Guild Chat - Episode 94
Guild Chat - Episode 94
- Title
- "Whisper in the Dark" Preview
- Host
- Rubi Bayer
- Guests
- Justin Reilly
Clayton Kisko - Date
- November 15, 2019
- Official video
- YouTube
The 94th episode of Guild Chat aired on November 15, 2019. Rubi invites Justin and Clayton as they give a preview of Whisper in the Dark.
Summary[edit]
Transcription[edit]
Whisper in the Dark trailer (4:50)[edit]
"Almorra Soulkeeper": Commander, I need your help here at Jora's Keep.
Braham Eirsson: The gate is open.
Marjory Delaqua: And no one here to greet us.
Braham Eirsson: No, no. What happened? We need to fix this.
Jormag: They'll betray you.
Pact Commander: That voice, the one in the back of my head.
Braham Eirsson: You hear it too, don't you.
Jormag: You can't trust them. I can protect you.
Introductions (6:31)[edit]
Rubi Bayer: Oh no, my lipstick. Hi Tyria, happy Friday and welcome to Guild Chat. Thanks for coming in and spending some time with us. I'm your host Rubi and today we are going to give you a little preview of Whisper in the Dark. We are four days away from release and I have a couple of guys here who are working on Whisper in the Dark. I'll let you guys introduce yourselves. Just let us know what your name is, what you do here at ArenaNet and what you are working on for this episode.
Justin Reilly: I'm Justin Reilly. I'm team lead on the Encounters Design Team. We built the strike mission bosses for this episode.
Rubi: Awesome.
Clayton Kisko: Hi, I'm Clayton Kisko. I'm a team lead and senior game designer here at ArenaNet for episode one. And yeah! We...
Rubi: Yeah! Good show, good show!
Clayton: We made episode one! And we're working with these guys over here to make really cool, sweet bosses! So...
Rubi: Awesome. Justin, this is your first time on Guild Chat so thank you for taking some time and joining us.
Justin: You're welcome.
Rubi: I super appreciate it. So we're going to chat for a little while and if you have questions at the end of the episode, just drop them in chat and we'll try to answer as many as we have time to get to, right? Alright, so- And Clayton, thank you for joining again.
Clayton: Always. Always a pleasure.
Rubi: Alright, so let's just kind of run through what's new for this episode. We're not going to spoil everything, but we're going to give you a little look at what to expect. Justin, why don't we start with strike missions? And talk a little bit about what's new and what's coming.
Strike Missions (8:07)[edit]
Justin: So for this episode we have three strike mission bosses as opposed to the one that was in episode zero. They're on a rotating weekly schedule. Clayton can talk a little more about that if you want to, now or whenever.
Clayton: Yeah! Every Monday at 4:30pm I believe for Pacific Time? What is that? UTC 8 time is something like 23:30. So go ahead, go on like Google and hit UTC converter for whatever that means for you. But that will be the weekly reset. So yeah.
Rubi: So strike missions, you've kinda ramped up the difficulty a little bit on these, right?
Justin: Yep. We're trying to again use these as a stepping stone into more difficult group content for people that may not have engaged with that previously. So after the first one, you know, we kinda put it out there to gauge interest and, you know, see what players' comfort with that was. We got some feedback that it "could be harder", "give us more". So we're definitely trying ramp that up, add in some more mechanics to sort of teach the kind of things you might encounter in raids or higher level fractals, but still be accessible for a general audience.
Rubi: Okay. So we've got three strike mission bosses coming. Which one do you want to start with? Let's talk about them.
Justin: We'll go ahead and talk about them in the order that you'll see them. So the first one is the Fallen Voice and Claw. It's two kodan. I think you could see them a little bit in the trailer for just a second. So this is two bosses that you fight at the same time. I wish we could show a little bit more video of this cause it's really cool. Our animator, Brian, did a lot of great work on this. And so we sat down to kind of brainstorm the fight. We have two bosses at the same time and we wanted to find ways to make that more interesting and make it feel like it was really you're fighting two of them, who are fighting against you together, than just there's two in there at the same time.
Rubi: Oh, yay!
Justin: So one of the ideas, kind of the genesis of the whole thing, was Brian said, "I wanna see them like John Wick, like back to back with the guns!" And so we kind of built everything around that idea, where they'll periodically do these team up attacks where they kind of combo together and one of them actually is the stand back to back and attack opposite and do some cool flips and really neat animations in that, so...
Clayton: In the trailer, you can see polar bears jumping over each other, so it's awesome. Or kodan, rather. You know they're polar bears.
Justin: So one of the things we were trying to do with strike mission boss fights in general is, apart from just having interesting mechanics and making it a cool fight, is making it very visually interesting. Find new ways to push the art, make you feel more exciting that way.
Rubi: Yeah. Okay, so and this is the first one that's going to come up in the weekly rotation, so...
Justin: Right.
Rubi: You guys can see that coming up on Tuesday.
Clayton: Yeah. At the release, yeah.
Justin: Yes.
Rubi: Yes, it's Tuesday! It's so close to Tuesday.
Justin: Is it? Okay.
Clayton: It's coming up quick! And another thing like, I don't know if you mentioned it, was the AoE denial, I think, like some of those mechanics also focused on that you added in. Which is great, right? It will teach, in a very friendly way I think, relatively speaking to raids-
Rubi: "Friendly"!
Clayton: Don't stand in the fire? Don't stand in the fire?
Justin: Right. Don't stand in the lava. Don't stand in the lava.
Clayton: Yeah, yeah.
Rubi: Yes. If this was in question: do not, please, don't stand in the red. If you're standing in the red, you're not doing a good job.
Clayton: Exactly.
Rubi: Alright, so who's coming up after that?
Justin: After that is the Fraenir of Jormag. I don't want to spoil too much about the character. It's someone you'll encounter in the story.
Rubi: And he's gonna hurt you?
Justin: And he's gonna hurt you.
Clayton: Yeah.
Justin: So he's kind of in a shaman- Again, we wanted to get away from the idea of like, "Okay, it's a shaman so it's gonna be a caster guy with a staff." So this guy actually has daggers and fights a little bit more engaged that way than kinda just standing back and casting spells. You've seen the Ice Construct from the prologue episode. There was a strike mission boss at the end of that. This is the character that's actually controlling that, summoning that. So that guy makes a special guest appearance in this strike mission as well, but we've put a little twist on it, mechanically and again visually, to try and make it more exciting and something.
Rubi: Okay.
Justin: People will be excited when they see the reveal.
Rubi: I'm looking forward to it. With no small amount of fear, but that's okay. I feel like that's kind of what you were going for?
Justin: Yeah.
Rubi: Alright. And then the third one we've been talking about for awhile now. Do not pet the Boneskinner.
Quick link to the last location - https://youtu.be/o9VzCkmBENs?t=752
