A look behind the art of Guild Wars

Guild Wars art is beautiful. When we were doing our site launch giveaways, the giveaway post for a concept art print was one of the most heavily commented - you folks like their art as much as I do. So you might be interested in an interview over on the CVG/ PC Gamer site with Daniel Dociu, the art director for the series of best selling online games.

In the piece, he discusses the innumerable challenges that Arena.net artists have faced in creating the games. The sheer scope of the world and the numerous cultural influences to synthesize were things I expected, but he also notes the important role that art plays in spurring on the writers and designers. As he puts it, "The way that I personally like to work, and the way things oftentimes work out, is that I throw out ideas and propose a possible context that these ideas could work in - a seed for the storywriters to consider."

You can also read about his 'role' in a highly notable offline game, Half-Life 2. Dociu, you see, is the visual template for Father Grigori of Ravenholm fame. "Be free, my children!"

I had the chance to see a copious amount of concept art for the Arena stable of games when I visited their offices last year. It was amazing to see the way they treated these precious works; the original data is all on a PC, of course, so printouts were what they used for reference and sorting. Their methodology for doing this was distinctly low-tech: they taped them up to the wall. As 3D artists came back over the concept folks' work, they'd just toss the printouts on the ground to indicate they were done. What was left behind was a drift of paper, each page featuring an image worthy of framing in a gaming household.

Luckily, you can sample some of that beauty online. Arena's artists are frequent contributors to the ConceptArt.org Forums, and received permission after Factions, Nightfall, and Eye of the North to post their beautiful works. Make sure you especially check out the GWEN stuff - amazing!