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

From FIFA Soccer to Mechwarrior, James Bond, and a variety of IPs and titles in-between, Daniel Dociu's artistic work in the field of game art spans decades. More recently, however, Daniel's artistic vision has helped imbue Guild Wars and its expansions with a style that is unique among MMORPGs since the very beginning.

As we learn more about Guild Wars 2, a project that is gargantuan in scope when compared to its predecessor, we've also been exposed to some incredible concept art from Daniel and his sizeable team. That art, the vision behind it, and the inner-workings of the ArenaNet art department - these topics are the subject of our latest exclusive Guild Wars 2 concept art Q&A with Daniel Dociu, Chief Art Director.

Ten Ton Hammer: Guild Wars 2, being a much more persistent online world with larger environments, content demands, assets, and pretty much larger everthing, is obviously a very different game than Guild Wars. How has it challenged you compared to other projects you've worked on in the past?

Daniel Dociu, Guild Wars 2 Art Director: It is different, but in many ways there are similarities. It is similar in the sense that we’re building on the foundation of core principles and aesthetic values established in Guild Wars. At the same time, it is different because the scope is significantly larger. We have benefitted from a pretty deep revamp of the engine and have a whole new arsenal of tools available to us, which also came with the challenge of learning and adapting to these tools. So [Guild Wars 2] is different in many ways, but also a continuation or an evolution of the IP.

Ten Ton Hammer: How many are on the art team, and how do you even begin to organize such a huge project?

Daniel: We’ve probably exceeded 70 artists by now. These are split among six teams: concept art, characters and creatures, environments and props, animation, technical art, and cinematics. As far as organizing the project, it is quite a challenge to keep everything under control and coordinate with design and engineering, the other major departments working on the project. For the first time in Guild Wars 2, we have a team of producers that facilitate the communication process. It is significantly more challenging, but we’re adapting to the challenges of developing a high budget game with a larger team and all the benefits and responsibilities that come with that.

Ten Ton Hammer: With the sheer size of the team, there’s little doubt that you’ve had to go outside ArenaNet and NCSoft to search for talent? How difficult has the search been to find the sort of artistic talent you need?

Daniel: Over time, we have build a development culture that is recognized within the industry as being very art-centric. Or, another way to put it is that our development culture that truly appreciates and respects the contribution of the art department to the development process. Because we’ve established a good reputation, we’re bombarded with applications and requests for jobs from all over the world.

Another reason we are pretty well-known is because our artists are extremely active in the game art community – there’s numerous forums and competitions that they enter, and that gives our studio a great deal of exposure and established our studio as a great workplace for artists. That and we have an on-staff full-time recruiter who’s constantly working with art schools all over the country and doing all the scouting work for us. So we are very active in identifying and selecting the top-shelf talent.

Underwater areas and tiered environments vastly increase the playable area in Guild Wars 2.

Ten Ton Hammer: So you’ve got a large staff of very talented artists. Turning towards the game, I wonder if you can give us an idea of the scope of the world your creating in Guild Wars 2, maybe on the order of Guild Wars and its expansions?

Daniel: It is significantly bigger. The maps are anywhere from three to four times larger and there’s also just more maps. In addition to that, we have underwater maps which increases the real estate of the explorable portions of the map by another order of magnitude. It is also a true 3D game, as opposed to the first Guild Wars, so we have multiple tiered buildings and structures and this also adds to the total “square mileage” of playable area. I can’t give you a hard number as to how much bigger Guild Wars 2 is, but it’s a huge leap from Guild Wars.

Ten Ton Hammer: And we can’t wait to learn more about underwater exploration and the sunken city of Orr as Guild Wars 2 gets closer to release. But back to concept art, since that’s what this Q&A is all about, could you walk us through how an idea becomes concept art and then becomes part of the game?

Daniel: It is a very organic process, and we don’t have a predetermined work flow that we subject our ideas to. Ideas can originate in any of the departments; they could start as a paragraph that writers put together, or a game play idea from the design department, or quite frequently, they start from the art department, and so on. And, depending on where the idea starts from, the team that originates the idea develops the idea a little bit and then submits it to the other teams for evaluation.

It’s a very collaborative effort, and we go back and forth between all the departments involved, and I want to make sure that I don’t leave out engineering, which has a great contribution to making these ideas work. And, we just pass this early prototype back and forth between the different departments and have them all contribute their area of expertise to it until it grows organically into what looks like a promising game experience. The process can take anywhere from a few days to, at times, weeks , depending on the complexity of the idea, and how many iterations it goes through until we implement it in the actual game and subject it to testing by the entire company. That usually results in a lot of feedback, and we go for yet another round of iterations to incorporate that feedback, and so on as far as time and resources allow.