Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity made quite an impression last year – it certainly did with us as the expansion and MMORPG raked in a bunch of our 2025 awards – so it’s perhaps not too foregone of a conclusion that fans would want to learn more about what went into making some of the expansion. If that’s you, then you’re invited to read a new dev blog from story design lead Chloë Mills, who breaks down some of the work behind Visions’ first story chapter. Assuming, of course, you’ve played the expansion because if you haven’t there will be a few light story spoilers ahead.
The opening portion of the expansion’s story had a few key goals according to Mills, such as setting its overall tone, grounding the zone of Castora, and foreshadowing upcoming events and threats. The blog takes both a wide and close look at how the devs worked to achieve this, as it talks about how they plot an overall outline for the expansion, how they worked to make the two ships that kick off the story centerpieces, and the sense of danger and foreboding that a sea storm and fog can create respectively in the chapter’s first steps.
On a development level, Mills details some sneaky tricks that were employed for the fog section of the chapter, such as creating duplicates of objects in the scene that actually reduced the technical lift, and a peek behind the curtain on how the moment where navigating ships in the fog was achieved with moving prop gadgets.
“There is so much more to the development of this story instance and Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity as a whole that I couldn’t ever possibly cover here. So much work and talent from every discipline goes into making Guild Wars,” Mills writes. “This is a technically complex and ambitious piece of content, so hopefully you find it as interesting as I do!” Indeed we do, Chloe. Indeed we do.