Tom Abernathy.5893

I hear that, and I appreciate the reminder. We’ll do our best to keep it in mind. Julia is great about noticing that and pointing it out to me, which is just one reason she’s awesome and I’m grateful we have her. I can’t imagine a better Narrative Lead for GW2, nor one more dedicated to keeping her finger on the pulse of what players are saying and feeling.

FWIW, BTW, the reason we did the Q&A to begin with is that we knew it had been a little while since you’d heard from us and we wanted you to know that what might seem like radio silence from the outside was actually just us working like crazy to give you something awesome in what’s coming up. We’re truly excited about the direction the story is going. We think you will be too, when you hear about it on August 30. We seriously love you guys and spend a lot of our days figuring out how best to knock your socks off. Hang tight; my remaining answers will be posted sometime this week, and, come August 30, much will be revealed about what’s on the way. Honestly, it’s killing us not to be able to share it with you yet. I mean, here I am posting from a ?; that’s how excited I am. :D

Hey folks—Sorry about that. I wanted to answer some more questions before the 2nd but was busy with other pressing work stuff for GW2, and in fact I did write a few more answers over that weekend. The idea was that I would do so in a doc, then one of our fab Marketing folks would unlock the thread and allow me to post my answers...except what actually happened was that my week turned out to be crazy busy and I never had time to do it. However, the good news is, those answers are still coming. I’m out on vacation this week, but even in my absence, Julia’s gonna try to get them posted while I’m gone. Worst case, I’ll do it myself next weekend. Thanks for your patience!

Legitimate questions. I recommend you watch the Guild Chat Julia and I did in May after “War Eternal” was released. I addressed a lot of that in our discussion.

Speaking only for myself, I’ve thought about it. Haven’t come up with anything I really like yet, and, anyway, that whole area isn’t where we’re focused at the moment. But never say never.

It was a very crowded episode, and we wanted to have as many characters involved in the battle, but inevitably had to focus on fewer than we might have liked. Epics are unwieldy beasts from a writing perspective. That connection isn’t going away anytime soon (or maybe ever).

It would, wouldn’t it? As Julia likes to say, we don’t do anything by accident.

Two big reasons: We have VO budgets, which require line count caps, which place a practical limit on how much dialogue and, to a degree, how many characters we can feature in any given release. At this point we have so many significant characters that there’s no way we can have all of them around all the time. (Not that we didn’t try in “All or Nothing” and “War Eternal.”)But maybe more importantly: We weren’t sure what we wanted to do with Jory and Kas. They are the example I referred to in another answer of characters who’d been left in an awkward place—Kasmeer runs away while Balthazar is torturing Marjory, and then has a major episode of religious disillusionment when Kormir and the other gods “peace-out,” as Linsey likes to put it. Oh, and they’re engaged. Those were the facts on the ground coming out of Path Of Fire. And, while we love those characters and we know players love them too, the facts on the ground didn’t suggest easy or obvious directions to take them in.So what does that mean for their future? We can’t give any solid details, but I can tell you we have spent quite some time discussing Kas and Jory. And I will tell you that we were indeed able to see a way forward with them, and that the secret to doing so turned out to be stopping thinking about them as a couple, a unit (Marjomeer?), as important as their couple-ness is for lots of reasons, and starting to think about them first as individuals. Only once we feel like we really know who they are as individual human beings can we then start talking about them as a couple who are in love with each other—because the reality of relationships is that just being in love guarantees nothing. People are people, we are all flawed and complicated, and simply treating Marjory and Kasmeer as some sort of poster couple doesn’t do justice to them as human beings and doesn’t do justice to the truth and reality of same-sex relationships (or any other kind, for that matter). And it’s very important to us to do justice to all that. So. It’s taken us some time. We now know where we want to go with Kas and Jory. More to come.

I don’t see a flaw in any of that reasoning, FWIW.

When we were beginning Season 4 planning just as I joined the company in February of 2017, I asked Mo what, in his opinion, the story of Guil Wars 2 was about, in as few words as possible. His response: “Dragons.” By my count there are still four Elder Dragons on Tyria. Draw your own conclusions. ;-)

Actually, Bobby is the only non-Editing/VO person on the team who was around during S3 planning, so I can’t say what the folks who worked on that season had in mind. What I can say is that, in the earliest discussions for what we’ll be introducing at the event at the Moore Theater on August 30—and, when I say earliest discussions, this is over a year ago—we realized that, before we could decide where the story was going, we had to answer a whole category of questions that I refer to as “cosmology” questions. Things like, what exactly is magic in our universe? What’s the relationship of Elder Dragons (and of other creatures) to that magic? Etc. Like you, when we looked at what the player-facing lore on those topics was, it suggested that, assuming one wasn’t prepared to simply accept Elder Dragons as naturally evil and destructive beings (which we weren’t; as I’ve mentioned in my answer to someone else’s question, we were pivoting to seeing them as people so we could make use of them as characters, and characters need to be emotionally comprehensible)...it suggested that something might be making them act as if they were. Like you said, dragons eat magic, so...the answer seemed pretty obviously to lie in that direction. At this point in the story (meaning following the events of “War Eternal”), we know that Kralkatorrik had been driven mad, to the point of his mind fracturing into two warring personalities, and the implication is obviously that that was at least one factor in his long history of destructive fury. We also know that he had absorbed the magics of Zhaitan and Mordremoth upon their deaths and the death of Balthazar, and we also know that Aurene had absorbed much of the same, both in the egg and after she hatched. What exactly the effect of all those magics was on Kralkatorrik, and what it, plus his own magic, will be on Aurene, especially now that she has Ascended, are questions yet to be answered. I think it’s safe to speculate, though, that Aurene herself, and those who love her, are probably going to want to find those answers. ;-)

First, thank you for the very kind words. We’re very touched that those Aurene lines moved you. Taking your two big questions (for which we have answers we can share): RE Kralkatorrik, we confirmed in our Guild Chat in May that he does indeed say the word “Mother...” as he’s dying. Whom he’s referring to is as yet unclear. RE Caithe and why we put a spotlight on her, we made a decision as we were planning Season 4 that, given our approach is highly character-based, we wanted to pick a character or two who, there seemed to be a player consensus, had been last left in a place, arc-wise, that people weren’t particularly satisfied with. (Or, in one case, that WE weren’t satisfied with.) We felt Braham and Caithe were great examples and so set about figuring out how to move their arcs forward. In Caithe’s case, she didn’t really fit easily into the first three episodes (the Joko arc), but, as Aurene and her role as Glint’s Scion moved center-stage in “A Star to Guide Us,” that seemed a perfect moment to bring Caithe back into the story. As we discussed her long history with Aurene, even in the egg stage, it occurred to us that Caithe and the Commander were, in a sense, like Aurene’s foster mother and father (regardless of gender), and that Caithe would feel drawn to help Aurene confront the legacy Glint had left her. (We also kind of loved the idea that, at some point after eating Joko in “Long Live the Lich,” teen Aurene might have gotten mad at the Commander and flown off to cool off with Caithe, like a teenager whose parents are divorced might get mad at one parent and take off for the other’s house for the weekend. :D ) It also gave us the opportunity in “All or Nothing” to have Aurene repay that maternal love by choosing Caithe to bind with her even more intimately, be Branded by her and be the voice Aurene did not yet possess. And, of course, that led to the Crystal Bloom and all that came with it, as you noted.

I really love your collaboration with VA team (and every other), but Eve Eschenbacher and you put together in one livestream is just the best thing ever.Just saying. :) I appreciate that. :-) Eve has sadly (for us) now moved on to Bethesda (as the world’s biggest Fallout fan, it’s pretty much like she’s gone to Valhalla) and we miss her terribly, even as we’re happy for her. Definitely a fun person to do Guild Chat with. :D

The way we’re currently thinking of it is that, pre-Aurene, mortals understandably perceived Elder Dragons in the way you mention, thinking of them as forces of nature—but that our principal characters inevitably have seen Aurene as a person (if you follow the distinction I’m making), as well as Glint, Vlast, and even, most recently, Kralkatorrik. As a result, they’re re-examining some of their long-held assumptions. For example, all Tyrians used to refer to an Elder Dragon as “it”; as they get more visibility into the inner life of Elder Dragons, some Tyrians are coming to refer to them with gendered pronouns where appropriate. (In all candor, treating the EDs as people rather than impersonal forces also allows us to therefore use them as actual characters in our storytelling. A hurricane doesn’t have motivation or reason or emotion or a soul; a character does, and is thus a kitten of a lot more useful from a storytelling perspective.)

Yeah, there’s no question evolution occurs as a result of normal staff turnover; not counting Editing and VO, there’s only person on our team who has been here longer than three years. But evolution would happen even with the same writers who worked on the Personal Story and Season 1. And frankly we enjoy the freedom such an elastic IP gives us to do different things. “A Bug in the System,” for example, starts out as an Ocean’s 11-style heist movie and then takes a left turn into Cronenbergian body horror once you discover what’s really going on in Rata Primus. It’s a lot of fun to have that broad a stylistic palette to work with. As far as team structure, currently we have four writer/narrative designers (and are recruiting for a fifth) working on GW2. The GW2 Narrative Lead, Julia, runs the narrative side of the dev process and is supported by Armand, our Writer/Narrative Designer at Large (which means he’s a craft coach who’s not on one specific project) and VO Lead; Bobby, the Associate Narrative Director; and me (Studio Narrative Director). We all collaborate closely with the Content Leads and designers during story breaking and episode breaking, and production, as well as Cinematics, Audio, Art, and Localization.