Guild Wars 2

Haha. Yeah, I made that one grueling. I figured lvl 80s could handle it.

Can’t wait for you to see what I’m working on now. You may never leave it.

I’ll ask about it.

Can’t just switch camera systems. The system is the way it is in order to accommodate a number of systems including an occlusion system that makes things on the other side of walls not render, and messing with the camera collision can push it through walls then you end up with half the world disappearing at random times. This is just one of the important systems that need the camera to behave a certain way. In the big picture, having the world drop away is higher on the priority list than making all the jumping challenges feel good. It would have been nice to have had a final camera when most of the JPs were being built, but the occlusion system didn’t get in until near the end of production, so we couldn’t have foreseen the crazy camera demands it would have. We can make little tweaks to the existing JPs, but that’s got it’s own can of worms associated with it, like introducing new bugs. As to a First Person Cam, I would LOVE it. But that’s ANOTHER big can of worms, as we would have to create a new system for how we reconcile the direction of the camera to the orientation of the player’s face as they do all sorts of crazy maneuvers like back-flips, cartwheels, 720 spins, etc. Not to mention dealing with how to render the weapons and attacks which were not created with that viewpoint in mind.

Cantha was my favorite GW1 region to work on. And I worked on every GW release. I know a lot of the dev team loved it and would love to revisit it. I kinda agree with critickitten about the negative aspect of tight corridors. Most of that came from hitting technological limits while trying to keep the epic quality of the concept art. I think we could do some really amazing things with those themes in our new engine. Certainly nothing is ruled out. I certainly encourage anyone to express your desire for a Cantha region in GW2 in a positive and friendly way. It could be years away, but it’s worth asking for.

Yeah, I feel bad about the camera issues. The camera was changed just before we launched in order to accommodate a couple of systems, and as a result the way a lot of our JPs feel changed as well. When I was building Troll’s End I always tested it as a max-sized Male Norn, and it was ok. A bit claustrophobic, which was the intent, but not infuriating like it is now. Sadly there’s no good way for me to go in and make that area bigger without a HUGE rework of the area. What I can promise is that moving forward, as I make new JPs I’m keeping the new camera in mind all the time. I still can’t make it as smooth and wonderful as a dedicated platform game camera, but just try to minimize the frustrating bits.

We run one-time events at the time where we have the highest concurrency.

Focksbot.6798:

‘Difficulty’ isn’t some quantitative concept, where making something more accessible necessitates removing the challenge for others. It’s about ‘arming’ your players equally, so that those coming to something new or with less experience of certain systems can get up to speed with those who are seasoned, and those who don’t have as much time to waste can still get something out of an event, while those who have all the time in the world can find a proportionate increase in reward.

So please stop treating it like an oppositional binary. My hope is that Josh and ANet have the wisdom to see this as a problem that requires a creative solution, rather than a supposed choice between pleasing two different types of player.

I mostly agree with this. My only caveat is that there are distinct groups of players with different interests. So there is content that is compelling to one group, but not another. PvP, WvW, PvE, JP. There is obviously overlap, and the more we can please everyone with one piece of content the better. However, if we attempt to make EVERY piece of content meet this criteria we will lose the fringes. And more importantly to me as an artist, we lose a lot of chances to make distinct, memorable, and boundary-pushing stuff.

The point being that when I’m testing a PvP arena with Izzy, it is very, very, very difficult for me to even get him to half health. Now if I LOVED PvP, and really got into it and researched builds and all the necessary accouterments, I’ll bet it would get easier to get him to half health. But I DON’T love PvP. I’m just not a competitive person, I feel bad when I beat people, and losing isn’t particularly compelling to me either. So for me and my ilk, PvP is TOO HARD. You could make all the guides and walk-throughs and hold my hand and show me how to sit properly, it just won’t get any easier to me unless I changed my mind about competition. And Izzy can’t get past the first chest on the Clock Tower.

None of this is to say that if given more time we could not have made the Clock Tower much better. We absolutely could. I’ve made some tweaks and I hope if it’s back next year I’ll some more time and the scriptors can work out the bugs, etc. All the criticism I’ve heard about it is valid except for those saying it’s bad because you can’t see yourself. (As many have pointed out you just have to wait 1 second for the crowd to get ahead of you until you have learned the jumps. Then you can get ahead of the pack by the first chest.)

Focksbot is right that it’s a dangerous precedent to pin difficulty on poor skills since any kind of shoddy design could be creating difficulty. It doesn’t mean that there is NO truth in that many people with low skill in a particular area will tend to complain that content is too difficult. But as a designer, I can’t let all criticism bounce off me by chalking it all up to sucky players. It’s just a balance, and that’s where design skills come into play.

Good idea. Not sure if it’s something we could do at this point. But I’ll keep it in mind on my next JP.

Rising Dusk.2408:

You know, no matter what happens, Josh, someone is going to have a tough time with it due to their own inability to complete the content.

This is true. But I have to keep in mind the proportions that our game mechanics have created, and work within that framework. We have platforming and swimming, but these are ancillary mechanics compared to the emphasis that defines the game. Think of a mixing a song. You might really love cowbell, but if you keep turning it up louder and louder, to the point where people who want to hear the singing can’t, then you haven’t mixed your track well. You’ve forgotten the core of the song for a detail.

I DO think that it’s a pretty small percentage of people who couldn’t manage the jumping in the boss map, and I’m not going to go in and make wheel chair ramps everywhere. But there are other spatial design tools I have at my disposal to communicate the way down and ease them along without significantly nerfing the whole experience for everyone.

Snapdragyn.1238:

It was not fun for me. I will not do it again. I’ve not been bothered at all that jumping puzzles exist for those who enjoy them, but if this sort of mechanic becomes an integral part of the game such as it was here, I’m out.

This is very valuable feedback for me. Thanks. Since the MK boss map is required for completion I’ll go in and make the descent a lot easier for next year. (Assuming that map will even be around next year, which I do not know.) The last thing I want to do is alienate players who don’t like platforming. The point of the relatively small amount of resources we put toward JPs are meant to bring more people in, not trade one demographic for another.

Latorn.4209:

Josh Foreman.8250:

Jalad Lantana.3027:

As long as jumping puzzles are optional, that’s fine, but requiring one as they did with the Mad King fight crosses the line. If they are going to require jumping puzzles to complete regular content, then they should fix things so all players have an equal chance.

I did not consider the MK boss map as a jumping puzzle. All you are doing is dropping down. And I made it so there are MANY paths down.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback.

Noooo! Don’t change what you’re doing! The mad king mini-dungeon layout was fantastic, really spiced it up with the small amount of jumping required. Think of how boring it would be if you just went in and fought him on a flat level :/

Oh I wasn’t saying I was changing anything. I was just seriously surprised that anyone would consider the verticality in that map a ‘jumping puzzle’.

Jalad Lantana.3027:

I think it is unfortunate that they design an event that puts you at a disadvantage based on choices you made during character creation.

I agree that this was unfortunate. But it was not intentional. When I designed the map I thought we were going to be able to have single-player instances.

Jalad Lantana.3027:

Arenanet is showing its bias and bigotry against large characters, by putting in an event which results in large characters, (Norn and Char) becoming the targets of derision and scorn because the environment of the jumping puzzle puts them at a disadvantage and obscures the puzzle for others.

I do, truly feel bad about this. From the ground up, we designed our game mechanics to encourage cooperation and altruism in the community, and this JP’s mechanics broke that design aesthetic. It was an accident, but I still accept responsibility for it.

Jalad Lantana.3027:

A good game designer would not design a dungeon that required you to be a certain height to shoot over an obstacle, but Arenanet seems to have no compunction telling Norn and Char tough luck when it comes to tight spaces and jumping puzzles. New players ought to be warned that the camera completely bugs out in tight spaces for large characters, and the large character models completely obscure the path in jumping puzzles.

Well, ideally we will continue tweaking our camera until this is not a problem. Throughout the development of GW2 I was very purposefully pushing the boundaries of spatial layout and mechanics, because I believe you can’t know what your limits are until you pass them. One of the themes I tried to explore in a couple places was claustrophobia. (Specifically in Troll End, which I consider to be my worst JP) I always play as the largest male Norn in these areas while I’m building and testing them. One of the reasons for pushing the limits like this is that our engine is malleable because we are an MMO, so we are always tinkering, and it’s possible to push the direction of the engine in new and interesting ways, but only if there are compelling mechanics to justify those changes. I’m one of the guys always pushing and pushing to try to discover new compelling mechanics. That means a lot of experiments. And the nature of experiments is that some fail. But I assure you, at no point have I, or anyone here, built something that totally sucks for one of the races and said, “Well, screw THOSE guys! I don’t care about Norn!”

Jalad Lantana.3027:

As long as jumping puzzles are optional, that’s fine, but requiring one as they did with the Mad King fight crosses the line. If they are going to require jumping puzzles to complete regular content, then they should fix things so all players have an equal chance.

I did not consider the MK boss map as a jumping puzzle. All you are doing is dropping down. And I made it so there are MANY paths down.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback.

Aurelian Omenkind.2470:

Tried 4 or 5 times, then said “nope, I’m’a farm some more candy corns.” Been happy since.

When I made this map I was HOPING that people who aren’t into jumping would do exactly this. They’d see a fun Halloween looking environment, maybe get to the first chest and snag a goodie, then be on their merry way. I see now it was a mistake to make the hardest jumping challenge in the game part of an in-your-face update like a holiday event. I’m not going to stop making difficult stuff like this, they just won’t be so prominent in the future. I honestly hate making people upset and have a very high level of empathy. So it’s been hard hearing all the people that are so angry, frustrated and sad because of something I’ve made. But it’s just another lesson learned.

I like this idea, TG. I don’t know if I’ll be on the Holiday team next Halloween, but if I am I’d be up for making a destroyable version of my map.

I worked way too hard on that thing to throw it away! That would make me cry. Haha… spent a lot of my free time on it actually. You know it has 4,000 frames of animation, and I had to hand track every single frame that a splash happened on every single fish for the audio guys to sync it up. Not that we will never permanently destroy anything. In fact… well, I can’t say more than that. But NOT the lion statue. It’s the symbol of LA. Like the Statue of Liberty is for New York or the Eiffel Tower is for Paris.

This area was supposed to be hooked up before launch but we got swamped and the script I wrote didn’t get submitted to localization in time. It WILL get hooked up and operational at some point. (Though everyone is actually MORE swamped with post launch content than before we shipped, it seems) What really sucks is that it can be seen from outside, which really ruins the effect. It’s not supposed to look like UFOs or be reminiscent of anything alien. and Ceiling Cat was going to be a super secret Easter egg that only a very few would ever see. What sucks more is that this is one of those projects I did almost entirely on my free time (as is the fragmented garden statue of Caudicus and the Lion’s Arch Lion sculpture) and it’s getting out there in a completely stupid ugly way. I’m not blaming anyone but us. It’s totally natural and healthy for fans to poke at every corner to find this kind of stuff. Just makes me sad that something that was supposed to have a very specific mood is ruined for a lot of people now. anyway, I appreciate you guys bringing it to our attention.

Sent you a PM. I need more info to fix this, thanks!