Update log
Full Guild Wars 2® update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Repeated intro
Hello, Tyria,
Extracted changes
- Gameplay
- Events
I'm Chloë Mills, Story Design Lead for Guild Wars 2®: Visions of Eternity™. I'd like to give you a look under the hood at what went into making the Unending Ocean story instance in Chapter 1: Unscheduled Departures, including the design process for this instance, some technical details of its implementation, and a few interesting challenges we solved. This is a technically complex and ambitious piece of content, so hopefully you find it as interesting as I do! This blog contains light story spoilers, in case you wish to avert your eyes now.
Planning the Voyage
At the beginning of Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity, the Inquest have a head start in traveling to the mysterious island of Castora, and the commander and their allies hastily assemble a crew to set sail across the Unending Ocean aboard two ships: the Dark Leviathan and the Martingale.
From early on, we had several key goals for the start of the story and the journey to Castora that helped shape the setting and gameplay:
Set the tone for the expansion overall and address player feedback about pacing and participation from Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds™ by beginning the story on an adventurous note and more quickly and frequently inserting the player into the action.
Ground Castora in the setting by physically traveling there. Castora is an uncharted landmass separated from mainland Tyria by a massive ocean and without pre-existing lore, so we wanted to show the player making that journey rather than taking a portal and —poof!— arriving with little thought, difficulty, or frame of reference for the vast distance.
Set up and foreshadow important narrative elements that arise later in the story. The magical fog, Isgarren's cagey behavior, and Kela attacking the Martingale unseen from beneath the waves all plant seeds for later story development centered around the seers. We wanted to demonstrate that reaching—or leaving—Castora would be fraught with danger, contextualizing the castaways' story and why Castora has remained shrouded in mystery, only roughly charted from afar by passing sailors.
During the early planning process for any expansion, we outline a rough estimate of scope for story design work. We consider the number of chapters, the number of story instances, and how complex each section will need to be. This is all based on factors including (but not limited to) the development timeline, designer and writer bandwidth, and the emerging needs of narrative beats. Story sections containing narrative focal points usually need extra attention and require higher design scope, so I designated the scope for the Unending Ocean story instance as "extra large," meaning that it would have many moving parts (literally) and a high amount of bespoke, complex implementation.
Ships and Environment as Centerpieces
The entire story instance takes place aboard the Dark Leviathan and the Martingale. This presents an interesting challenge because the physical play space is much more limited. To help compensate, I tried to get the most out of using vertical layers of the ships and design variety in what the player must do. Initially, only Sayida's ship, the Dark Leviathan, was planned, but in early prototyping, it became apparent that the small main deck of the ship and limited upper-deck space would not provide a large-enough playable area. And thus, Canach's ship, the Martingale, was born. And just as quickly, the fate of his ship was also sealed when we realized that there was an existing ship model with a spectacular break-apart animation just begging to be used. The instance is split up into two distinct sections:
Source