The Guild Wars 2 team continues to go behind the scenes of Janthir Wilds’ design process, this time detailing how they brought the warclaw from WvW into PvE, with a little inspiration from cats.
If you’ve played the expansion content, then you’re already familiar what a role the warclaw plays in your ultimate success. Last week, the team talked about boss design, and sprinkled in a few details about how they approached designing boss mechanics and the warclaw together. Originally added to World vs. World, ANet Intended it as a utility-based mount to boost up support and lend a few tactical advantages. People liked it, but the team thought it was underutilized and had so much more potential.
In developing Janthir Wilds, the GW2 team took lessons from their work on Secrets of the Obscure, and in particular, the skyscale implementation. The faster expansion cadence also lets them pull from previous content much quicker now. That experience with the skyscale let them figure out how to repurpose an existing mount in a brand new way.
Yesterday was National Cat Day in the US, and If you were on the internet at all then you noticed people really like cats. That inspiration went into the mount's mechanics and personality. You've noticed that they don't take fall damage, right? Ultimately, “We wanted to create a mount that had a lot of personality and was fun to move around the world on, while also helping players on their own journey,” they said.
The devblog also dives into the challenges of development and even how a bug early on inspired them to add the warclaw’s double jumps. Ultimately, what we got was a useful, versatile mount that is essential to some of the challenges you face, and an example that we might see used more or repurposing existing mounts in new ways.