GuildWarsInsider: Interview with Ree Soesbee (2012-01-11)

[Centaur]

The people of GuildWarsInsider recently did an extensive interview with Guild Wars 2 lore & continuity designer Ree Soesbee. It gives some great insights into Ree's personal story and the whole design process at ArenaNet... and the second part of the interview contains quite a bit of new info on the lore in Guild Wars 2!

GWI: Speaking of CCG’s, I hear there’s an interesting story about how you came to work at ArenaNet, care to give a little history on how that came about?

Ree: Some of the people who worked here at ArenaNet — Eric Flannum, James Phinney, Jeff Strain — had played Warlord and really liked it, and were like, “This is a great story! It has great characters! We really like the races! We need to pick up a second person because poor Jeff Grubb is going crazy (because that’s a whole lot to have to memorize to do the job)…” so let’s see if this guy Ree is busy and we’ll see if he has some time in his schedule to where he could come interview with us.

So they called me up on the phone and said, “We need to talk to Ree.”, and I’m like “This is Ree.” and all I get is silence…silence…”Oookay, sure!” They rolled with it really well, but for a minute or two on the phone while I was talking to Jeff Strain, I could hear the pause of reconstructing his brain to the fact that I was a girl, and how that’s kinda cool, and that could be even cooler if we could get her on the staff.

After that they were very gentle and soft towards me, like, “We work for a game called Guild Wars, not sure if you happen to play computer games, or if you’ve ever played any MMOs…” and I’m like “Guys, I’ve got a raid in an hour, and I’m the primary priest healer and the tank’s gonna be really mad if I show up without my pots. Can we just go ahead and talk this through?” And they were like “Okay, you’re gonna be fine.”

...

GWI: Are there any other frustrating or funny design moments that come to mind?

Ree: There are some frustrating and some funny. One of the things that we recently dealt with, that was kind of hilarious in a pandemonium sort of way, is: We have creatures in the game, Devourer, and when you have a young Devourer, we would call it a Juvenile Devourer. This made sense, right? So, we have a creature in the game called the Stalker, and the Stalker is a cat, like a mountain lion. And suddenly we realized we had Juvenile Stalkers, in the game. And that was a little creepy, so we had to change it to Juvenile JUNGLE Stalkers, because that was much, much, better. But you don’t notice things like that until you’re in the game and you’re playing it, and you go, “Oh. Oh, that. Oh, maybe that’s not OK…”

You can read the full interview here, or if you prefer to listen to the audio version, you can download the mp3 file here

[Ruse]

I especially appreciated the "juvenile stalkers" bit. Working at a newspaper, we have to watch out for unintentional little things like that all the time, lol, such as this one from a rival paper.

[H azel]

I especially appreciated the "juvenile stalkers" bit. Working at a newspaper, we have to watch out for unintentional little things like that all the time, lol, such as this one from a rival paper.

Lmfao. Sounds like she REALLY likes Golf.

[Ruse]

Lmfao. Sounds like she REALLY likes Golf.

What's worse is she's a really sweet girl. She had a state championship in the bag (one of many) and realized she'd signed an incorrect scorecard. (She still won by points, even corrected.) But she told on herself and got herself disqualified.

So a really humiliating headline for a very honest teenager, lol.