Guild Wars 2 Devs Take Us Behind the Scenes of Janthir Wilds World Boss Design

Now that Janthir Wilds has been out for a while, the Guild Wars 2 team is breaking down details of world boss design, new titans, and balancing ambition with making it real.

Designers Travis Battig, Peter Larkin, Matthew Burke, and Brian Gilmore feature in the new devblog. When it comes to the design of open world events, Batting goes into the desire to make things bigger, harder, and more complex to try and one-up what they’ve done before, but the fact that you have to work within design and budget constraints. 

This was one reason the titans figure as they do in the Decima and Greer world boss encounter, which still carries an element of surprise since this is the titans’ first appearance since the original Guild Wars. The desire to highlight the new also led to the reworked warclaw mounts being integral to victory.

We get more insight into the creation of both Decima and Greer too. Larkin shares how Decima’s design took from her Stormsinger nature to Inspire her rocky, large armor and design that Drew from inspiration like pyrite. Titan of Rot Greer’s design, as Gilmore talks about, was based on conveying “decay without life”, and on how they introduced mechanics to the open world boss fight that you might normally expect in things like raids. Specifically, in the cooperation you need to come out on top. Sometimes boss fights are won by numbers and just doing enough, but here you had to do more. It gave players some more control if they got it together enough to use it. Eruption of Rot could be stopped if you had three players stacked up in the same spot.

Related:

Review: ArenaNet Has Hit Their Stride With Janthir Wilds

Finally, we get some insight into The Bog Queen from Matthew Burke. They took inspiration from bog bodies, mummies in peat bogs, and let her loose over her army of bog bodies and maggots. Then, she became a new community favorite. 

There's a lot more detail in the full blog, so if you love the behind the scenes stuff and Guild Wars 2, check this one out.