The White Mantle were,
they were brought up really early on in concepting.
We knew that we wanted to do White Mantle before
we finished designing release 1,
or even started on it, really.
The whole idea of bringing the White Mantle back
was a little terrifying, to be honest,
because it's a big part of the Guild Wars universe.
We hadn't really dealt much with them since a long time ago,
in the first generation of games that we put out.
So, you know, we had to be respectful and also a little delicate
in terms of what we were trying to say.
And even now, there's a lot of questions, I think,
in fans' minds like, "Where are we actually going with this?"
You start to work toward the White Mantle, and then you realize,
oh my gosh, it's the White Mantle.
And then you have to go somewhere with that, right?
And why not into a keep?
They've been there for
some 250 years, I'm sure that they've built something since then.
So we wanted to take players into their headquarters.
My assumption is that a lot of people
who got into the Guild Wars universe with Guild Wars 2
probably don't know that much about the White Mantle as antagonists,
so a lot of what we're trying to do in the raids
is to reintroduce them so that, you know,
should we decide to explore that more, they have a basis.
It started off with a very simple story
that we had plenty of flexibility to kind of work within.
Guild Wars is very unique, and it needs unique play modes,
so we couldn't just lump standard raiding into it.
We knew what we needed to do plot-wise, beat-by-beat,
where we needed to end up,
but we purposefully left a lot of room for interpretation
so that we could allow the team to get crazy.
And I think that probably shows,
I think once people start playing the Keep Construct,
they'll realize the whole concept is a little bananas.
Jason, who designed the encounter, he and I worked very closely,
and he had some really great ideas for mechanics,
and we tried to thematically tie them all together.
The first concept came from when we were brainstorming the story,
and what were you doing, who were the bosses,
like, what were the big, scary things that we wanted players to come across?
Ben Miller kind of tossed this crazy idea out, and it stuck with me--
I decided that instead of it being the actual keep that's coming alive,
and whole towers and doors and bridges,
instead it's just some rubble and pieces of statues.
We can't really take an entire castle and turn it into this
giant, monstrous marionette.
We have to make it more player-sized.
One of the upsides to that is it makes it a little bit more of like
a standard boss-fight, it's not so much like a prop boss,
where things are stationary and it's a lot more scripted.
It has a really cool look, and the interesting thing about that
is it didn't originally look like that.
So people probably, if they've been following the raid development,
they know we go through a lot of different stages
where there's a lot of concepting and prototyping,
and a lot of times the way that something starts off
is not the way it ends up.
The Keep Construct started off as something a bit different.
We kind of went into the early process with
"Oh, we'll be fine, we've got assets."
"We've got Krytan assets."
"That's what the White Mantle use."
We didn't really think about it.
The first prototypes that we were playing, I was like,
"So that's what we're fighting now, is it?"
When we were building it out, we were like
"Man, this, this needs some flair."
"Like, this has to feel White Mantle."
So we actually took a lot of time to redo some props,
create some fresh stuff for the White Mantle,
and to really make all the different areas pop.
When the topic was raised of, "Hey, you know what, that looks cool,
but it's not really fitting in with kind of the theme and the story,"
they went back to the drawing board rather quickly,
and put together what the Keep Construct looks like now,
and it's really cool looking, I mean I'm really just excited about it.
Seeing the actual art come online, and the animations,
and as those came online, I was more inspired to do different attacks
that then became part of the fight, and it was just
really interesting seeing it grow.
Going from start to finish, I'm really happy with what we created.
It's been a joy. It's been a lot of fun.