Following ChthonVII’s idea, I’m mirroring my probably only interesting post on the subreddit :D

---

Finally got around to watch the 2-hours long GW1 segment of the recent Extra Life 2022 ArenaNet livestream. The devs had a lot of interesting insights and amusing anecdotes, so I made a bunch of clips - sharing them here in case someone else haven’t had the time to watch the whole thing.

The participants were:

• Bobby Stein - writing team lead

• Darrin Claypool - level designer

• Colin Johanson - game designer

The clips in order of appearance:

• The unstoppable servers

• How GW1 shifted away from PvP focus

• GW1 was not really an MMO

• GW1 players about playable charr

• GW1-GW2 build design differences

• The original concept of the GW franchise

• GW1 current devs and population

• Pre-Searing and Gwen were added last-minute

• Legacy of the Tihark Orchard mime

• Workplace microtransactions :D

• GW1-GW2 voiced dialogue difference

• Why GW2 didn’t get multi-classing 1

• Why GW2 didn’t get multi-classing 2

• EotN, GW2 and the novels were all written at the same time

• Palawa Joko Bonus Mission hacks 1

• Palawa Joko Bonus Mission hacks 2

• Devs on playing own game vs. other games

• EotN locked-skillbar minigames

• GW1-GW2 development workload

• Returning to GW1’s development constraints

• Hardest feature to make was the dynamic Kurzick-Luxon border

• Dhuum banning animation

• ArenaNet was almost based in Hawaii :D

A few more bits that were too short to worth clipping:

• Early in development there were no professions, you could slot any skill.

• They spent 4-5 months working on Sorrow’s Furnace compared to their usual couple of weeks per zone.

• GW1 development team was around 70-80 at launch, and peaked around 100 with EotN. (GW2 had 350 developers at launch.)

Twitch only allows max. 1 min long clips, so sometimes I had to cut off an interesting follow-up - if you want to see how a clip continued, click Watch Full Video.

PS.: For the story of the hideous leopard-print couch go to this timestamp in the VoD :D