If you, as a Guild Wars 2 player, have had your fill of candy corn and the Mad King wrecking your face in jumping puzzles, you might consider moseying on over to ArenaNet’s blog, where the studio has dropped an article discussing how it designed the world bosses in Janthir Wilds. Obviously, there are plenty of spoilers here about the expansion’s storyline and its enemies, so don’t read it if you aren’t done yet.
But if you are, then it’s a treat. As players now know, the new threat is really an old Guild Wars threat, the return of the titans themselves, several of whom players fight directly… although we don’t actually end episode one of Janthir Wilds on a winning note. At best, it’s a draw.
“We had decided early on to make Decima and Greer a world boss encounter instead of a meta-event,” ArenaNet’s Travis Battig says. “We also wanted to incorporate our reworked warclaw mount’s mechanics into the design by having them be the solution to the titans’ hardened armor. Early prototypes included porting over existing WvW door functionality onto a creature, armor gadgets we attached to a karka rig, and a dynamic race-gate placement. Ultimately, we arrived at the experience that’s in the game: tripping the titan with your warclaw to make it break its own armor under its weight. When either titan is knocked over, their armor is shattered, revealing their inner core. As an homage to titans in Guild Wars, the resulting destruction generates titanspawn for players to defeat.”
The devs also discuss the development of the Bog Queen, inspired by actual preserved mummies in peat bogs (go to sleep with that vision in your head tonight).
If Guild Wars 2’s cadence holds true, we’re expecting the next stage of Janthir Wilds in just another few weeks.
