Jade Sphere Creatures

Untitled Guild Game 2

A glimpse at how the story changed at the start of season 4

 Now that season 4 has ended I can finally share this because it's safe to say nothing of this will ever happen. As some of you might recall back in the day Arenanet mentioned on stream how they decided to rework the story and maps at the start of the season.

In most cases this kind of information gets lost forever but in the chaos some of it did accidentally end up in our client including things like unique models, mini pets and even some story steps. I contacted Arenanet about it just in case some of these characters would show up in future episodes (they did not) and most of it was removed by the time episode 3 came around.

Episode 1: Daybreak

• To get started I like to mention the cut instance that bridged Istan with Fahranur, you can still access this long winding cave (that starts at the gate where you enter the final instance) underneath the map and it was said to be cut late in production so the story wouldn't drag on too long.
• A "mystery" mini pet also showed up out of the blue. It had no name if you linked it in chat but people noticed his icon looked a lot like Phlunt wearing inquest gear.
• To further elaborate on our mystery inquest friend they added several unique highly detailed models of both him and Taimi in identical poses. These were never used in the episode and all I can do is speculate that they were probably planned for the boss fight at the end of the episode.

Episode 2: A Bug in the System

• At this point our inquest mini friend got renamed to something generic like "Awakened Inquest Engineer" but there still was no way to earn him.
• For this episode I managed to recover a quite a few internal descriptions of the old story steps, I've roughly placed them side by side with we what got here. To sum things up:
  • Gorrik: Nowhere to be seen, they still use his placeholder name Glubber in the final version indicating he was added at the very last moment.
  • Lonai: Also completely absent, they had to rework the final boss fight around her.
  • Hadya: Some people might recognize her name, she's a priestess of Kormir and can be found in the Crystal Oasis. Did she go on a rampage? Got corrupted by Joko? Didn't like time gates? We'll never know but it looks like she was going to be the main villain we were tracking down this episode and the final encounter.
  • Phlunt: looks like our mystery inquest was Phlunt all along! He probably would be playing a much larger part during the entire season revealing him to be an inquest leader all the time.
  • Final encounter: originally had escape pods, jumping puzzles, Phlunt, Hadya and the gravity hammer that ended up in the Magnetics Lab in the open world.

Episode 3: Long Live the Lich

• Everything mentioned above was completely removed from the client by this time and at this point the new map (Kourna) and entire season had been rewritten around the new characters and events.

In the end we could've had a very different season that focused more on Phlunt than Joko, but as it stands now he didn't turn to the dark side (yet) and Hadya is still happily sending refugees to Amnoon.

Kralkatorrik's head on the Shatterer's body

Pre-alpha Sylvari Designs

Palawa Joko, the Inevitable, the last Primeval King, the Undying, the Scourge of Vabbi, the Feared, the Beloved, the Eternal Monarch of All

New decoration

Was messing around with different shaders in blender today so I've made a render of a new decoration for the upcoming Lunar New Year festival.

Unused Tiger Mount

Scrapped Mount

As mentioned before by one of the developers this spider mount was scrapped at an early stage as it was deemed too scary

Soon... (only one day left for the Beta weekend)

A couple of new head gear models

Here's a couple of new head gear models from the last patch.

Renders of an upcoming outfit

We all know how the humanoid male version of this outfit will look like (Balthazar is actually wearing it in game), it has 4 dye channels, and will probably have a bunch of flame particles not pictured in this image.

Amnoon Oasis Boardgame

With the release of the new heart of the mists map they've added a VIP section to it that can only be accessed by a tiny amount of people (21 to 29 players per region, per month). In it you can find a small board game, tucked away in a corner on a table.

This board game uses a combination of playing cards and different kind of dice and has room for up to four players. The cards and glyphs all have a distinct Elonian feel to it and one of the meshes is called AmnoonOasisLattice1:Dice1.

With the amount of textures available it is possible we'll be getting a new mini game in the future. Now I do not understand why they chose to put an item that in my opinion could've sparked quite some hype in a location that only 0.0000001% of the population will ever be able to visit and definitely would've ignored.

Anyhow, enough of my complaints, enjoy!

• Render of the Board Game
• Cards
• Dice

New Faces

Had a bit more time to make a very quick preview of one of the new faces.

New Faces and Hairstyles

I had a bit of free time during my travels and made a preview of one of the new faces and hairstyles

Super Charrio Kart is now fully open-source

It's been two weeks since I've released Super Charrio Kart as an April Fool's joke, and after a lot of deliberation I decided it would be best to make it open-source. So if you just want to make a couple of tracks, make your own game or add multiplayer to it feel free to do so!

The entire project is build with plain old JavaScript, HTML and CSS and uses Howler.js for easy sound playback and three.js for cross platform webgl rendering.

Charrio Kart on Github

8 new hairstyles and 2 new faces from the March 28 patch

[Data-Mining] 8 new hairstyles and 2 new faces from the March 28 patch

New Shoulder Armor

It looks like ArenaNet is going to try something different by releasing part of an existing outfit as separate armor pieces!

You'll probably recognize this one as the shoulder armor of Braham's Wolfblood Outfit and it's probably going to be sold along with the new Mini Wolfblood Braham and Braham's Bitterfrost Frontier Pack.

New hairstyle and shoulder armor

With episode 4's update a new shoulder piece showed up (all races) and a bunch of (mainly human) hairstyles were added to the dat file as well.

Upcoming features from the February 8 patch

Today's patch was huge (about 1400 new lines) so it took a bit longer to sift through everything. I've made sure I've left out a couple of mini-pets and items that could be considered story spoilers so you don't have to worry about those.