Advertisement

Guild Wars 2 devblog highlights cinematic conversations

Screenshot -- Guild Wars 2 cinematic conversation

"One of the things we game developers always have to struggle with is reconciling our ambition with the reality of a production environment," begins today's Guild Wars 2 dev blog. That principle of balance comes into play in the case of the game's cinematic conversations, as the blog notes. James Boer goes on to detail many of the unique strategies used in Guild Wars 2's dialogue scenes in order to ensure that precious balance between ambition and pragmatism.

For instance, characters are designed in such a way that they don't look terribly good during close-ups, and there is no easy way to integrate facial animation. As a result, the team settled on a compromise, pushing the characters farther into the background. This, combined with the painted backgrounds utilized during conversations, lends a unique style to GW2's cinematic dialogues. For the full details, just head on over to the ArenaNet dev blog.