Points of Interest - Episode 2
Points of Interest - Episode 2
- Title
- Gates of Maguuma
- Host
- Kate Welch
- Guests
- Angel McCoy
Jessica Teddy Croft - Date
- July 4, 2014
- Official video
- YouTube
- The following is an unofficial, player-written transcript of the episode. The accuracy of this transcription has not been verified by ArenaNet.
Points of Interest episode 2 aired on Friday July 4, 2014. Kate Welch sits down with two of the developers involved with Gates of Maguuma to discuss this release.
Points of Interest studio [0:36][edit]
Kate Welch: Hello, livestream audience. Welcome. You're watching Points of Interest. I'm your host. I'm a UI designer here at ArenaNet. My name is Kate. I am joined today by Jessica Teddy Croft again, who you may recognize from last week's Points of Interest as well. He's here to talk about the first episode of Season 2. And we have, for the first time on Points of Interest, Angel McCoy, who is one of our narrative designers, who wrote all of the story, I believe, for this episode. So we have two amazing people.
Angel McCoy: Some of it.
Kate: Some of it.
Angel: Not all.
Kate: Some of it. My favorite parts, I think she wrote.
Jessica Teddy Croft: The best parts of it.
Kate: So we have two super-amazing people to talk to us today about this new content release, which I personally loved, but we'll get into that in just a second. The first thing that I wanted to talk to you guys about is today we're doing a really fun episode. We have new segments that we did not do last time. We're introducing a couple new things. We're going to have some fan art submissions and some other user content. We are going to, of course, do the Q&A with the devs today. And then we have a very special surprise guest who will be joining us in the later part of our show.
Jessica: I wonder who it is.
Kate: I wonder who it is. So please stick around. We have a lot of cool stuff. And so today we're here to talk about Living Story, Season 2, Episode 1: Gates of Maguuma.
Angel: Dun dun duuuun!
Kate: Gates of Maguuma! *fwhwfk* This is thunder crashing. We'll edit this in post, it's fine, we'll put it in there. So if you have not yet completed this part of the story, I just want to warn you we may spoil it for you. Like, there's going to be a lot of discussion about story beats and particular parts of the map. So if you want to be spoiled, then by all means, watch on. But if not, maybe just pause and go play through story, come back, we'll archive this video on YouTube. It'll be great.
Jessica: It's been 48 hours: statute of limitations is over.
Angel: That's right.
Kate: Apparently that's all you get.
Jessica: Yep.
Kate: And going forward, we will always have this show the same week as the episode is released. So before you watch Points of Interest, make sure you complete the story episode. So I think the first thing we're going to do is look at some of our fans submission work, which we got a ton of. We have a couple of really cool pieces to show you guys today. So the first one is this adorable fan art of Taimi, which is painted by... the user is named Elke, I think. And in-game name is Less.1265.
Jessica: Yeah. Ayren's actually a friend of mine. I love your art. I love you. Thanks so much.
Angel: We all do. We all do.
Kate: Every single one of us, when we saw this Taimi art, we were like, "Oh my gosh, this is so great."
Angel: So adorable.
Kate: And she was honestly, she's one of my favorite parts of this particular episode too. Taimi is amazing, she's so interesting. And she's just got, she's got moxie.
Angel: She does.
Kate: She's got spunk.
Angel: She's a little squirt.
Kate: She's a firecracker.
Jessica: You should definitely check it out. She's a real treat. She's got a ton of fan art of all the characters. It's really a pleasure.
Kate: Nice.
Angel: Awesome.
Kate: Really well done. So the next one we're going to go to is actually a screenshot. And this is from Juriia, is the name of the submitter. And this screenshot is so cool.
Angel: Wow.
Kate: She's got a cowl that she particularly put on for this release because of the sandstorm, made it so appropriate. And she's just rocking. He's just rocking. I'm not sure, but anyway, this is an incredible screenshot. Thank you so much. I think that this does a great job of showing-
Angel: The coloring in that is just amazing.
Kate: Yeah! I know, right?
Jessica: Superhero with the M on your chest.
Angel: Yeah, right!
Kate: The next one we have is another screenshot showing off this gorgeous Dry Top map. This person, this is from Tyrian Cartographer. This is another Tumblr submission. And this screenshot, I think, shows off a gorgeous part of this map. But if you go to Tyrian Cartographer's Tumblr, they have documented a bunch of gorgeous screenshots of Dry Top, which is super cool. Thank you so much. That's awesome.
Angel: Go check them out. Go check them out.
Kate: And actually, yeah absolutely. Go find all these places, they're amazing. And our last one also comes from Tyrian Cartographer, but it's a different artist. The artist is named Tyler Chow, and Tyrian Cartographer apparently commissioned him to paint their main character. And it is amazing. Tyler Chow! I actually went to Tyler Chow's blog, which you should do. And his art is off the chain. It's insanity.
Angel: How do you spell his last name?
Kate: Chow. C-H-O-W.
Angel: Okay.
Kate: You guys, I forgot to mention this. I'm so sorry, but Jessica has a new scarf on today and it deserves some mention. But yeah, so that's our Tumblr fan art and fan submission.
Angel: Wow.
Kate: So if you have something that you want to submit on Tumblr, I'll repeat this later. The hashtag for that is actually different, it is `#gw2 fan submission` on Tumblr. Use that hashtag and we can see your stuff and we can use it on the show and it'd be very exciting.
Jessica: Yeah. We'd love to give you guys credit so please, please, please so that-
Kate: Yeah.
Angel: I'll tell you our favorite thing is looking at the fan art that we see that people put out on Twitter or on any of these places, Facebook. Just amazing stuff. It's so cool that you guys feel so invested in the story and in the game and in the characters that you take the time to do this. It's really amazing.
Kate: Yeah. It is. We love it.
Jessica: The fan fiction and the cosplay as well. Fantastic.
Angel: Yes.
Kate: Do more of that stuff. Yeah. If you guys have cosplay photos that you want to submit, use that Tumblr hashtag for it, and we would love to feature it on the show.
Bill Murphy from MMORPG.com [7:04][edit]
Kate: I have to move right into the next segment, which I'm really excited about. And that is introducing our special guest. Mysteries abound! Will there be no end? We are very, very excited to introduce Bill Murphy, who is the managing editor at MMORPG.com, and he's joining us via Skype. And we're going to go into our like 3D glasses mode where we put on earbuds to listen to him, because it's the future. Hello, Bill. Can you hear me?
Bill Murphy: I am the special guest, the super-exciting special guest?
Kate: Yes, yes that's you! Aren't you excited? We're excited.
Bill: And you have to give me... I feel bad for your viewers. Hi!
Kate: Nonsense, sir. So Bill-
Bill: [?] me by leaving MMORPG.com.
Jessica: Your incredibly handsome Skype photo.
Kate: So Bill is going to be joining us on the show as a regular segment. We're going to invite him to come on and submit questions that have been asked by the MMORPG audience. Which is cool because it's going to be stuff that we may not see through our normal community channels. It gives us a brighter and better and wider audience to get ideas and questions from. So, yeah Bill, have you had a chance to play the content yet?
Bill: Later, I'm sorry. Yeah! It's pretty exciting actually. I'm really happy you guys asked us because we see all this speculation on our forums day in and day out. And I know there was a whole bunch of people talking about a new elder dragon and all this other stuff at the end of Season 1, and then it all went quiet because you guys went quiet. So it's fun to watch everybody get stoked and excited and started guessing things all over again. So I'm pleased to be here.
Kate: Awesome. Fantastic. Well, we are going to be really excited to have you on the show going forward, and I hope that you bring your toughest questions and hard hitting journalism and reporting.
Jessica: Please be gentle. Don't listen to her.
Kate: Or just ask really nice questions.
Jessica: Yeah. All low balls.
Bill: Mostly going to be me asking about Taimi. So that's pretty much it.
Kate: Oh good, yeah. If all questions could just be about Taimi, I think that we could all die happy.
Jessica: Oh, she's an asura?
Kate: She's very small.
Jessica: Has a golem.
Kate: Well, awesome. Bill, is there anything else that you wanted to say before we kick you off this livestream for today?
Bill: Just that the asura rule and anybody who doesn't think so deserves to be kicked in the butt repeatedly. I won't say any other swear words; I will only reserve them for a later stream. Thanks for having me and I look forward to work on this next stream and sorry you guys, that I'm the surprise guest.
Angel: Excelsior.
Kate: Do not apologize. We're very excited. Thank you, Bill.
Angel: That's right.
Bill: [?] is the nicest form of self flattery.
Kate: All right, well, enjoy your international vacation, you jetsetter. We'll see you again in a couple of weeks.
Bill: Thanks guys. Talk to you later.
Kate: Bye Bill.
Angel: Bye.
Jessica: Bye.
Kate: Hooray! So yeah, if you guys have more questions, you want to see more coverage, more opinion stuff, then Bill and MMRORPG are going to be submitting those questions right to us here on the livestream. And you can watch us scramble around and flail and... No, we're going to answer it like super pros. We're bosses. We're boss hogs.
Jessica: We're all professionals here.
Jessica: We really love answering your questions too.
Kate: It's awesome.
Jessica: And we'll try and answer any of the ones we can answer, we probably won't spoil anything unless we heck up really badly.
Kate: Right. Which of course would never happen.
Angel: Did you look at me when you said that?
Jessica: No, I tried not to, specifically.
Developer interviews [10:48][edit]
Kate: Okay. So for anybody who has decided to stick around and hasn't actually gotten to play the content yet, can you guys give just a super brief overview of what Episode 1 of Season 2 is happening? What's going on in this episode?
Jessica: Angel can hit the story points.
Angel: Sure. Yeah. So you start out and you find out that something is going on in Brisban Wildlands. And you arrive there, there are some Seraph there who are basically after bandits, one assumes. But when they arrived here at this place, they found some other things going on. Notably some giant vines that are making life difficult there.
Kate: To say the least.
Angel: To say the least, yes. Big thorny, nasty vines. You also run into Belinda there, who is Marjory's sister.
Jessica: Belinda Delaqua?
Angel: Belinda Delaqua. She is there with the Seraph and you get a chance to talk to her. You get a chance to talk to her boss. And at the end of that, she is sent back to Fort Salma and you proceed forward into Dry Top. You arrive in Dry Top to discover that a Zephyrite ship has crashed. Sadly, this is a terrible tragedy. Many people are dead. Many people are dying. They are taking the survivors to a little town called Prosperity, which is there nearby, which appears to be some sort of criminal town actually. Some sort of outlying frontier town where criminals have decided to take up residence. And there are also many miners here. When I say miner, I mean, with the E, not the O. People actually digging in the dirt and digging in the earth for copper. This whole area... actually I'll let Jessica sort of describe what goes on as you're trekking across Dry Top.
Jessica: Sure. I mean, I think Angel did mention the villains of this release are as they are, as they tend to be a giant jerks, the Inquest. They have interest in the wreckage that's basically scattered across Dry Top. This is a new map, which is something we don't do often, but we're super excited to get it out there. The art is by Josh Foreman and Tammy Fletch[?], two of our very lovely environment artists. And the gameplay, there's a lot of free... There's a lot of, we like to use the phrase "joy of movement". So a lot of Dry Top is based around, just getting around using the Zephyrite movement skills that you've been playing around with in Kite city. And in general, we wanted a more active, mobile, open world experience with this one, in addition to all the story stuff.
Angel: Yeah. There's a lot of environmental challenges here that you'll face. And then to continue the story part, when you eventually get into Prosperity yourself and discover what's going on there, you find out that basically Scarlet was here.
Kate: Dun dun duuuun!
Angel: And you have the opportunity to look for a little room that she owned here in this town and find some of her secrets there. And I'm not going to go into any details on that right now. So the main story plots though, is actually finding out who caused the crash of the Zephyrites. Right?
Jessica: Yep.
Kate: Awesome.
Angel: Yep.
Kate: So what did you do? Jessica, you first. What did you work on specifically in this episode?
Jessica: Well, so as principal designer, I was involved a lot in architecting the overall experience in terms of what the general direction of the story would be and then what each of the content pieces would look like. Sarah Sperry and Lisa Davis and Byron Miller, lovely designers who are too scared to be on air with you.
Angel and Kate: Hahaha!
Jessica: You're all cowards.
Kate: I will frighten all of ArenaNet.
Jessica: She's very intimidating. They did a lot of the open world stuff, Sperry one of my very favorite people, she did the first contact instance and the Saboteur Aerin fight. I worked extensively on the crash side investigation with Marjory and Kasmeer. I do love ladies detectiving, so that's kind of my thing.
Kate: Yes. Yeah, that's awesome.
Jessica: Angel?
Angel: Me, I worked on any of the texts that is related to your team to Braham, Rox, Kasmeer, Marjory, Taimi. And the other writers on the team were Peter Fries and Elan Stimmel. And they both did amazing jobs with the Zephyrites, with the Durmand Primary characters that are out there, with basically all of the ambient characters and event-related characters. The main thing that I think I worked on would be the story instance. The story instance at the end, where you go and you find Scarlet's room. I actually was allowed the opportunity to flex a very new scripting muscle and actually build out that content myself, with a lot of help from Jessica and other designers.
Kate: That's awesome.
Angel: Yeah. They probably got tired of me appearing next to their desk with a querying question on my face.
Jessica: No, never... Maybe a little.
Kate: I think you did an incredible job because that investigative room. In most games whenever I get to a point where I know that I'm just going to be experiencing the exposition of a room, I always sort of dread it. It's something that loses my interest really quickly. And this did not at all. I was so into the way that even though it was exposition, I was still interacting with those items in that room. And I was learning a lot from the dialogue that I was in. And the dialogue is essentially customized to your race and your profession too. It was just so well done in these low, polished ways that people might not notice. So hats off to you, Madame. I think that that room was amazing.
Angel: Thank you.
Kate: It was really, really cool. Very well done.
Angel: It was fun to make.
Kate: Yeah, I would like to try that out sometime just for fun. So, what would you guys say if you had to pick your favorite parts of this episode, I'll start with you this time, Angel. Your favorite part of this particular content release. Anything, whether you worked on it or not, what would it be?
Angel: I have to go with that room, mostly because I put so much time and energy into it. But also because it gave me a real opportunity to lay down a lot of the lore, a lot of the backstory, and to tie in some moments and characters from Guild Wars 1 that I don't always get a chance to do. We are limited to how much content we can put in for a couple of different reasons. Aesthetics also just, we have budget limits on our text and on our voiceover. And this room actually gave me the opportunity to just really tackle some of the topics that I've had on the shelf for a year, or up to a year, and really, really get that out there.
Kate: That's awesome.
Angel: So yeah, that was really, really good.
Kate: That's fantastic. How about you?
Jessica: So the selfish answer would be: I really love the crash side investigation because I worked on it.
Angel: Indeed!
Jessica: But no, I think in general, my favorite thing about the whole release and any of the Living World releases involving your team is just seeing the gang back together. I mean, seeing how Rox and Braham are getting along, how Braham's recovered from his injury.
Kate: Super bros.
Jessica: Yeah, Kas and Jory, how their relationship's evolving. How Marjory's recovering from her injuries. And then just the general, the familial nature of all those characters with Taimi. I think that's something that really comes through in Scarlet's room where just everyone's poking fun at Taimi and Taimi is going nuts. And she's just-
Kate: She's totally geeking out.
Jessica: This kid in a candy store. And I think in general, the reception of those characters and their interactions has been overall really positive. It's just been a great pleasure to do anything with them. I mean, not everybody's going to like every character, I know someone out there who's like, "I hate Taimi blah blah blah blah blah."
Kate: How can you hate Taimi?
Jessica: And you know what? Taimi's not for you. You're also a monster.
Kate: Rubi Bayer, our producer, just stood up over her computer with her jaw on the floor like, "Who could hate Taimi? Are you kidding me?"
Jessica: There's always that thread, "Kas and Jory, rah rah rah rah rah"... That's not how I imagine you talk when you type that. [pointing to viewer] We appreciate you, don't get me wrong.
Kate: Yeah. So are there any little easter eggs hidden in this content? That's an exclusive hot peak for our livestream viewers that you guys hope that people find? Can you maybe give them a little hint? Something to look for.
Jessica: So I don't know if it counts as easter egg, but you might have noticed in just the more recent releases of Living World in general, there's been a lot of things you would have noticed unless you just stumbled upon them or looked for them. So like an example is, I think it was The Origins of Madness release, there was Kas and Jory's house in Divinity's Reach popped up. In Battle for LA, there was Belinda Delaqua who was actually already in the game there at Fort Salma, which a lot of people didn't see because it was just this thing to reward people that explore and look deeper. So, I mean, Scarlet's room is a treasure trove of just small little details. And these things all mean things. If you look very closely, you're going to be able to piece together some of what's to come or at least speculate about what's to come. And I think a thing that a lot of people probably glossed over is there's this very interesting interaction (and this is kind of a spoiler, so if you haven't played it tune out), when you're doing the investigation and you find the Zephyrite that's dying, Morning. Kasmeer points out that Morning is lying and she's dying. Why would a dying woman lie, right?
Kate: That's right.
Jessica: And that's a big question. And that's one we will answer. So yeah, if you pay a lot of attention and you read all this stuff, you just read between the lines there's a lot going on.
Angel: Mmmhmm. Yeah. I'll just add to that, that because of the limitations we have on what we can show. The spotlight, when we shine a spotlight on something, you should pay attention to it because it means that everything is important. And we do have a long-term plan and we have had a long-term plan from the beginning. So this is your hint from me. Pay attention: if we share it with you, pay attention. Now the one little thing that I think you can find in the game that not everyone seems to be finding according to the forums. And yes, we do read the forums, is the Scarlet hologram, where she talks about her history. Some people are bypassing that. And if you're interested in the story, you want to try to find that. It's in the room.
Kate: I did not even see that.
Angel: See?
Kate: Oh my God.
Angel: That's what I'm saying.
Kate: Excuse me, I have to go do something very important.
Angel: Don't leave us!
Kate: That's awesome. Thank you guys so much. So on a similar note, do you have a particular, one of our achievements that you think is going to be the most challenging for people who decide to replay the story?
Jessica: Oh boy. Yeah. This one, without a doubt is Zephyr's Ascent. This is so you may have noticed you can fly them to the cloud at the top of a diving platform. [reacts to Kate's poking] Stop that! You climb to the top of a diving platform, which might actually be behind me. And you do that in the open world through using is the Zephyrite movement crystals. And a lot of people, Kate included, were like, "This is really hard!" And well there's achievement in the fascia investigation to do it without using any of the Zephyrite movement crystals. This is courtesy of... Don't point at me. This is courtesy of Josh Foreman.
Kate: No, I was pointing to the platform behind your head, that's on the screen.
Jessica: Convenient. Yeah. Mister-
Kate: Someone else made this jumping puzzle.
Jessica: Hey, it might've been my idea, but the actual puzzle itself was, was built by Mr. Super Adventure Box himself, Josh Foreman.
Kate: Yeah, that doesn't surprise me.
Jessica: So if you curse anyone, curse Josh. Maybe me a little bit, but mostly Josh.
Kate: Well, yeah, because it took me 45 minutes last night to park myself on this platform, so that we could record here today. Now I said some words I'm not proud of. I said some words.
Jessica: You said kitten a lot.
Angel: But you made it.
Kate: I said "kitten".
Angel: Kitten.
Kate: Kitten this kitten. And I died a lot. Anyway, let's move on. So there was one thing I wanted to... Angel, you mentioned earlier, you had a... It was related to the dying Zephyrite, and it was about Kasmeer.
Angel: Yes.
Kate: That was something that you wanted to talk about.
Angel: Yeah. So I wanted to talk a little bit about Kasmeer's gift. It's been with her since the Tower of Nightmares, and it seems to be growing in power or she's just beginning to understand what it is. And we see it in this release with the dying Zephyrite, who is lying. She mentions again that she can tell sometimes, not always, but she can tell sometimes if someone is lying. That is going to be an important piece for Kasmeer's story. And so I just wanted to point it out for those of you who hadn't noticed. This is one of those things that we shine the spotlight on that you really probably should pay attention to.
Kate: You know if an Angel is saying it, by the way, you know it's legit. You know that's the good stuff.
Jessica: It's really nice when people notice these little things. 'Cause we don't put these in here for no reason. They do pay off. So pay attention.
Angel: Yeah. Yeah.
Kate: And I wanted to point out, Dry Top is a smallish map and it's got a lot of events, it's got a lot of champions, it's got of course the jumping puzzle. It has the repeatable instances. And I wanted to mention my current nemesis, who is that kittenn' moa running around named Three-Toed Tootsie. I swear, I will find the person who made that, and I'm going to prank him or her. I'm going to do that thing where you take a screenshot of someone's desktop, and then you set it as their desktop. Oh, they better look out.
Jessica: It was Lisa Davis.
Kate: Lisa Davis?
Angel: Lisa Davis.
Jessica: I didn't say that. Who said that? It that wasn't me.
Kate: Lisa Davis, I'm on to you. Oh my gosh, that is the worst champion.
Angel: Must have been Rubi.
Kate: Anyway. So some general overview stuff about Episode 1 and the episodes going forward too. To be unlocking the content, you have to be a level 80. You have to have a level 80 character on your account. Your personal story, the one that you've been doing as you level up, you actually don't need to have that finished in order to participate in the Living Story stuff. It takes place chronologically afterwards, so it's better if you complete your Personal Story, but it's not necessary. Once you complete the episode of a Living Story release, then we'll automatically send you back to where you were in your personal story if you're not completed yet.
Angel: Yeah. We are designing with the understanding that you have gone through the Personal Story. So you may get spoilers from the Personal Story. If you haven't played through it in the new content. But it's not required.
Kate: Right. And it is right now set so that you complete it once on a character and then you unlock it for achievements. And then each of your alt characters also needs to play through the story and unlock it for achievements. The good news about that is that everybody gets rewards, all of the rewards are the same across, so you don't get diminishing rewards for doing any of that. Yay, more stuff, more loot and Piles of Silky Sand.
Jessica: I love stuff.
Angel: Stuff is good.
Kate: So yeah, I think we have run way over time.
Angel: Already?
Kate: We are cool. Oh, I apparently was idle too long and have logged out. I will go back in the game. Hahaha! This is my character though, isn't she boss? Look at her.
Angel: She's totally boss.
Jessica: I love the hair.
Kate: Thank you very much. Here we go. There we go. This is a professional arrangement. That's right. We did that on purpose since you can see the loading screen. So that is kind of the amount of time that we have for the show today. I wanted to seed some speculation for next week's, next, next, next week's release. You guys want to seed some speculation?
Jessica: Sure.
Angel: Sure.
Jessica: I love being a tease.
Kate: Plant some mysteries. So the Saboteur, let's talk about the Saboteur. Some speculation that we have for this is who he was, who he was working for. The fact that if he was in, as we were talking earlier and you pointed out that he's actually in Zephyr Sanctum during that whole period that we had there. He was an NPC running around, Trader Ayren, and he seemed really excited and he was super pumped to join the Zephyrites. And now something has happened, right?
Angel: Yes.
Kate: There's been a... And it hasn't always been the case, maybe ever, that sylvari can be corrupted. Is that true? But now it seems like they can?
Angel: Speculation is that yes, they can. I mean, it seems fairly clear that something happened to Trader Ayren, between the time when we last saw him getting on the ship, on the Zephyrite ship, and when the Zephyrite ship crashed.
Kate: Right.
Angel: He went nuts.
Kate: Somethings changed. Yeah, something's changed.
Angel: There were explosions on the ship. There were people who saw him threatening others, that sort of thing. It's clear by the time you finished the investigation and start on the path to go after Ayren, it's pretty clear that he's the one definitely who did it, that he was probably working alone. The question is: Why? Why did he do this? And we don't say specifically why, but it was definitely some sort of insanity that overtook him. And it is also mentioned that it was very similar to the symptoms that Scarlet had.
Kate: Interesting. Interesting. Also, another thing that is a great question is why was Scarlet in Prosperity? Presumably years ago when she was just a student.
Jessica: Young Scarlet.
Kate: What was she doing in Prosperity? And why was that dying Zephyrite lying? Like we were talking before about Kasmeer. What would that Zephyrite stand to gain about lying about the Master of Peace.
Jessica: Yeah. What could be so important, right?
Kate: Right.
Jessica: It's a dying woman. She's lying to the people trying to save her. She clearly cares about something more than her life.
Kate: The last thing that she wants to do is protect or hide something.
Angel: Yeah.
Kate: It's good.
Angel: It's a good question.
Kate: Good questions. Oh man, this is so good. So we are going to close out. We have a hashtag by the way that we have been using it as #gw2poi. You can use that on Twitter to continue the conversation. And we have that embedded in the Twitter button, that's down below. You can click that and then it'll seed you with that hashtag and you can speculate your little hearts the way. And any questions that you have that might be appropriate to ask on the next PoI, we would love to hear them. We have one particular good one from this week, since it's kind of the first time we're doing this Q&A segment, but we had one from @costleftr[?] who asks, "Why is Living Story Season 2 only for people who can jump?" Ahahaha! So I thought, it's a funny question, it's a funny question. But I thought it was good because this map is quite a lot more vertical than some of the other maps that we have in game. So I wanted to talk to you guys and see is that an intentional thing that we're doing?
Jessica: Yeah. I mean, we're always exploring new gameplay avenues. As I talked about earlier, "joy of movement" is a big theme for this release and "verticality", which I'm not actually sure is a word for sure.
Kate: It is now.
Jessica: Is a big part of it. Being able to scale clamps and explore should be a lot fun for you folks. In general, we want Dry Top to feel very unique. And I think we've succeeded with that. I mean, with the sand storm, which we didn't even talk about that much.
Kate: Yeah. The sand storm so cool.
Jessica: And just generally the very arid feel of this map.
Angel: The quicksand and the...
Jessica: Ah, the quicksand.
Kate: I got my quicksand achievement, though. It's pretty easy for a warrior. I'm not going to spoil it for you, but you can do it.
Angel: Good job.
Jessica: I died horribly as a ,esmer, trying to do it.
Angel: If I could add just one quick thing to that. The other thing with the "verticality" of this map is that it fits very strongly with the Zephyrite theme. And it sort of continues and plays on the whole up and down verticality play, you know, jumping and things that you do with the Zephyrites.
Jessica: The Zephyr Sanctum was very vertical as well.
Angel: Yes.
Jessica: Was sort of formed like a racetrack.
Angel: So, it lends a theme.
Kate: Yeah. Awesome. I'm enjoying it. I thank you guys. You've done a fantastic job with this release. Literally my only complaint is that I wish it were like 35 hours long. That's the only thing. And I love that feeling because it's a bite-size, it's an episode. Like a TV episode would be an hour, an hour and a half long. And to be able to have that much content and just like, need more of it. That's my binge watching side of me, I just need more. But that means you guys crafted something that's amazing.
Angel: That's cool.
Jessica: Mission accomplished.
Kate: Yeah. Thank you so much.
Angel: That makes us feel good, makes me feel good.
Kate: There's a lot of documentation here internally for how the rest of the story plays out. I haven't read any of it. I don't want to know, I'm working on other things and just keeping my head down. I don't want to know what happens. And so I get to experience it as it comes out with you guys. And so all of my enthusiasm about this is very genuine, because I honestly have no clue what's going to happen. And the mysteries are very interesting. So if you have questions, speculations, comments, criticism, compliments on scarves. Please use our hashtag on Twitter, #gw2poi. If you want to feature any fan submission, screenshots, cosplay, fan arts, whatever use on Tumblr, the hashtag is going to be `#gw fan submission`. I know that's a mouthful, I'm sorry. But you're just, you can do it.
Jessica: You're intelligent people; you'll figure it out.
Angel: You can work it out.
Kate: Yeah, you would love it. It's for legal purposes, but we would love to have more of your stuff.
Jessica: You'll find us on social media as well.
Kate: You'll find us on social media. You will be talking to Rubi Bayer, our producer on social media, probably. So next week you'll have the Ready Up livestream, which is the PvP balance. So make sure you tune in for that. If you are a fan of the PvP side of the game, which is awesome. And then July 15th will be the release of Episode 1. Episode 2!
Angel: Two!
Kate: Episode 2, Season 2, yes.
Jessica: You had one job!
Kate: Ahaha! I know, I messed it up guys. Episode 2, Season 2 comes out on July 15th. The next episode of Points of Interest will be on July 18th, the following Friday. We have had so much fun on this show. I love talking to you guys about this stuff because I can honestly just geek out about it. I'm such a big fan of the work that's being done on Living Story. I hope you guys are too. I hope that you enjoyed this, you learned something. And yeah, that's our show. I wanted to quickly give some kind of... We don't have a credit scene yet. So just in case you're wondering our intro music is done by Maclaine Diemer, who's our new composer. Who's doing all that hot new music for Dry Top that you guys have been freaking out about has been Maclaine and Leif as well.
Jessica: Fantastic.
Angel: Amazing talent.
Kate: But yeah, he's just recently, he's been given a promotion to being a full composer, so we're very excited. Drew Cady does our audio setup. Ben Quell[?] helps with all of the lights and cameras and making us look fine. Eli Scheer did our logo. Luke Knocker[?] did our animation intro. Rubi Bayer is our brains of the operation over there. Special thank you to Bill Murphy for being on the show. And we're really excited to see the questions that you have to ask us next time. And of course, Jessica and Angel, thank you for being my guests today.
Jessica: Thank you for having us.
Angel: Thank you.
Kate: And Kate! Thank you all. Thank you livestream! Everyone.
Jessica: Tune in next time for my new scarf.
Kate: Enjoy. Have a lovely couple of weeks.
All: Bye!
