. The healers went on strike.

Rubi: Oh, the monk strike!

Andrew: Because they were like, "We are tired of you guys overextending and blaming us because you go die. Stop shooting each other with the ballistas!" Like they just had enough.

Rubi: I actually have been meaning to ask you because I honestly have not had time to look myself: Is there friendly fire with the ballistas?

Andrew: There is not. It's a hard rule that you can't have friendly fire in Guild Wars 2. Because it's a true MMO, where it's an open world you don't choose your friends that you go with.

Rubi: Okay, that's fair.

Andrew: It's a little bit easier for unsavory folk to ruin other people's experience.

Rubi: You're looking at me like I'm the unsavory folk! I have a problem with that!

Andrew: No! No, no, no, no, no. I mean, you're the one asking if you can shoot your friends with a ballista, so... If the shoe fits...

Cameron: That's true.

Rubi: Oh, okay. Then that's valid, I suppose. Like you're not wrong.

Andrew: But yeah, like the general flow of the Keep meta was deliberately made to be reminiscent of the original flow. You start by retaking it, then you defend against a hold out. The element where you go out and kill the riftstalkers is a bit different because you know there's portals and displaced sylvari houses and such. But that was supposed to sort of be a tie-in to the original side objective, where you'd run out and try to save some dwarves that are off. Or, you know, shoot them with a ballista, if that's your thing.

Rubi: I wouldn't!

Andrew: So we wanted to stay true to that and then end it with a with a big epic boss fight. And then we got that new Wrathbringer model for that fight.

Clayton: Fun fact: Caithe was originally supposed to be in that, right?

Andrew: Yeah. So originally we had hoped to have Caithe also be involved in that because then it could be a little bit more of all the present members of Destiny's Edge to all go together. But it just sort of ended up being a problem because we had actual open world story steps where you need to speak to Caithe. And we never really want to have a situation where-

Rubi: Caithe's not here right now.

Andrew: Caithe is over- Well, or like somebody's like, "I'm talking to Caithe over here!" and they're like, "Well, wait a minute, Caithe's over here. Does that mean she's actually a mesmer clone?" you know? We don't need that.

Clayton: And there's a slice of time, I think, where Caithe would have had to've been Branded at that point. Which would have been a huge spoiler.

Andrew: Yeah there's also that. Like would you do it pre chapter three or post chapter three? So yeah. It didn't work out. But we did get some good banter between Logan and Canach, yeah, so it's great. Yeah.

Rubi: Oh really?

Cameron: And Rytlock.

Andrew: And Rytlock.

Cameron: Victoriously run away.

Rubi: Oh, that's right!

Andrew: Yeah, and he names one of his mines after Rytlock because he says, "I call this one Rytlock Brimstone because he's- it's temperamental, but effective."

Clayton: Yeah. Some good stuff in there.

Rubi: That's fantastic.

Andrew: Aaron did a lot of good writing there. And that is the meta where the skritt come to help you out with the- Skritt on pigs. Yeah, any time we can have skritt on pigs, the cavalry-

Clayton: That is a win.

Cameron: [skritt voice] We are helping!

Clayton: So funny.

Andrew: Yeah, it's pretty much a winning situation. Yeah. Yeah, the dialogue there is great. Like at one point, I was like, "Do I want to set this dialogue to play for the entire event radius?" And then I'm like, "Well, most people are gonna be over by the Riftstalkers. The only way they're gonna hear it... Yeah, they're hearing it." So those are some very loud skritt. Everyone gets to hear that moment.

Rubi: I just need to say any time you can have skritt on pigs, it's a win. It's like my favorite thing from this whole show today. Really, really.

Clayton: I think in the last segment you were asking where that started from. So I think Path of Fire's launch was the first time we had skritt on pigs, I think, right? Because we had the race? And the skritt was a part of that.

Andrew: Yeah, I think it was the race.

Rubi: Yeah, we had skritt racing. Yeah, that was the first one I saw and I was like, "Hey! We did that. That's amazing. It'd be cool if we did it again."

Andrew: Well, I mean, it's a mount so it couldn't have been before Path of Fire.

Clayton: That's right. Right, yeah. That's true.

Rubi: A skritt on a pig taunting us with mounts beforehand.

Clayton: Ha. Mounts confirmed! Yeah, that's good.

Rubi: Fantastic. Well, you mentioned the flow of the meta and moving players around. And that was really deliberate, wasn't it?

Andrew: Yeah, it was. There's- The flow for the entire map is kind of deliberate. Where we want people to have moments where they're, "Hey everybody! Come together to do this thing." And we do that both right around midnight in game time and then also right around dawn in game time for the southern one. But then we also wanted moments between those where it's like, "Okay, now spread out and do more small group content or do your solo thing. Go craft your Dragonsblood weapons." Just general downtime. But there's a lot of connectivity between all of the events during those down times. I don't even know if people really have realized yet, but all those events actually tie together and then at the end of them, you unlock, I believe, it's a merchant or a-

Clayton: Yeah, there's a vendor there.

Andrew: There's a vendor that you can unlock in the thing if you do all the- If you go rescue Pepperseed in the ice- What's called? The snow valley?

Clayton: Yeah, yeah.

Andrew: Defend the Zephyrite Dock. Help them keep their supplies.

Clayton: So, it's not so much as unlock, just because I don't want people to think that there's not a guy there, but like it's a vendor that will end up going away if you start to fail those events, right? Because then if the city gets taken over, that vendor is gone and that vendor sells an insignia which is a key component to crafting your Dragonsblood weapons. And I was on last night talking to people, they're like, "Why would you?" and like it's- They want to know why we would split that, and the reason was to give the city the feeling of weight and like the need to not want it to fall. Among that is like other heart tasks that will just be increasingly harder if that city were to fall and to be corrupted with Branded and stuff like that. So, sorry. Didn't mean to interrupt.

Andrew: Oh, no. No worries. Like you said, we wanted to put emphasis on the importance of like supply lines. Because like there's a lot of supply lines in our map, but there's not usually a lot of consequences if the supply lines are broken. And in this case, we wanted a really show like, "No, this is dangerous out here. You need to help these guys get from point A to point B so we can keep everything flowing smoothly."

Rubi: Yeah.

Clayton: Yeah. And it's good cause like those downtimes- That's when you want to be doing those events or going the catacombs to like getting your daily like chests and stuff like that. Yeah, I think it worked out pretty well. I like the flow a lot, yeah.

Rubi: It worked out well. Knowing that it was- that much thought went into it and well, like there's anything in this episode that a ton of thought didn't go into, but yeah, having that and it feels like it worked out really well. And it feels like everything's kind of flowing the way it's supposed to. So that was awesome.

Easter Eggs [1:54:07][edit]

Rubi: Okay, one last thing I want to talk about and that's Easter eggs in the game. And then we'll take some questions from you guys.

Clayton: It's my favorite.

Rubi: So if you have them and you haven't put them in, do that now and we will get to some of those at the end. Cause there are, I think, isn't there a jade armor running around somewhere?

Clayton: Yeah. Yeah, so I put a jade armor at the top of that ice cave, like destroyed or whatever and a Mastery Point there. Cause like Frosty was saying, like back in GW1, one of the things was the mursaat and they had jade armors and you had to like-

Rubi: That was a thing.

Andrew: Oh, boy, was it.

Clayton: Yeah, yeah. So I wanted like just throw that in there for anybody. And I've seen some people on forums like mention that. They're like, "Why is there a Branded jade armor over there?"

Andrew: It's not Branded.

Clayton: Yeah, yeah. It's not Branded, though.

Andrew: They're just purple.

Clayton: Yeah, yeah.

Rubi: They just look like that.

Andrew: Why jade is purple? I don't know.

Clayton: I don't know. It was a different time.

Rubi: Because hush. Clayton, tell me about the white rabbit.

Clayton: Yes! Okay, so a little while back, you and I went to Gamescom and that was an amazing experience because we got to meet so many different fans.

Rubi: Yes, that was so fun!

Clayton: Yeah and I enjoyed it like all, but there was one, a couple fans in particular, a guild that like were telling me a story about GW1. They're like, "Why don't you have this like white rabbit?" I was like, "White rabbit? Yeah, like what are you talking about?" And he's like, "Well, in our guild in GW1, we would tell new recruits as like their exercise is to go follow that white rabbit and they would go follow it and follow it and follow it. And then it would turn into this like giant monster and kill them." And they're like, "Why'd it kill me?" And they're like, "Yes, you died! Welcome to the team now."

Rubi: Welcome to the guild.

Clayton: Yeah. I was like, yeah, that's amazing that you took something like that and you incorporated in your own like guild structure.

Rubi: Well, and if you're not familiar, this is when Eye of the North came out. That was actually my introduction to the Eye of the North, and again, I am not okay. But you followed this little white rabbit into the cave and there were- Were there more? Was it a bunch of white rabbits? I can't remember.

Clayton: I don't remember either. I didn't play that...

Rubi: I don't know, it was like 50- It was like this little winding path that you went down.

Andrew: You died, that's for sure.

Clayton: Yeah.

Rubi: Yes, until you learned.

Andrew: Right.

Rubi: But it was full of, I want to say, innocent little white rabbits. I know- I can't see chat but I'm sure if I'm wrong, you guys have this. And you get all the way to the bottom and they all turn against you. And it's awful.

Clayton: So yeah. And in my head I was like that's an amazing story. And in my head, I was like, if I have an opportunity to like bring something like that, of a fan's wish, right? to get that in-game, definitely. And we got lucky enough for this episode to have that opportunity. So I talked to Charlie, our programmer, and I was like, "Dude, like we have to find an area. And it has to be a white rabbit and like have them like walk a path and then turn into that giant Jackalope model that we have.

Rubi: And Charles is going like, "Are you okay or...?"

Clayton: Yeah, no, Charles was like, "I love it. I love it."

Rubi: Alright see, you guys at Gamescom, that was for you.

Clayton: Yeah, yeah. You know who you are.

Rubi: Yeah, alright. I lost track of who has the thing, but-

Clayton: I do. I have the power.

Outtakes [1:56:53][edit]

Rubi: Okay. So, let's look at the outtakes because we have a couple and that-

[laughter]

Clayton: Cameron?

Cameron: I love this. I love it.

Rubi: Please, first tell me the file name.

Cameron: Uh...

Rubi: The file name was like Hurr Durr?

Cameron: Hurr Durr? Hurr Durr!

Rubi: Okay, Cameron. What happened here? Why does Kralk have horse teeth?

Cameron: Oh, man. So, Kralkatorrik is a big boy! Big dude! And so, one of the first things we did is we tried to like see how much room we needed in a giant cavern to fit his model. So, you know, I went into our map at a program and I just popped him down in there and where I had placed him, his teeth started clipping into the props, and I just burst out laughing and I couldn't- "Aurene! I'm here." I just couldn't contain it so I had to take a picture of this.

Rubi: I'm so happy you did.

Cameron: Yeah, this, you know, maybe one day we'll have an elder dragon that may look like this.

Andrew: It's Kralkatorrik's cousin, Cletus.

Clayton: When we have rough days, it's like this stuff that gets you through. It's really good.

Cameron: Yes. We respond with like probably more laughter than it really should elicit, but it's just- It's wonderful. It's stuff like this.

Rubi: That's awesome.

Cameron: Oh, the bedrolls!

Rubi: The bedroll with no collision.

Cameron: So, we did fix this, hurray! But we really wanted to put in some sort of like cot or bedroll or something for all of the different armies to sleep on and when we went into the game and put the characters onto them, they didn't quite use them as they should be. I really wanted to put like a Tempur-Pedic logo on this or something. You know, really feel the fluff, but-

Rubi: What an incredibly deep sleep.

Cameron: But yeah, the fun fact about this is, in our engine, it used to be that if a prop that you placed in the map was small enough, then the engine would be like, "Yeah! We don't need to alter collision at all. That doesn't need collision." And so Meagan Glennon went in and ended up fixing this for us, but it resulted in a lot of good photos. Like, what is that norn doing? Like how does that work?

Rubi: You're becoming one with the bedroll is a thing.

Cameron: Yes.

Rubi: I love it.

Clayton: Uhh...

Rubi: Who? Who? What?

Clayton: Dan, our environment- You've seen Dan's pee^{[verification requested]} if you've been on the forums. You've praised him. This is just one more thing that Dan likes to do which is put giants-

Rubi: Are you okay?

Cameron: Yeah, yeah.

Clayton: Which is to put giants into our map. And I don't know, it was one morning and I was like testing out that portal for the mastery you know and I just was like, "Dan, can you come over to my desk please?" He's like, "Oh, yeah! I did that." I was like, "Cool, we're gonna remove this." But that was-

Rubi: Yeah! You found Judy!

Clayton: Yeah. Apparently it was in there for like a month until I finally found it, yeah.

Rubi: What?!

Clayton: Yeah. And Judy's just looking over us. Judgmental eyes.

Andrew: Tyria is actually- It's just some kid's marble.

Clayton: Yeah right, yeah. So this was fun.

Cameron: Oh, man.

Rubi: What happened?

Cameron: So this is really early on in development. We were trying to figure out, you know, "Okay, we need to have something for you to fight whenever you're going through this instance, so what if we did like, a hydra fight?" And when we placed some of the props into the map, because we were thinking like, "Oh, its heads are gonna burst out of the ground!" and then like do things and then come back down... They stuck in a weird animation state and it-

Clayton: It's a bad seafood.

Cameron: Yeah. It looks like New Year's Eve went really wrong with them.

Rubi: Oh, no!

Clayton: Yeah. This was early on. Like yeah, the hydra was gonna be more of like a boss-ish thing in the-

Cameron: Yeah, it was gonna be like the focus of the last instance to kind of allow you to have something to fight before we were like, "Why don't you just fight Kralkatorrik? It's fine."

Andrew: Well, he's there. You might as well.

Rubi: As long as we're all here. And the hydra's sick anyway. Okay, what is happening? Da-Hee put these in.

Clayton: Oh, this is great!

Cameron: Wait! I was wondering. I was worried that- Okay, so-

Rubi: What?!

Clayton: I don't think I've ever seen this before!

Andrew: Me neither.

Rubi: Wait, seriously? It was on that page!

Clayton: Really? Okay, that's awesome.

Cameron: Yeah, so animation bugs are the best, right? Throughout development, when we start trying to like figure out how things are going to move, sometimes just like a small number change just results in some really weird things.

Rubi: That dance! How does this happen?

Cameron: There's really no explanation.

Clayton: Lean wit' it, rock wit' it. Lean wit' it, rock wit' it.

Cameron: Okay. Now all the kids are going to be doing this all day.

Clayton: That's great! I'm gonna do it! Yeah! The skritt dance.

Cameron: Okay.

Rubi: So, let's see.

Clayton: Next one?

Rubi: Next one. Okay, what have you done?!

Clayton: Okay. Yeah, this is my favorite bug cause it always gets me. When you are trying to follow a leader, you have to set the leader. It's like, it's kind of convoluted in the way you set it up, in the way we script it. So oftentimes, everyone is the leader and so no one knows who the leader is. And so this is what happens when you tell a group to go to-

Andrew: It's a power struggle.

Clayton: Yeah it's a power struggle. Like, "Who's the leader? Who's the leader? You're the leader!" And they're all trying to follow each other and then this is- Yeah, this is the result.

Cameron: It's just a very complicated series of musical chair plays.

Clayton: Yeah. They're all trying to follow each other.

Rubi: Yeah and everyone is super- Oh my gosh, that's amazing. Alright, so let's-

Clayton: Could I-? Sorry, really quick!

Rubi: No, please!

Clayton: I wanted to tell one more bug that seriously broke Cameron, Frosty and I.

Rubi: Oh, really!

Clayton: We were trying to- In the final chapter, when you get like risen and you fly over Kralkatorrik, we had a bug where he would rise up and fall back down and we had no idea when this started. He didn't touch the scripts. I didn't touch the scripts. And it took us like a day of just digging into like our script logic and trying to figure out and taking things off and taking things off and we realized that someone had changed a buff that we have in the game. That buff was removing the wind tech that we have, but we had no idea that that was the case? And so when we finally figured this- So I think it was Melina who was like, "Oh, yeah! I requested some stuff that was ???^{[verification requested]} And we were just like, "How did this happen?!" Like we were just like dying laughing cause-

Rubi: Oh, no!

Cameron: We went through all of those scripts like just trying to find the logic break. We're like, "All of this makes sense. Why is this happening?" And just for a solid day we were thinking we were all crazy. We had all the programmers over there, they were looking at it, they were like, "No, this is fine. Like what's the problem?"

Rubi: That sounds wildly frustrating.

Cameron: And just on a whim, we're like, "Alright! Just start throwing stuff out!" And then it just worked! And we were like, "Wait."

Clayton: Yeah. We were like, "No way. It can't be. It can't be that buff. It can't be that buff!" And sure enough-

Cameron: That was just a coincidence. There's no-

Clayton: Yeah. It was that buff.

Rubi: Oh my gosh! That's insane.

Clayton: But yeah. Nobody was mad. We were just- We just broke. We just cracked.

Cameron: Yes.

Rubi: That's one of those where the laughter is way out of proportion because it's just- We found out what's happening!

Cameron: Like a solid minute-and-a-half of us just like dying a little bit.

Clayton: Tearing up, yeah.

Rubi: Okay, so one final question for you. Um, what was your absolute highlight of development? What was the absolute best? You have to pick one.

Cameron: Ooh.

Rubi: Frosty's (referring to Andrew) like, "Yeah, I get the most time."

Cameron: I need to think about this. I'll pass it over for a second.

Clayton: I mentioned-

Ruby: You have less time.

Andrew: Oh no. You cheated.

Clayton: (To Andrew) You going first, is that what happened?

Andrew: No.

Clayton: Me? I said this before. I think I would just reiterate, like watching when it goes live, watching everybody's reaction. Like, that was like not only the highlight of the episode again: highlight of my career. Just, like, everybody on the floor like laughing and sighing, clapping and just, everyone as one watching this whole thing.

Andrew: So originally I thought it would be the top meta that I worked on because it was re-envisioning the original, but actually I think I had more fun working on the bottom meta: the oil boss.

Ruby: Oh yeah!

Andrew: There was a lot of iteration on that one where it just sort of evolved. Like, at one point I mistakenly thought that oil was sticky and not slippery. So, that was an early change when somebody told me how oil works.

Clayton: Huh. Yeah, that was Sean C., he's like, "You know, uh..."

Andrew: He's like: why am I sticking in a puddle of oil? Shouldn't the opposite happen? I'm like, well, if you want to be all technical about it.

Clayton: And he also mentioned the water too, right?

Andrew: He mentioned a lot of things. He's good at watching my back.

Cameron: That's right. Cleaning it up with water. No, that's not how it works.

Andrew: No, no, no. It was when the oil catches on fire, I'm like, we'll throw water on it.

Ruby: No!

Andrew: Do you know how many kitchen fires I could have started?

Ruby: Right?

Andrew: If it had gone live.

Clayton: It was really funny too, because Sean C was just doing script reviews. Just looking at scripts.

Andrew: He was like: your script looks great

Clayton: Yeah.

Andrew: But you're dumb.

Clayton: He's like: yeah, this is not how it works.

Ruby: Do not allow him in the kitchen at home.

Andrew: I do the cooking too, so.

Ruby: How?

Andrew: Imagine if I, well, come in covered in bandages.

Ruby: Mark is like crying right there.

Andrew: Yeah. I don't start fires so then I don't have to put them out.

Ruby: How? Again, how do you not start fires. Like, the thing about Mark is that Mark is an excellent cook and this is literally killing him right now.

Andrew: Oh, I know. I mean, as soon as he said it I'm like, well I know that.

Ruby: Now.

Andrew: Clearly I know that.

Ruby: Now I know that.

Andrew: Yeah.

Ruby: What about you, Cam?

Cameron: Well, I won't steal Clay's answer, but definitely the launch day reactions were wonderful. But I just have to say, like, working with such a talented group of artisans, just like everybody coming together and and doing something that we all thought was gonna be crazy and possible. And having the help from the team during, like, some really tough situations where it's just like, "I'm not gonna have a whole lot of time to do this, can one of you guys maybe help me out?" And everybody was there and everybody provided a lot of support in any way that they could. So just a big shout-out to the team- anybody who touched this episode entirely. It was a labor of love and you guys all did a wonderful job.

Ruby: That's awesome.

Audience Questions [2:07:14][edit]

Rubi: Alright, well let's answer some questions and there's some up here, but I have one specifically for you first.

Clayton: Okay.

Rubi: Because I don't remember if you were in the room or not, but we held it over from the first segment. Because somebody asked and I like looked over to see you and everybody was like, uh, stay tuned. So the charr chef. They wanted to know if that was a nod to anything and I was like, "Oh! Clayton."

Clayton: Yeah, no, it sure was. I think Cam and I one morning- He was working on the chef and I was like- And he is "I think there's going to be a charr. Wait, can he have an eyepatch? Can he be the most muscular model we have?"

Cameron: Yeah, and we were- we've been playing alot of Monster Hunter. Yeah, so we- I just immediately was like, "Yess!"

Clayton: Yeah and that was just amazing cause like, we loved that game and this was just like our little like love letter, you know what I mean. And like that character is just enjoyable to-

Rubi: I love him. Well and I didn't- I hadn't seen him yet and then a player tweeted like side-by side screenshots and that is when I popped into your IM windows. Clayton! Because I'm a huge fan too and I was like, "Hmm, I hope it's not insulting if I ask." And Clayton is like "Uh yeah, that was super on purpose" and it absolutely made my whole week.

Clayton: Yeah, and there've been plenty of players who are like "I wonder" and totally.

Rubi: He seems very muscular.

Clayton: And he even has like, his like, like moves that he does, like to mimic the flexing and stuff.

Rubi: I love it.

Cameron: It's great.

Rubi: That absolutely delighted me. But yeah I mean that's- We've talked about that on the show before, we all play games and we have games that we love and it's just a part of who we are.

Clayton: Shoutout to Monster Hunter: World.

Cameron: Yeah.

Rubi: Okay so, here questions. I will let you guys answer however you want.

Andrew: Uh, well the Awakened Sylvari, that's a carryover from episode three that we showed them originally.

Rubi: And the question was why why did you put Awakened Sylvari in the last mission.

Cameron: So actually they were intended to go into episode three, and something about their models I think they were through breaking or crashing whenever it turned to night-time because of the glow on their character models, and so it was something that was unfortunately we had to cut and and Connor Fallon actually told me about it, if I remember correctly, and convinced me and and a couple of the other writers to just put these guys in and add a little bit of lore.

Rubi: That's awesome, I like it.

Clayton: Frodak Steelstar's vault, with all the different plates, what was the inspiration behind it and its creation? Um, wow that's- I mean we knew dwarves- the dwarven characters- Well okay, so first of all it was gonna be a meta and that was like one of the first things we cut.

Rubi: Frodak's vault?

Clayton: Just that whole area, the Dwarven Catacombs.

Rubi: Oh.

Clayton: But it was always going to be about like there's gravelings, and there's always gonna be dwarves, and and we just wanted to give a really fun exploration um kind of area that you would do after the meta and so that's where this was always supposed to be. Charlie, our programmer, you'll remember his work if you played episode 2, he did all those puzzles there. He really likes doing puzzles. So we're like "Charlie go ham" and just like create some really fun puzzles and that when we'll like we'll interweave that with like the dwarf plate technology that we added in the Path of Fire expansion, and yeah he did a really great job and like the ghosts are the ones that are like you know resetting everything because they've you know, they're crazy.

Rubi: So that's what they do.

Clayton: Yeah, so that's what they do. Yeah and we knew we wanted like a fun kind of not really like jumping puzzle but like a mountain exploration area as well in there so yeah that was also there.

Cameron: I just completed that last night, it was wonderful.

Clayton: Yeah, yeah.

Cameron: I didn't even realise it was there.

Clayton: Yeah, yeah, Dan did a good job. [crosstalk 2:10:58]

Rubi: (laughs) Surprise! That's really good.

Clayton: Anymore questions?

Rubi: Um... Gonna say no then, and I'm going to thank you guys very, very much. You did incredible work on this episode.

Clayton: Thanks.

Cameron: Thank you.

Rubi: This was absolutely fantastic from beginning to end, and the player feedback we've seen is overwhelmingly in the same feeling, so thank you all, you nailed it. Thank you all for your time today, thank you guys for all hanging out with us today and for spending some time with us. I will let you guys get back to work and thank you all for hanging out with us and we will see you next time on Guild Chat.

All: (wave)

Guild Chat - Episode 79

Contents

Transcription[edit]

Guild Chat Studio [6:50][edit]

Open World Content [18:03][edit]

Scion and Champion [30:15][edit]

Viewer Questions [57:04][edit]

Interlude: Player Reactions [1:02:48][edit]

Game Designers [1:08:22][edit]

The Kralkatorrik Fight [1:09:21][edit]

Caithe's Branding [1:23:25][edit]

Aurene's Scene [1:26:01][edit]

Thunderhead Peaks [1:41:03][edit]

Easter Eggs [1:54:07][edit]

Outtakes [1:56:53][edit]

Audience Questions [2:07:14][edit]

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