An Introduction to the Environment Art of Guild Wars 2

ArenaNet writer Peter Fries has taken to the company’s official blog to discuss and showcase the environment artwork they’ve created for Guild Wars 2. In particular, that second image showing the transition from 2009 to 2011 is pretty amazing.

Many hands work over a map along its path from raw design to final polish. Before artists ever worked on the environments of Guild Wars 2, the overall geography of the game world was planned out on white boards plastered with sticky notes. While programmers readied our proprietary map creation tools, designers began planning the layout of the interconnected maps that make up each region. These regions began as a few sentences of evocative lore, which inspired years of concept art imagining its various habitats and subregions.

Each map was prototyped by a level designer as a sort of rough, three-dimensional sketch, devoid of detail but with a first pass on placement of roads, villages, mountains, rivers, and seas. The environment artists familiarized themselves with the maps at this early stage and then helped brainstorm dynamic events for each map. It was a real treat to be consulted that early in the process and to have a hand in shaping game play. After all those suggestions for map content were narrowed down and agreed on, the long process of realizing each map began.

Two environment artists initially shared the workload on each map, working in tandem to fill out the huge expanses of game territory. Through trial and error, the team built visual vocabularies to describe each region, prototyping props and landscapes together. Early on, the changes were more dramatic artists raised dizzying peaks, sheared off steep cliffs, and sank sub-oceanic trenches. Large-scale props were dropped into the maps and piled up to form cave systems or soaring, multitiered cities. Artists broadly applied lighting and climate approaches for the way their maps would appear in daytime, at night, and underwater.