Guild Wars 2 peeks behind-the-scenes at its ‘chess raid’

How does chess factor into MMORPGs? When it comes to Guild Wars 2’s newest raid, Bastion of the Penitent, the age-old tabletop game was apparently a great inspiration to the design team in creating the boss encounter.

In a new dev blog, ArenaNet explains how it mapped out the raid on a table before putting it inside a computer. “We loosely based the encounter on a game of chess, which was an idea our concept artist Tsveta Komaticheva threw out during a tabletop meeting with the artists. During this meeting, we drew a 4-by-4 grid and explained the mechanics we wanted to build.”

And if chess isn’t nerdy enough for your MMO, ArenaNet also utilized (why not) Sudoku in its team tabletop meeting. Following its start-to-finish explanation of the raid design, the devs posted several fun facts about its creation, including some abandoned ideas and this gem: “There are 1,222 spears in the map for a total of 1.1 million triangles in spears alone!”