Designing and Redesigning Norn Events in Guild Wars 2

It's the third day of norn week. Today, Jeffrey Vaughn, a content designer at ArenaNet told us how he cooperated with QA and other departments in ArenaNet to create a map and designing and redesigning its attendant events in Guild Wars 2.

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Let's take a look at Wayfarer Hills, the norn starting area, as an example of our iterative process. The southern area of the map has four shrines, each dedicated to one of the great totem animals. The original design called for four identical events, where the Sons of Svanir - norn who have forsaken the Spirits of the Wild in favor of the Ice Dragon - would attack the shrines and you'd have to try and fight them off. We got these events in, and while they worked just fine, they didn't feel very compelling. Not wanting to throw away the work that had been done, we first tried to bandage the original events by changing the enemies at some of the totems from Sons of Svanir to dredge, another norn enemy. We still didn't like the way this felt though, since each event was mechanically the same, and all the totems felt exactly the same. After another meeting, we finally settled on the current design:

Source: ArenaNet Blog