ArenaNet narrative lead Indigo Linde has an intriguing dev blog out today on Guild Wars 2’s Secrets of the Obscure – specifically on how the studio chose the Wizard’s Tower at the focus of the upcoming expansion.
“There were quite a few directions that we were really interested in pursuing,” Linde says. “We’ve only explored a small portion of Tyria to date – and even then, a great deal of the world we do know has vastly changed over the events of the last eleven real-world years. We want to dig into that with more focused, self-contained stories, and we hope to bring each of these into the limelight as we see Tyria react and unravel to a future without chaos (well, without dragon-centric chaos). But before we slow things down and explore modern Tyria, we opted for something a little more mysterious to mark the beginning of this new arc.”
Linde says that the Wizard’s Tower makes the “perfect canvas” to tell a smaller and more ancient story with its new enemy faction, and that more intimate but still “cosmic” feel carries over to the character’s story too because hey, your NPC friends have their own lives to live.
“[The expansion story sends] the commander on a journey absent their usual comrades. We thought that this would make the story as exciting and bewildering to the commander as a character as it would be for the player. At the top of the story, a mission goes awry and we’re pulled into unexplored territory (physically and intellectually). By isolating the commander from their support group—and thus, their typical problem-solving catalysts—we’re able to completely immerse the player character in this darker, more mystical facet of Tyria as the Astral Ward battles against the threat of the Kryptis.”
The exception will apparently be Zojja, and though Linde isn’t really spilling the beans on how and why she’ll be back in the Commander’s circle, Felicia Day is clearly signaling her return as voice actress too.
*Psst Zojja’s back. Pass it on. #squee* https://t.co/OjHLiiFhdd
— Felicia Day🇺🇸 (@feliciaday) July 25, 2023
The whole blog post is over on the official site, full of teasers.
