Guild Wars 2 MMO News, Guides, and Features at Ten Ton Hammer

The art of crafting believable iconic characters for a video game IP is one that perhaps only a handful of MMOG developers have ever truly mastered. Yet it can be as integral to successfully immersing players in a given title as the cornerstones of combat, crafting, and character progression.

This concept is certainly not new to longtime fans of the original Guild Wars campaigns and expansion. From the very beginning you were introduced to iconic characters that formed a direct link to the destiny of your character. Even a character that you were introduced to within the first five minutes of the Prophecies campaign, Gwen, has gone from a storytelling device of lost innocence to iconic status thanks to her role in Eye of the North, and the Guild Wars Beyond storyline.

For Guild Wars 2, fans have already been introduced to the iconic characters representing each of the five playable races through promotional images and videos, but the release of Edge of Destiny marks the first time we’ve been introduced to them on a more personal level.

I recently had the opportunity to learn more about what went into shaping Guild Wars 2’s iconic characters into living, breathing entities that fans can connect with once the game is released. In the following interview, Edge of Destiny author J. Robert King gives us a deeper insight into that process, and the integral role that GW2’s iconic characters will play in the destiny of your own characters in the live game.

Ten Ton Hammer: In previous interviews you’ve noted that this isn’t the first time you’ve had the opportunity to work with members of the ArenaNet development team, such as Jeff Grubb and Ree Soesbee. For our readers who may not be familiar with your work prior to Edge of Destiny, could you share a bit of your background as an author?

J. Robert King:I first met Jeff Grubb in 1991, when I started work at TSR as a game editor. The editorial department was housed in a series of cubes, set up rather like a rat's maze. Jeff was one of the lead rats. He actually was on vacation, but a designer told me that Jeff was a novelist and pointed out his cube. I peeked in and saw a battered chair surrounded by avalanches of paper. When Jeff returned from vacation, I was impressed by his tremendous energy and imagination. Whatever project Jeff was working on - whether Spelljammer, Ravenloft, Al-Qadim, or Marvel Superheroes - was his favorite project ever. After a five-minute conversation with Jeff, it was your favorite project, too. That's his creative style - infectious excess. I'm glad to report that, these twenty years later, Jeff still has that style. He was the one who got me involved writing for Magic: The Gathering, and he's the one who introduced me to Guild Wars.

I first met Will McDermott in the late 1990s when I was writing Time Streams and The Thran for Magic: The Gathering. Will was head of the Duelist and wanted a set of three short stories that told the origin of one of the main characters in the world. We worked closely together on those stories, and Will collaborated with an amazing artist and inker to present them in a graphic-novel format. I was impressed with how many pies Will had his fingers in. Later, when I was a novels editor for Wizards of the Coast, I was impressed with Will's writing. He contributed short stories to a number of Magic anthologies I edited. With Edge of Destiny, Will was the nexus, gathering and collating comments from the whole group, presenting them to me, and receiving draft after draft from me. He once again had his fingers in many pies.

I met Ree Soesbee also in the late 1990s. Wizards had just acquired the novels license for the Legend of the Five Rings game, and I was lining up writers. We held a writers' audition, and out of about fifty entries, I chose Ree's proposal as one of the top three. She really knew L5R, and she could really write. Her characters were always compelling and genuine, psychologically very convincing. Now, a dozen years later, Ree brought that same skill to creating and fleshing out the iconic characters for Guild Wars 2. Ree had a character arc in mind for each of the iconics and sketched out how their agendas worked at cross-purposes. She's always been able to see multiple perspectives and trace how each of them is “right” while they all contradict each other. In that sense, it's not surprising that fate dragged these iconic characters apart. What is surprising is that fate ever drew them together in the first place.

Ten Ton Hammer: What was it like to work closely with a team on Edge of Destiny while much of the game world that the novel is set in was still being developed? Were there any unexpected challenges or even surprises that arose during that process?

King: The team was composed of the best world-builders and novelists I'd ever worked with, so I was tremendously honored to collaborate with them. And what a world they were creating! The original Guild Wars had already captured my imagination, but Tyria reborn was even more thrilling.

Yes, of course, it was a messy process. I got in on the early stages, when the air was exploding with ideas - some of which were my own. The great thing about being involved that early is that you can help shape the world. The tough thing is that it's impossible to know exactly what ideas are going to stick and what ones are going to go poof! Creativity, by its nature, is prodigious and productive but also profligate and prodigal. There's a lot of waste. Edge of Destiny went through six drafts, each getting nearer and nearer the mark and each evolving beyond the last. It was work, but the team and I were in it together, and the final book was the result of all of our dedication.