The mushrooms were a natural extension of the jumping puzzles which have been in the game since the start. “In Heart Of Thorns these random things felt scattershot,” says Helmich.
But the team sensed they could be something bigger. Guild Wars 2 has always been filled with gamey distractions and pursuits, and gliding and bouncing were absolutely part of that tradition. Once players had earned the relevant Masteries for gliding and bouncing off mushroom jumppads, they’d be able to revisit zones and get to locations that were previously out of reach. “The idea was that people are into games like Metroid, so how do we get players to come back to a map and see things that they didn’t see before?” programmer Joel Helmich tells me. This was Guild Wars 2’s first expansion, and its new zones included two new ways to move around them: jumping mushrooms and gliding. Mounts, the team figured, would undermine the way waypoints encourage exploration - and besides, they designed the entire world around waypoints, so why add mounts?īut then they started making Heart Of Thorns. The team instead wanted to base travel on its waypoint system, which allows you to warp to any waypoints you’ve discovered. In fact, there was no plan for mounts during the original development of the game. Mounts didn’t arrive in Guild Wars 2 until its Path Of Fire expansion, which was released in 2017, five years after the game first launched. And here’s the thing: they’re inspired by Metroid and Zelda.
They’re beautiful to look at, they do interesting things, and they feel so good to control. Guild Wars 2’s mounts are the best mounts in the MMO business. And with the game feeling like it’s in your grasp at last, you even get to show off your achievement with the flamboyance of your steed. Mounts are a reward, a step in the endgame that helps you feel like you’ve finally mastered an MMO’s world. This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games.
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