Braham’s Story

Seven-year-old Braham stood with his back to the corner, heart hammering. Hands behind his back, he clenched them, nails digging into his palms. His eyes burned with unshed tears.

The shaman had arrived and was bending over the sickbed, preparing Borje the Sun Chaser, Braham’s father, for his final journey. The shaman’s quiet song-of-sending rose and fell in time with, then counterpoint to, the shifting firelight. He smelled of evergreen, and the bone beads in his beard clicked together as he moved his thin-lipped mouth.

“Braham,” croaked Borje from his bed, and taking his cue, the shaman receded to a far corner as smoothly as fog on a gray morning.

Braham stood taller, but hesitated. He didn’t want to go any closer, didn’t want to see his father in this state, and was afraid of what it all meant.

Borje turned his palm up and spread his thick, worn fingers. “Come here.”

Bare feet silent on the pine floor, Braham crossed the distance to stand beside the fur-covered bed. He made every effort to sound strong as he said, “I’m here.” He put his small hand on his father’s arm.

His skin stood out starkly against his father’s darker tone. He’d been told he was a mix of light and dark, his mother having had snowy skin and his father with his brown bear coloring. It had never bothered Braham, until that moment, when he wished more than anything that he could blend more smoothly with his father, be more like him, the great warrior, the legendary hero—Braham’s hero—who lay broken and failing upon his deathbed. That may have been the first time Braham ever felt anger at the stranger who was his mother, for she had made him less like his father.

“Wolf is coming for me,” said Borje. “And I must go with him to the Mists. You understand what this means?”

Braham’s throat tightened painfully, so that he could only nod.

“You…” A fit of coughing shook Borje.

Braham tightened his hold on his father’s arm as if he could share his seven-year-old strength.

“You will stay here in Cragstead,” continued Borje when his body had calmed. “You will shelter at Rugnar’s Steading with Yngvi and Brynhildr. Your strong back and sharp teeth will protect them.  They are your pack now.”

Braham’s legs grew weak, and he leaned heavily on the bed.

Borje extended an arm and coaxed Braham onto the bed beside him. Braham lay as he had when he was an infant, curled against the fiery warmth of his father’s bulk. The tears he had fought so hard, spilled into the furs where he buried his face, and Borje’s arm pulled him close.

“Your mother’s name is Eir Stegalkin. Remember that, but I will tell you what I told Yngvi and Brynhildr. No one must send word to your mother that I am gone. I forbid it. She is capable of great things, as are you. She must not be tempted to stray from her path. Wolf walks beside her. But you mustn’t worry. He walks beside you as well, my son. Never forget that.”

The ensuing silence was broken only by the crackling of the fire and the occasional rattle of the shaman’s beads. Braham fell asleep against his father and awakened when someone lifted him from the bed and carried him away.

His father had gone with Wolf.

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Stay warm on those chilly spring nights with our brand new bonfire, lend your weapons a fiery look with new Fused weapon skins, or change your character’s name!

Check out what’s new in the Gem Store today!

• Keep Warm with the New Bonfire

  Gather around the warm glow of the Communal Boost Bonfire, a new item that provides powerful buffs to players who stoke the flames.
  

• New Name Change Feature

  Tired of your handle? Rename your character with the new Name Change feature!
  

• New Fused Weapon Skins

  Give your weapons that hybrid Molten Alliance look with 16 new Fused weapon skins, which can be found in the Black Lion Chest.
  

Available Now in the Gem Store!

Log into Guild Wars 2 and press “O” to access the Black Lion Trading Company for these great offers and more!

Flame and Frost: The Razing is Now Live!

Defend the innocent from the hybrid threat of the Molten Alliance. Join the norn Braham and Rox the charr on desperate missions to defend their homelands! Earn new titles and abilities with the new World vs. World progression system, track down three new fugitives in the latest Guild Missions, and more!

Learn more!

World vs. World: The End of Culling

If you’ve ever played World vs. World in a large group, you’ve probably noticed that there were some enemy players that you couldn’t see. That was an unfortunate side effect of a process calledculling. I’m pleased to announce that in the upcoming patch on March 26, we’re going to turn culling off completely in WvW. This will make invisible enemies (except those using invisibility skills, of course) a thing of the past.

How different of an experience will that be for WvW players?  I think these before and after screenshots make it pretty clear:

Culling ON

Culling OFF

So What Is Culling, Exactly?

Normally as you move through the world, any character (either an NPC or another player) within a fairly large circle around you gets reported to your client. This lets the client draw the character, allows you to select the character as an attack target, etc.

In order to cut down on the network resources that were used by the game and to reduce the client-side system requirements, we implemented a culling system, which imposed a limit on the number of characters that could ever be reported to your client. This meant that only the characters closest to you would actually get reported.

“By removing culling, we’ve been able to [...] greatly increase the epic feel of large WvW battles.”

While this achieved our goal of limiting bandwidth and client-side resource utilization, it had the unfortunate side effect of causing large battles in WvW to be confusing, as there were sometimes many enemy players that were completely invisible. Additionally, there were side effects of culling which could result in stealth characters getting up to two seconds of additional invisibility when coming out of stealth. By removing culling, we’ve been able to eliminate these negative side effects and greatly increase the epic feel of large WvW battles.

For the sake of clarity, I want to make a distinction between our usage of the term “culling” in this post (meaning to limit the amount of data the server reports to the client) and other uses of the word “culling” related to graphics (discarding backward facing triangles in models, triangles or whole models that are occluded, etc.).  Our changes are to the client/server culling and have no bearing on basic graphics operations in the GW2 client.

A World vs. World without Culling

Now that every client will know about every character within range, we’ve provided a new set of WvW options to control how all those characters will be rendered. Setting these options should allow players with various hardware configurations to enjoy WvW at a reasonable frame rate.

Under the new system, characters can be rendered in three different ways:

• High resolution models - These are the high-res character models that you’re all already familiar with.
• Lower resolution fallback models - These are the models that we’ve been using as placeholders in WvW while the hi-res models load. They differ depending on race and armor class, though human, sylvari, and norn share the same model.
• Nameplates only - We don’t render the model at all and instead only show the nameplate for that character.

We’ve also added two new options to allow players to select how WvW characters are displayed:

• WvW Character Limit - This controls how many of the reported characters render with a model and how many are rendered only with nameplates.
• WvW Character Quality - This controls how many of the characters rendered with a model use the high resolution models and how many use the lower resolution fallback models.

The World vs. World team has been working on this change for quite a while now and we’re very excited to see it go live. Epic battles have always been a part of WvW and now players will get to experience them in their full glory!

We’ll see you on the battlefield!

Living Story: Evolution

It’s me again, Angel McCoy, from the Living Story team, and I’m writing this to share a bit more insight into what’s happening and what’s planned for our Living Story content. We’ve been working hard at it.

These first couple months of teaser content have allowed us to ramp up to make the long-term Living Story an even fuller and more satisfying experience for you all. As designers have come off other projects and joined us, we’ve increased the amount of content we’ll be delivering, starting at the end of March.

We’re also listening to your feedback and tweaking our content here and there in response. We’ve been reading what you’ve been saying on the Guild Wars 2 forums and across the Internet.

Storytelling in an MMO

“…we’ve increased the amount of content we’ll be delivering, starting at the end of March.”

Over the past few months of design work on the Living Story, we’ve overcome many challenges. Writing story in an MMO environment resembles building a giant puzzle. We want to avoid temporal paradoxes, for example. From a player perspective, the Personal Story is unfolding simultaneously with the Living Story, but how can characters be in both places at the same time? Furthermore, do we all presume that So-and-So is dead, because he died at level 80, or do we assume the opposite? There’s a minefield of possible paradoxes that we have to carefully move through when writing the Living Story, and we’ve had to shift our thinking a bit to accommodate that. This has taken a lot of thought and forethought.

In order to make this easier on ourselves, and on you, we’ll be introducing a set of characters specific to the Living Story, at the end of March. Hint: one’s a norn, and one’s a charr. I’m not going to tell you more than that right now, but know that you will soon be meeting the first two of these characters, and we hope you like them as much as we do.

Where to Go and What to Do

Last month, I told you about the heralds located at the exits in every city, and we’re continuing to utilize these rumor-mongers to give more general details on where to go and what’s happening. We’ve also introduced the Living Story Achievements to make the directions clearer, and we’ve identified other ways to message your mission to you.

We’ll be utilizing non-voiced conversations with options that clearly relay the next step or location on the Living Story journey. You’ll find these on characters involved directly in the arc, so take the time to talk (F) to people if you are interested in knowing what to do and where to go next. We don’t want to over-message, so some of the onus is upon you to read the conversations and look for the characters most logically in a position to guide you.

Another great resource for knowing what to do next or to find out what you might have missed is the Guild Wars 2 forums!

Pay-Off

We’ve had long meetings, with our most colorful thinking caps on, to discuss how we will pay off all your patience during these early months of teaser content, and we’ve come up with some thrilling storylines that we feel will keep you intrigued and get you even more deeply involved in the ongoing progress of the Living Story. Aside from the Living Story main characters, we’ll also be surprising you with interesting villains, one of whom will become your personal nemesis. Again, no spoilers allowed, so I can’t tell you more than that, but you’ll recognize this sassy character when you see…um, him/her/it. <grin>

With the February release, we’re further advancing the Flame and Frost storyline in fun ways, but we still consider this to be teaser content. You’ll get to experience saving homesteaders and ranchers in a more direct way, no longer just as volunteers, but becoming actual defenders of the residents of the Wayfarer Foothills and Diessa Plateau.

All our hard work is beginning to bear fruit, and we’re as excited as you are—maybe even moreso—to finally see the Flame and Frost story arc revealed in full. It’s only a matter of time, so hang in there, and stock up now on sodas and snacks.

I’ll see you in my Dream.