Guild Wars 2: Dragons’ End Interview
Guild Wars 2’s Canthan cards irresistibly envelop the player. When you set foot in the first region, Seitung Province, every tree, bush, and building is bursting with color and clamoring for your attention. Birdsong is in the wind, pink petals float in the air and somewhere beyond the houses fishermen can be heard chatting with the waves lapping against the docks. It is clear that the natural splendor of this place has been lovingly abandoned for generations.
And all these generations are watching you. You’re the fox in the henhouse, the traveler with a story to tell, the sign that something worse is on the way – depending on who you ask. Whatever you are, you are new. All eyes are on you.
So, Commander, what are you doing? your eyes notice? The holographic woman reporting the news? Unknown robots patrolling the streets? The size of Detective Rama’s hat?
It couldn’t be more obvious, Toto… We’re not in Kansas anymore.
“That’s always been a key part of the Guild Wars franchise: really making the players feel like they’re places they live in. That these characters and creatures truly inhabit this world. The player is able to walk into that environment and see it for what it is,” Justin Fawcett, a 3D environment artist on Guild Wars 2, tells me.
Last week, I had the opportunity to sit down with some of the team behind Guild Wars 2’s latest expansion, End of Dragons, to talk about their approach to reintroducing a familiar region: Cantha. This southern nation was featured in the original Guild Wars game’s Factions campaign, but hasn’t been heard from since.
Several artists who worked on End of Dragons were there when this campaign, Factions, first premiered. Aaron Coberly will have worked at ArenaNet for 19 years in December. He became the art director for Guild Wars 2, but was the lead character artist while working on Cantha for Factions.
“One of the exciting things for artists, especially in the gaming world, is the evolution of technology,” says Coberly. “Things you couldn’t do in the past, you can do now. There are so many ways to make art look better now, as engines and graphics cards get more powerful. So that, in and of itself, was super exciting: taking ideas, reimagining them, and making the world even more beautiful than it was back then. »
And it’s more or less the same world. Guild Wars 2’s Cantha generally features the same areas players were able to explore during Factions: Shing Jea Island, Kaineng City, Echovald Forest, and the Jade Sea.
“We identified these areas as the core areas that would have the most impact, not only for players who have played Factions, but also for new players,” says Coberly. “These four regions were very iconic and created great visual variety.”
For each card, the design revolves around a particular atmosphere or mood that the team wanted to convey. Shing Jea has been identified as the “entry point” for the expansion due to the way it blends beautiful, man-made architecture with natural splendour. In New Kaineng City, the team worked to push the industrialization of the region to its limits. The Echovald Wilds are deliberately brooding and dark. Finally, Dragon’s End is in the Jade Sea, which Coberly identifies as having a deep connection to the history of Guild Wars Factions. Dragon’s End continues the visual storytelling of the core Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons campaign.
“For every aspect of this expansion, we had to break it down” and say, ‘OK, what happened after the Ministry of Purity took over? What is the timeline? What’s the story? says Matthew Medina, Lead Narrative Designer.
A big change, of course, was the introduction of jade technology. Essentially, this new technology uses jade harvested from the Jade Sea that has absorbed magic for many years. Jade can store energy, like a battery, which can then be used to power mechanical devices.
“The humans we’ve seen in Tyria are so much less technologically advanced,” says environmental artist Tracey West. “The closest we’ve seen to what Cantha has is what the Asura, or maybe even the Char, did. So I think this huge breakthrough really sets Cantha apart in terms of what players have seen humans capable of. The Jade technology really helped sell that this was a unique area that hadn’t had much contact with other human settlements for a long time.
This new technology changes everything about Cantha, including how players can interact with the game world.
“In Guild Wars Factions, the best you could do was jump using an emote,” West explains. “So there were a bunch of new areas that players could now access for the first time, with mounts and ziplines. The biggest [use of jade technology] in [Shing Jea Island] was Joon’s mansion. It was a very intense collaboration between props and Connor Fallon on the design side to really make all the pieces work. We were really pushing what we could do in a meeting space and using moving platforms, spawning creatures, and tripwires in creative ways. I think we surprised even people internally with what we were able to accomplish in this space.
Jade-tech is also a reminder of the Empire’s hold on the province. Since the days of Guild Wars Factions, the Jade Empire has taken control of almost all of Cantha. The Human Luxon and Kurzick clans were absorbed into the Empire, though their descendants are still culturally differentiated groups within human society.
“It’s a fairly technologically advanced nation,” Medina says, “so even in areas where the empire doesn’t necessarily have large outposts or large structures, we wanted to have their influence. One of the things we did was create a holographic information network. We have these disks on the floor or on a table that would represent a holographic news anchor, Mi-Rae, giving Cantha news. So we created this character as their Walter Cronkite. One thing that I find very interesting is the balance between old and new that you get with these holograms. In the middle of the Echovald Wilds you always get the news which is very modern.
Hours of toiling through government bureaucracy probably isn’t one of the things Canthans enjoy about their modern, high-tech lifestyle, but it makes for a fun streak for the player. Over the course of the story, the Commander must go to a government office, much like a DMV in America, to obtain their travel permits. According to Medina, he was inspired by his own emigration experiences.
“I have to tell you,” Medina said, “standing in line at an immigration office in a foreign country, having to get papers that say who you are and that you’re legally allowed to be here and work here and live here – I definitely had to stand or take a number and sit in a queue and wait for hours to get in touch with one of their immigration officers.
Medina tells me that the government office environment was fun to set up. “I did a first pass and I thought of some funny things, like you have to have the white background for your photo to be taken somewhere here, all those things. But, I think we did three different passes adding more and more chairs to this room over time, just to get over that depressing feeling of “you’re gonna be here forever.” A very appropriate amount of chairs.
Jesse Christensen, another environmental artist for Guild Wars 2, says this kind of environmental storytelling is “one of the most rewarding parts of the job.” He and his teammates remembered other such areas that they were able to fill with life, such as Mai Trin’s apartment full of cats.
“Mai Trin is kind of a mess,” Media says, “so her apartment reflects that. I was like, ‘she’s going to have at least six cats.’ And I think we ended up with seven or eight.
Prior to its release, I was concerned that the expansion relied too heavily on the Cantha nostalgia factor, leaving no breadcrumbs behind for those of us who haven’t experienced Guild Wars Factions. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the ArenaNet team really brought Cantha to life, largely thanks to these detailed little spaces.
Much like a stranger in a new land, the player spends time adjusting to the sights: the unusually shaped mechs, the mini-boats, the weird technology. There’s nothing to betray the synthetic nature of the NPCs – clearly they’ve been here even longer than you saved the world from the Elder Dragons, and they’ll be around just as long after. But, through small, carefully decorated spaces, we find ourselves able to find something eminently human, undeniably familiar, about these strangers.
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