ArenaNet answers a slew of classic Guild Wars questions

Guild Wars 1 may have been supplanted and largely deemed obsolete by its sequel, but rest assured, there still exists a multitude of fans for this game among both players and ArenaNet itself. The studio recently was bowled over by an unexpectedly popular AMA with one of the classic game’s programmers and so decided to open up a special forum this month to allow the conversation to continue on a higher level.

There’s a lot to digest in this forum (the AMA will continue through June 15th), but some of the interesting factoids and quotes that popped out include the following:

• On bugs: “There was a bug during the development of War in Kryta, where the White Mantle (or bandit?) rangers had a special skill to summon their pet before the player showed up. An error in its script caused the rangers to use it over and over, resulting in a writhing carpet of ranger pets too dense to see the fields of Kryta beneath it.”
• On hidden Easter eggs: “I’ve hidden a lot of tiny little things in my art over the years. The only ones I think no one ever found were the more than a few buried references to Homestar Runner and Strong Bad (and especially Trogdor) in some of the textures I created for Ascalon.”

• On naming: “Mursaat is the words Murder and Satan mushed together.”
• On bringing GW1 classes to GW2: “Probably not as I’m really against adding professions as it makes it harder to make each profession different but you know our table is really, really big so nothing is ever off the table.”
• On Asura origins: “The Asura were originally an NPC race for the cancelled Utopia expansion; in that incarnation, they were similar looking but less advanced and were more of a standard cave-dwelling goblin-like race.”
• On the Jade sea: “I think there were stories of the Jade Sea beginning to revert to water, but not instantly. Perhaps it was the defeat of Shiro, or perhaps simply the amount of time since it was ‘frozen.’ I can’t speak to what it’s like nowadays though.”
• On capes: “Capes work in Guild Wars 1 because we only had human characters and our armor “footprints” were pretty standardized. As such, their absence in GW2 was an unfortunate casualty of moving to a MUCH more complicated composite system, and our increasing character art standards.”
• On beta: “My most memorable memory of Guild Wars 1 was actually from one of the beta weekends — where a number of us devs, as the weekend was drawing to a close, summoned an army of pre-searing Gwen’s to prance around, playing her flute and MURDERING EVERYONE WITH FIRE! I was cackling like mad at the carnage — Oh, the humanity!”