Shawn Schuster and Rubi Bayer are back again with episode 8 of their Guild Wars 2 podcast. This time they have an interview with the prolific actress and writer Felicia Day about her voice acting role on Guild Wars 2!
You can find that episode over on the GuildCast website, here: Episode 8
Geek Woman Speaks has just put up an interesting interview with ArenaNet’s Kirstin Perry, talking about the character design and fashion of Guild Wars 2.
Geek Woman : From what I have seen so far the outfits look a little more rustic than in the Original Guild Wars, is there going to be a trend to get grittier and less glam in GW2?
Kristen Perry: When we started designing in weight classes and less specific professions (though they still will be appropriately represented) we noticed that pieces had to play nice together more broadly. No longer is any one detail trend locked into a profession. Oddly, this has given us a freedom to design with magic and fantasy in mind, but also with functionality. With our various professions needing their identities and the general populace of the world needing looks from everything from social level to regional culture, we designed a little of everything. As a by-product of this, the world is indeed potentially grittier. This isn’t just out of intentionally trying to give it edge or wear and tear (though we have that, too), but to give it personality. A blacksmith from the human race will look different than the blacksmith from the charr or norn. It will be appropriate to the race’s ideals and design sensibilities. It will have age or maintenance to it. It may be heirloom, it may be brand spankin’ new. So yes, out of function and variety, some outfits certainly got grittier. This doesn’t mean that everything will be, there’s just more to offer. Glam will still exist with gusto.
But really, sometimes you just want a sturdy pair of sensible boots, eh?
Onlinewelten has an interview up about the recently unveiled Warrior profession and the ‘Traits’ system:
Onlinewelten: ArenaNet has just revealed the traits system of Guild Wars 2. Naturally we are very curious about it. Will the traits completely replace the attributes, which we know from the original Guild Wars?
Eric Flannum: Traits do partially replace attributes in that they allow a player to customize their character beyond the choices they make with their skillbar. We do however have a set of attributes that more directly replace those that we had in Guild Wars 1. Instead of being heavily profession oriented these attributes are more general, much like those you’d find in other RPGs.
ZAM has another interview up today, this time with game designers Isaiah Cartwright and Jon Peters, discussing the Guild Wars 2 combat system.
ZAM: How do the combos and tactics that we’ve heard so much about in the developer journals work? It seems like a very “real time” sort of effect for an MMO…
Isaiah Cartwright: The biggest thing that has allowed us to achieve this sort of comboing system is the fact that we’re changing the way we do skills. In Guild Wars 1, the designers would come up with the skills and then we’d hand them off to a coder and the coder would create the skills for us. That worked really well in that it gave us a lot of skills rather efficiently and the skills did exactly what we wanted them to do, but that didn’t give us a ton of room to experiment. Every time we wanted to come up with some crazy weird idea, we couldn’t really do it because of the process involved. It also meant that the coders were spending a lot of time doing pretty simple code.
This time around, we really changed the philosophy in how we create this kind of content. The programmers now build us a lot of pieces, and the design team sits down and puts them all together. What that allows us to do is come up with lots and lots of ideas that we then turn into something cool. Additionally, the programmers now spend their time making these neat little building blocks rather than crafting out each skill.
ZAM is back again with another Guild Wars 2 interview; part deux of their ‘Reinventing Tyria’ series. This one covers a plethora of topics, most notably some commentary on story telling and some cool insight into the casting process for voice actors.
“Steve Blum walks in and we show him the trailer and who he’s going to play. He instantly says “Rytlock is a badass.” He knows who the Charr are. He knows how to play one of these characters. I don’t have to explain the Charr to him, he just has to know who Rytlock is. If you watch him in the Voices of Tyria trailer, you can notice that he’s snarling while he’s reading Rytlock lines.”
A remarkably revealing Guild Wars 2 interview has cropped up on French gaming website Luna Atra, this time with Eric Flannum, Curtis Johnson, and John Hargrove.
Most notably in the interview is a mention of the much speculated ‘marketplace’ system for in-game trading. In addition to that Curtis also talks about the ability to manage your trading through a web browser, without having the game open.
Luna Atra : One of the biggest deficiencies of the first GW was the lack of real economic tools such as an auction house or a private store mode, so we were forced to sell auction-style but then we were unable to really play. Not considering the fact there was not a unique trade outpost, this did not ease the task. What is planned in GW2?
Curtis Johnson – Game Designer: Guild Wars 2 includes a full Marketplace for players, which will differ from the usual MMO auction house in a number of ways. The biggest and most important difference is GW2’s Marketplace supports postings from both buyers and sellers. You might put your sword up for sale, then offer 100 gold for the specific axe you’re looking for without having to find any specific seller. The market can display the history of average value and trends for an item, making it easy to determine a fair value for your goods. It might be worth waiting to sell your item, depending if the price is rising or falling.
Items you put up for sale may sell while you’re offline, and the funds will be deposited in your account bank. You must be in game to put a new item up for sale, but you will be able to browse the market, bid from your account bank, or cancel your own auctions and offers while logged in to a web browser without running the game.
The rest of the interview covers a broad range of topics, from PvP to leveling, read that here. Add your comments over on the forum here. Guild Wars 2 interview | Luna Atra
A Guild Wars 2 triple-header today, with three more loads of Dynamic Events System info released yesterday.
Eric Flannum answers popular questions on the ArenaNet Blog, and than added some more insight over on KillTenRats.
“One of our testers, upon seeing a huddle of sick villagers standing around a poisoned well, made the comment, “I feel like someone is trying to tell me something.” She ran down into the valley and noticed that the irrigation towers that water the fields were pumping out a green noxious liquid and that the fields were being overrun with grubs living off of the poisoned water. When she reached a giant water reservoir brimming over with noxious poison, she said, “Ah, this is where my peeps are being poisoned.” She immediately looked around the area for some solution to the crisis, found a waterworks worker who knew how to remedy the solution, and helped him do it. Once the reservoir had been cleansed, the villagers got better, the irrigators stopped spewing poison, and the grubs started to die. She received a nice reward of XP, gold, and karma for helping out.”
ZAM have just put up part one of an interview with ArenaNet’s Bobby Stein and Ree Soesbee. Not a great deal of new Guild Wars 2 information, but some random interesting facts and discussion.
ZAM: A few months ago, you released the “Voices of Tyria” trailer that featured a host of relatively famous actors and actresses, but since then we haven’t really heard much about the voice over work. What can you tell us about the VO? What was your reasoning to go with voice overs rather than text?
Bobby Stein: When we started looking at how we were going to take Guild Wars into the future, there were a number of things we wanted to add or enhance within the game to give it that larger scale feeling. Things like voice over were a really big part of that effort, so we sat down and discussed, with a variety of members from the design and writing team, our wish lists regarding the VO work.
The original Guild Wars didn’t have a lot of voice over work in it, and it was pretty much relegated to cinematics. Without going into too much detail, Guild Wars 2 has significantly more voice content because we’ve learned that it’s much easier to tell a story and engage people when they’re listening and watching action unfold rather than reading a cluttered box.
ArenaNet Character Designer extraordinaire Kirsten Perry is getting a lot of love on the forum today, thanks to a recently released interview on the ArenaNet Blog – ‘The Fashion of Guild Wars 2‘.
“Designing the clothing for a race is a lot of fun, particularly when you start at the beginning with a clean slate. One of the things I really like about GW2 is it gave us the opportunity to see the town inhabitants as a whole, rather than just an individual list of needed people (even though what I got was a list of needed people, heh heh). This allowed me to draw a block of designs at once and see them all together. Doing that gives insight into how the NPCs work as a crowd, spreading out interesting silhouettes and shapes that make them simultaneously a good backdrop for the players as well as appealing individually.”
