We are introducing our players to Ember Bay,
one of the new landmasses that has kind of come up and changed over the last 250 years.
So Ember Bay is a pretty different map.
Just a hostile, burning wasteland of rock.
I actually worked on this same level about twelve years ago in Guild Wars 1.
So I got to give it the new treatment with all our new props and effects.
It's a pretty cool map because it's the first time in quite a while
we've really been back to a seaside environment.
And also this map is really metal.
I made a skull, I made a horn,
a really weird, scraggly jaw that didn't quite look like a jaw,
but it really just needed to look like it was something.
And then I kind of went back and saw what Josh had done with it.
He'd just created different types of skulls with different types of horns,
and then he did something super awesome.
He created what I like to call the "Well of Souls."
You just go up into this caldera
and there's just this mountain of leering, demonic skulls looking down at you.
This place is like the cover of some really insane Tyrian heavy metal album.
It's really over the top, and really fun in that way.
So the skull theme is really cool, right up my alley,
because I'm a big fan of heavy metal and that kind of stuff,
so I really got off on doing as metal a version of that map as possible.
So lots of skulls just weeping lava, and smoke, and brimstone,
and all that kind of fun, thematic, dark broodiness.
One of our biggest challenges was trying to create
a mastery for this whole area that felt fun and unique for Fire Islands,
but that other areas with lava may not necessarily have.
We have, I think,
most of the previous movement-based masteries.
So there's jump mushrooms, updrafts,
there's a big ley line rollercoaster,
as well as a new mastery that we're calling Thermal Tubes,
which basically shoot you out of a lava cannon to hundreds of yards away.
It's really fun, you catch fire, it's great.
We wanted this map to be a little more exploration-based.
And so hearts seemed like a good way to do that.
The hearts this time are repeatable,
so you're not just sort of one-and-done,
you can find that there's a bunch of different ways to complete each heart.
So you might try different things on different days.
Because we're in an ocean environment,
it was fun to bring back some creatures that haven't seen a lot of play in a while.
So notably, in part of the map, the karka have sort of taken up residence.
We know some players really, really appreciate fighting the karka,
so it was cool to be able to have a really different environment from Southsun
for them to inhabit, and let them wander around in.
We usually put the jumping puzzles in last.
So I kind of had this spot reserved for it.
And I started building it and contrary to popular belief,
I actually don't like making difficult jumping puzzles.
But the aesthetic really demanded a just brutal jumping puzzle, so
There's several vectors along which we can make a jumping puzzle challenging,
The obvious one is the distance,
you know, how far you've got to jump, how difficult those jumps are.
But then additional to that are discoveries, finding where do I actually jump.
And then on top of that you can have the skills that you have to use,
the enemies that may be around and all that kind of stuff.
So we just really cranked up the sliders on almost all of those.
It ended up earning its name of "Chalice of Tears."
The island, and just trying to come up with creative gameplay spaces,
in an environment where everything is trying to kill you,
was a fun challenge to work with.
[Growling] METAAALLLLLLLLLLL.