Guild Wars 2 Norn Week, Day 3

We reach the third day of the Norn week for the upcoming MMORPG Guild Wars 2, in which ArenaNet profiles the giant race. Day 3 is about event design.

Getting through the 3-4 pass usually takes a few tries. As I fix the issues that QA discovers, they find new and creative ways to interact with the event and break it. Once they sign off on an event, it goes into the creative review stage, which is where Colin and I sit down at his desk and he plays through the event, making notes as he goes. At this point, hopefully, we’re only looking at minor balance or polish issues, like adjusting spawn positions or changing enemy difficulty. Most of the time, I only need to make one more polish pass on the event, then Colin signs off and we can call it done. for a while. As new features or tech go in, I’ll often go back and revisit finished events, just to add that final touch..

Once we have several events in an area that are ready to go, we ask the entire company to play the map together for a couple of hours. These (all calls) are incredibly helpful. There might be issues that only appear when ten people are playing an event at the same time, or something that I thought was totally clear turns out to be confusing. We hold (small calls) more frequently, where we ask just fellow designers to play a specific map for an hour or so.

As we’ve said before, we strongly believe in the power of iteration. Just because an event was originally designed one way, we aren’t compelled to follow the design to the letter. It’s my responsibility to make content as fun as possible, so I’m given a lot of freedom to make changes. Our environment artists, prop creators, creature team, and everyone else on the team that I work with have been extremely responsive and quick to tackle anything I ask for. I can’t say enough good things about the team as whole.