Posted today 2/14/12 on Arenanet's blog by John Stumme.
As current GW1 players knows this is a close of the Winds of Change story. I'm still finishing my story up in GW1 and have been enjoying it. If you havent tried this in GW1 please do. It's really fun and enjoyable.
Guild Wars 2 Stratics Staff hopes all the fans and players enjoy this link and we thank John Stumme and ArenaNet for sharing this information.
Please check the link below.
Winds of Change Wrap-Up – ArenaNet Blog
For the click link impaired:
Winds of Change Wrap-Up
By John Stumme February 14th, 2012
As current GW1 players knows this is a close of the Winds of Change story. I'm still finishing my story up in GW1 and have been enjoying it. If you havent tried this in GW1 please do. It's really fun and enjoyable.
Guild Wars 2 Stratics Staff hopes all the fans and players enjoy this link and we thank John Stumme and ArenaNet for sharing this information.
Please check the link below.
Winds of Change Wrap-Up – ArenaNet Blog
For the click link impaired:
Winds of Change Wrap-Up
By John Stumme February 14th, 2012
The curtain has fallen on Winds of Change. This chapter in the story of Miku, Ashu, and the Ministry of Purity has come to a close, and it’s time to take a look back at our Canthan trilogy.
The first phase focused on setting up the Ministry of Purity and Zei Ri. Since we knew that Winds of Change was going to be released as a trilogy, we wanted to make sure that the style of storytelling built things up over time and gave players the chance to speculate about where the story would go.
In order to make the Ministry a believable faction that had a place in the world, we really wanted players to work through its beginnings and see its accomplishments. We felt that it wouldn’t have had as much impact if we said, “Here’s this organization coming out of nowhere, and they’ve accomplished all of these things you didn’t know about.” We understand that some people might have actually preferred it that way, and we underestimated just how much some players hate fighting the Afflicted!
Even the promise of cleansing Cantha permanently didn’t soothe afflicted nerves. While that’s understandable, we wanted to use these mechanics to portray the struggles of Cantha, giving players a real sense of victory as they actually change the world.
As for Zei Ri, he serves as the player’s connection to the Ministry of Purity, as the ministry’s human element. While the player works alongside him, he slowly reveals his backstory. The goal was to have someone who wasn’t strictly a zealot, and through him—and in contrast with Tsuriai and Xan Hei—to show that different kinds of people come to the Ministry of Purity for different reasons.
They aren’t a group with a unified, singular mindset; they are just working toward a common goal. Setting up Zei Ri was also our swerve for the end of the content: we set up the disconnect between him and the player character so that it represented the player’s clean break from the Ministry of Purity. At the same time, however, we were also setting up the chance of reconciliation to bring closure to his character arc. I’ll confess we also included Zei Ri partly to throw off people who assumed the story was strictly centered on Miku and she would be the only hero reward.
Which brings us to our sassy assassin, the most invested character in the storyline.
We started teasing Miku back during the Costume Brawl in 2010, and she was central to the transition from War in Kryta to Winds of Change. In Hearts of the North, players meet her for the first time and get some understanding of her personality—she’s brash and impulsive, and she puts up a humorous front. She presents herself as her own ideal of what a hero should be. Through admissions in her story, as well as the supplementary story that we’ve spun through the blog and website, players learn that she is someone who lets the past rule her life: she is reacting to the loss of her adoptive family in Kryta, and that is what drives her forward.
Miku is trying to reclaim the life that she lost in Cantha. Ultimately, her character arc is one of coming to terms with the past, understanding that life can never be what it was. What’s lost is lost, and we have to live for the present and future, forging a new path. Coming to that realization and looking forward allows her to be the person she wants to be and to stop just playing the part. All in all, we’ve had a ton of fun with Miku. She’s different from the other female leads in Guild Wars, and we hope that people enjoyed playing her arc as much as we did writing it.
The theme of looking forward in Miku’s story is also a subtle theme for us as the focus shifts more and more to Guild Wars 2, and I want to touch on of the other hints of Guild Wars 2 that were felt in Winds of Change. From the very beginning, we knew that one thing we really wanted was to build up Reiko as a memorable end boss who felt different from those that had come before her, both thematically and mechanically. We felt that Guild Wars lacked a really strong mesmer character—they tend to be comical and flamboyant or prima donnas. The Guild Wars 2 mesmer treats the concept of illusion magic as a physical manifestation, and that was something that we really wanted to leverage for Reiko. Our work with her helps set the precedent for this type of mesmer within the Guild Wars continuity.
Playing around with this concept of mesmers also gave rise to much of Reiko’s character—she is an influential speaker, and that is what brings her to power. We asked ourselves, “If someone was truly powerful with illusions and making people see what they wanted to see, how would they use that power outside of combat?” It wasn’t a point that we chose to really draw attention to in the content, just an implication that people could speculate on. Could Reiko have been using her abilities to augment her words?
Finally, I want to talk about player feedback for a minute. The players were great about giving helpful feedback, both positive and negative. The biggest piece of feedback we got was focused on difficulty. Originally, Winds of Change was balanced at the approximate level of the Titan quests, with the assumption that this was endgame content, and players who had been through everything else would want something on this level to satisfy their need for challenge.
What we found was that the difficulty was getting in the way of people enjoying the story, making it far more of a slog than we’d intended and actively undermining their enjoyment of it. With the latest release, we went back and gave almost all of the Normal Mode content (as well as some of the Hard Mode content) major balance tweaks. This way, players who just wanted to see the story and get to the sweet rewards could, and those who still wanted a challenge could find the difficulty they crave in Hard Mode.
We hope you enjoyed Miku and Zei Ri’s stories and the conclusion to Winds of Change!
