Gaiscioch Magazine - Issue 14 by Gaiscioch Magazine

Gaiscioch Magazine Issue 14, 2017

t’s better late than never! Issue 14 is finally here after a few delays and challenges to overcome. We’re running as a skeleton crew this issue as several of our team had to take leave of absence for real life events. But with 9 brave editors and writers we managed to finally bring this issue to life!

Benjamin “Foghladha” Foley Founder & Managing Editor

Gaiscioch Magazine

foghladha@gaiscioch.com

Follow the Gaiscioch Magazine Online at: http://gsch.info/mag Learn more about the Gaiscioch Community at: http://gsch.info/ Discord: http://gsch.info/voice Facebook: http://gsch.info/facebook Twitter:

Issue 14 highlights Guild Wars 2’s journey to the Crystal Desert with Path of Fire. We feature interviews with key developers, guides, a first look at Living World Season 4, fan fiction, fan art from Pink Alp Bananas, and a review. There’s even a heartfelt look back on what makes Guild Wars 2 feel like home. In addition to the massive amount of Guild Wars 2 related content, we highlight 10 games we think deserve a remastered edition, provide readers with a guide to getting started in Citadel: Forged with Fire, and an interview with the team behind Gwent Thronebreaker. We also feature a guide to bounty hunting in Rift and a couch potatoes review of Elder Scrolls Online. Deeper within the issue you can read our previews of Ashes of Creation, Immortal Unchained, Biomutant, and Little Witch Academia. In the review section we feature Maize, Mass Effect Andromeda, ELEX, The Solus Project and Fortnite. All in all we hope you enjoy this issue and please do not hesitate to send us your comments and feedback to magazine@gaiscioch.com.

Slán go fóill!

Magazine Staff Gaiscioch Magazine is a quarterly, volunteer driven, no-profit, digital magazine for game developers and enthusiasts alike.

Issue 14 Team Managing Editor & Layout Foghladha

Senior Editors: Briseadh Gilliebod GmaFog Jairone

Editors / Columnists: Eiahn Robdalf Edward “Screenager” Orr Donaliam

Special Thanks To Our Patreon Supporters: A Smith G Godwin S L Starkey B Chouinard R Reynolds M Smith M Bukraba Darj Void R Livernois H Townsend L Knudsen K Riseling Rhynor S Daly

R Gale Whoflung E Fulham J Boucher-Zamzo Lorax K Burns Zoewii S DeRouen R Mayer Booie V Hamilton J Buczek E Matthews K Vail Scheesley B Pervis

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Contents

COVER STORY:

A Return to Familiar Places Page 24 Featuring interviews from Mike Zadorojny, Maclaine Diemer & Matthew Medina on returning to the Crystal Desert in Guild Wars 2.

Game Design

24 4

Lore

Music

FEATURES 8

10 Console Remasters That Need to Happen

Getting Magical with Citadel: Forged with Fire

Gwent Deals Out a Brand New Expansion

GUILD WARS 2

Review: First Impressions of Path of Fire

Guide: Crystal Oasis Masteries

Guide: Surviving the Fall - Avoid becoming the next Casualty of Floor

Fiction: Tinteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Adventures in the Crystal Desert

Tribute: Home Is Where The Heart Is

Fan Artist Spotlight: Pink Alp Bananas

ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE

RIFT

68 Armchair Adventures in Tamriel

PREVIEWS

66 Hunting Bounties In Rift

REVIEWS

LIFE

Ashes of Creation

ELEX

102 Worth Playing

Biohazard

The Solus Project

104 Bridging PHP to Discord

Immortal: Unchained

Fortnite

108 Stuffed Red-Top Peppers

Little Witch Academia

Mass Effect: Andromeda

100 Maize

104

Contents

107 ClubGaiscioch Fall 2017 Picks

110 Gaiscioch Member Business Directory

108 5

About the Gaiscioch Family

he Gaiscíoch (pronounced Gosh-Kia) began on November 11th 2001 in the industry pioneering MMORPG “Dark Age of Camelot”. They began on the Nimue roleplaying server with a focus on creating a fun and enjoyable community for players of all ages and skill levels. The Gaiscíoch takes it’s name from an Irish legend found within the “Lebor Gabála Érenn” and “Cath Maige Tuired” which chronicle the first people of Ireland, the Tuatha de Danann. Specifically the First Battle of Moyturna where the Tuatha de Danann hand picked the most honorable and loyal warriors to fight alongside the Celtic Gods in a battle against the Fir Bolg. These warriors were known as the Gaiscíoch. The Gaiscioch are a social gaming community with a relaxed approach toward gaming. They allow their

members to play how they want, when they want, as long as they want and do not constrict them with quotas or requirements. The overall focus of the Gaiscioch is to support the server communities and real world communities they are part of. They accomplish this by hosting public community events, participating and hosting community forums, interacting with game developers, and providing new players information through our in-game advisers and out-of-game guides, maps, and videos. With a strong focus on community our endgame goal is to create memories, friendships, and participate in the overall success of the community. It is through gaming, athletic competition, and social interaction that we forge new friendships and relationships.

Supporters

e would like to take a moment to thank all of our readers for their continued support and encouragement. Without your support we would not be able to keep this magazine going. In addition we would like to thank the following companies who have our undying gratitude for their support of the Gaiscioch Magazine & Livestreams productions. These companies have shown their support by providing interview opportunities, special access to their games, and social media exposure for our publication.

Without the support of our readers and the contributions from gaming studios we could not make this magazine so successful. We are happy to report that Gaiscioch Magazine has been read more than 250,000 times by over 30,000 unique readers to date. This is a huge accomplishment for a team that is staffed entirely by volunteers and we thank all of you for your continued support. Thank You!

We Appreciate Your Support!

Welcome Home!

re you in search of epic adventure, glorious battles, and more loot than your pack mule can carry? Join Gaiscioch as we prepare for what might become our greatest chapter yet!

Ashes of Creation offers a wide selection of activities including Siege Warfare, Raiding, Exploration, Crafting, Politics, Housing and an expansive Guild and Alliance system to allow coordination and teamwork. Learn More At:

https://gsch.info/play/aoc

Note: Gaiscioch is still evaluating Ashes of Creation for chapter consideration. An official decision will be made by late 2018.

10 Remasters That Need To Happen Feature

By: Benjamin “Foghladha” Foley In the wake of some pretty awesome remakes and remasters on the horizon, including the RPG Classic Final Fantasy VII, we thought it would be fun to give our top 10 games we feel would make excellent remasters.

#10 Tak & The Power of Juju How this game was never placed in a remastered collection I’ll never know. Tak & The Power of Juju was an action platformer that even inspired its own TV show spinoff. Tak was an aspiring shaman who was placed in charge of saving the world. His misadventures would lead him into many precarious situations. This title was filled with comedy and fun gameplay and still holds its own against the likes of Ratchet and Clank and Sly Cooper.

#9 Marathon For many, Halo holds a special place in gamers’ hearts with its great story, cooperative gameplay, and white knuckle action. Few know of the original game that launched Halo into stardom. Within the same universe but many years before, a game by the name of Marathon pioneered the FPS genre. It was known as the first game to incorporate mouselook in a FPS, which at the time needed a bit of getting used to but Mac gamers soon caught on. During the XBOX hay day a small remaster was released as a digital version but has since been forgotten. It would do the series a tremendous boon for them to remaster the three Marathon titles that paved the way for the Halo franchise. 8

#8 The Wheel of Time

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The Wheel of Time was a deeply engaging story driven action FPS that featured puzzles, a gripping plot and gave all those fans of the book series a visual medium to play with. At the time I first played it, I didn’t even know it was a book series and fell in love with the story. The biggest limitation was the limited hardware they had to program it for. A remaster would do the game a great service, putting it on a platform it was meant to be played on.

#7 Gothic Oh, the sad tale of the Gothic series. The original was by far one of the best kept secrets of its day. A wonderful non-linear RPG that combined action and reactive gaming. This would make a tremendous addition to the modern game lineup and give players a bit of history as to why so many fell in love with the Gothic Franchise.

#6 Defiance A game ahead of it’s time, Defiance launched as a MMORPG third person shooter that helped pave the way for games like Destiny and Tom Clancy’s The Division. The fact it’s still only available on PC, Playstation 3, and XBOX 360 is baffling and we can only hope that Trion Worlds will bring this game to the modern console. While the TV show was canceled, Trion says they’re not done with the game yet and have ramped up their development team considerably. If it does make it’s way to the modern console, I’d be the first to sign up to slay some hellbugs.

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#5 Darkwatch

#4 The Witcher

Everyone probably forgot about this classic western vampire hunter game. The game was ahead of itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time in many ways. Its entire story was playable with a friend and featured some of the best vampire slaying money could buy. A modern remake would bring this classic to a larger audience and with the current zombie / undead craze it would likely be a winner among the gamer.

Originally intended to be ported to the XBOX, the port was later abandoned. The original Witcher always felt like it would be a wonderful console game. Still today the enhanced edition of The Witcher holds its own against the action RPG genre. A modern remaster and port to Playstation 4 and XBOX One would introduce a whole new crop of Witcher fans to the original origins story, that only PC users can get.

#3 No One Lives Forever Kate Archer, oh where are you, Kate Archer? In the days when Goldeneye ruled the console, Kate Archer played a female super spy in this 60s themed action FPS. There was a brief port to Playstation 2 back in the day, however since then, this gem has been lost in the who owns the rights limbo. If you never had the chance to play No One Lives Forever, I highly recommend finding a copy on eBay or Amazon.com. 10

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#2 Champions of Norrath Right on the heels of Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance, Champions of Norrath sought to bring the world of Everquest to the Playstation 2. With 4 player co op and a deep RPG story, this game allowed four friends to partake on hours of adventures together. With a full progression system, several character classes and a hundreds of hours of randomly generated dungeons to explore. Champions of Norrath quickly became a favorite among action RPG fans.

#1 Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance While this game would go down in history as pioneering the physics of the female anatomy and creating the most realistic water effects ever seen, Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance offered so much more. It was a true Dungeons and Dragons adventure set in the world of Baldur’s Gate. It was an action RPG with character progression and cooperative gameplay. Still today, trying to purchase a copy of the sequel for Playstation 2 will cost you quite a pretty penny as it is one of the most valuable games released in America. A modern remake or remaster would bring a wonderful addition to the couch co op scene. 11

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Gwent Deals Out a Brand New Expansion By: Edward “Screenager” Orr Nilfgaard, Northerners, Monsters, Scoia’tael, and Skellige, whatever your persuasion prepare to go on a brand new adventure this year. Gwent, the Witcher card game, is working on its first ever expansion. While we wait on the new update Gaiscioch had some time to chat with Jakub Szamalek, senior principal writer on the Witcher franchise, about Thronebreaker.

Thank you for talking to us today, what can players expect to see in Thronebreaker that makes it distinct from say, just another deck expansion? So ThroneBreaker is a single player campaign that’s five maps that you can explore and visit. Each of them shows a different part of the Witcher world and ThroneBreaker combines the card mechanic that you know from multiplayer Gwent. So from the content that’s already been released with a story told through a fully voiced, interactive experience and a non-linear story, that’s pretty much the size of the Heart of Stone expansion.

What updates are we getting with Thronebreaker, other than this new story? When you buy Thronebreaker you don’t just get the story content and maps. You also get twenty cards, ready to use in the multiplayer, right away. To get the premium versions of the animated cards you have to play the PvE game, find secret treasures, and unlock them via side quests.

How does Thronebreaker tie itself into the wider Witcher universe? It’s set during the events described in the books. Thronebreaker takes place before the Witcher games. Characters known from both books and games will appear in Thronebreaker and new characters will interact with the characters that you remember from our previous titles.

Was it a particular challenge to stay true to canon and keep continuity correct?

How much freedom do you have in telling your story by placing the game in this period, rather than during the game’s timeline? In some ways it gives us more freedom because we explore part of the timeline that hasn’t been realized in the games before. However, on the other hand, we know that we don’t have as much freedom in shaping up the outcome of the whole campaign. It has already been described in the books and this is canon. When we were making the Witcher series, which takes place after the books, we could decide which killed Kings were assassinated by hired killers; which countries fall; or which grow in strength, but once we get back to the events described in the books we have to stay true to the key facts. I would say there was still enough room for us to come up with a unique new story or even a welcome surprise for those who read the books.

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Well, we basically knew the final outcome of the story and we knew one important event, which is the battle for the bridge described in the books. We knew here that we had to stay true to the vision of the books and Andrzej Sapkowski, but in between these events we had a lot of freedom and we could come up with whatever story we wanted to tell so it wasn’t too hard.

Was there a particular decision process in deciding to delve back into the books rather than say, jump forward in time? We felt that our campaign should be set during a time of a military conflict and because, naturally, it’s a Gwent game you are leading an Army into battle which you want to grow in strength. Showing the same war we did in the first part would be revisiting the events that players already know. Coming up with a completely new conflict far into a future that’s not supported either by the books or Witcher franchise, felt like a lot of work that’s possibly unnecessary. We do have the other war that’s happening with Nilfgaard that took place before the books and is so well described by Andrzej Sapkowski. This felt like a natural fit for this Gwent campaign.

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How important is individual character dialogue to building that world? Oh, it’s very important. Dialogue between characters and during personal stories is incredibly important. We at CD Projekt Red always take pride in the fact that we tell good stories. We strive for excellence when it comes to narrative. It meant that even though Thronebreaker is a very different game from the Witcher 3 and it operates with different mechanics, the story should remain as good as it was in Witcher 3.

Thronebreaker is fully voice acted, which is a huge endeavor. Was it crucial to do this? Yes, we really insisted on this. I feel that once a line is read aloud by an actor it really comes alive. Of course, there are great games that don’t have voice overs but the emotional impact of those lines is sometimes less obvious. Even though it was a lot of work and it is hugely expensive, we were pretty strong about this. We felt that to tell a story it needed to be fully voiced. There’s a lot of content in Thronebreaker,

including non linear stories and the voice acting of this is absolutely excellent.

Do you think that this helps convey the consequences of the decisions you take in Thronebreaker? Absolutely. When you hear the emotion in somebody’s voice, if they are relieved or angry about your decisions, it really helps to drive the point home and yes, there’s a lot of consequences. Some of them are immediate and you know right away what you did, and sometimes we revisit the choice we made hours before to present a surprising consequence.

I take it not all of those are good consequences? Does that ever make you want to go back and change your decisions? Sure, but if you feel that, it means that there was an impact and that you care about the story, so that’s always good news. I, of course, sympathize with players who come to regret their decisions but I think this is what makes the choice interesting. You have

to pause and think twice about what to choose and consider your choices. That’s what really means that the story was well told.

Well, at first when it comes to immediate consequences it is easier because you can go back to your latest save, but this is why the consequence of some of the decisions are only revealed after hours of gameplay. You have to be really determined to change the outcome because then you have go back a few hours and redo a huge chunk of the game. In most cases I think players stick to their original decisions and live with the consequences.

Does that add a level of replay value to the game and can the game diverge in different directions because of these consequences? Yes, absolutely. Each of the quests have some familiar parts and some wildly different outcomes. There’s another layer of non-linearity in comparison to the Witcher 3 in that Meve is surrounded by her advisers, officers, and champions. So basically you have a band of followers that are with you, but they are often in conflict with each other and can be mutually exclusive. If you follow somebody’s advice all the time, others will get offended and might leave your entourage. As a result, you cannot go through the whole campaign with the maximum amount of followers because sometimes there will be irreconcilable differences between them. Their presence changes the flow of the quests. For example, you can avoid combat if you are accompanied by somebody who is able to convince your opponent to part on peaceful terms. In other circumstances when you try to avoid combat some of your followers are so principled and so determined to fight the enemy that

How many followers are you able to gather throughout the game? If my memory serves me well, it’s about eight.

As well as followers, you can also collect new cards. How many new cards can you collect in Thronebreaker?

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When I read choose your own adventure novels, I always end up with my thumb between pages ready to flip back. Will players be able to flip back or replay scenarios to change their outcomes?

they will charge in, forcing your hand. The makeup of your party really changes the flow of the game.

There are twenty new cards that you can use in the multiplayer and on top of that there are dozens of cards that you can use in the single player modes. This means that battles and combat may play out differently in the two modes. As a result we do not need to worry too much about balance between the two modes and we can create some cards that might seem overpowered but work to convey a sense of power. We can even turn some battles into logical puzzles where you have to figure out the particular way of playing. There’s a lot of variability in terms of mechanics in comparison to the multiplayer, when taking this approach.

And when is Thronebreaker coming out? Well, at this point I’m going to say this is coming out this year but we will have more information on playgwent.com as soon as we have it.

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Getting Magical with Citadel: Forged with Fire By Robert J. “Jairone” Mann

Getting Started in Citadel: When you first enter Citadel: Forged with Fire you will be greeted with a sight that may leave you feeling a little crispy. You have just been dunked in lava, or born from lava, or maybe dipped your arms in lava. The truth isn’t really clear, and there’s nothing yet to tell us that story. Hopefully someday the wonderful folks over at Blue Isle Studios will do so!

Your first steps will take you through a small fortress, when said immolation occurred. You will find yourself in a room full of flowing lava and platforms above it, but the ground seems steady and you will not have to worry about re-immersing yourself. Instead find your way out into the courtyard area, and look around. There are some blue stones nearby which will help explain the basic controls to you. All those controls are the same window with tabs, so you can always just click to change tabs.

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You likely have now discovered the fortress you bubbled out of, and that you gained some experience from that new understanding of this world. Wonderful! This is your first quest, to gather enough experience to level up. To do that, start wandering aimlessly (or with intent) and gathering the items strewn across the ground. Flowers, Mushrooms, and stone are good. Wood and magical crystals are essential. With these, once you have gathered enough experience to reach the next level you can progress. By now, you have likely seen the various other inhabitants of the world. Some of them are rather unfriendly. It would be best to be able to defend yourself. To that end, the knowledge trees are important to you.

You can select any of the four weapons, or unlock multiple types if you wish. For now, select one of them, and then change to the spells tab. You will want the attack spell that matches your weapon! Choose wisely. Alternatively, the independent attack spell mana blast could work well with a melee weapon. Before you go running off to strike fear into the hearts of those wicked pixies, you have one final step to getting your weapon ready for use. You haven’t bound your spells to it yet. Sure, you can hit foes with the weapon anyway, but your damage output will be lower and if you chose a ranged weapon you’ll lose that range advantage. You won’t, however, spend mana doing so, which makes it a decent emergency

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backup option to have a weapon with an unbound spell slot. To bind your spells to your weapon, visit the spellbook. Drag a spell to one of the two weapon slots, or to the mouse icons. This will assign that spell to that weapon using that control to fire. You can swap the bound spells when not in combat, and you can swap weapons freely.

make them part of your hoard. However, this may make some conflict with other players, and on a PvP server they can start demolishing your home. It might be best to consider carefully whether the notoriety is worth the reward. *NOTE, this icon is disabled now on official servers, but can be seen on private servers depending on settings.*

Finding your bearings:

There are also arches which indicate a cave, where you can find treasures. These are usually full of dangerous foes. Caution is a good idea, but they can be very rewarding to those prepared for the trials within.

Now that you have yourself set up with the basics, it is time to figure out what exactly you want to do. Open that map up! There’s a few options before you, and your own preferences will lead you through the next steps. Let’s look at those icons. They will guide you to various sources of adventure, or warn you of dangers that might make setting down your home far less feasible. I won’t cover all of them, since the game tells you what they are when scrolled over in the map. Instead, let me cover a few that may come in extra handy in your travels. We have the treasure chest, which has a chest icon of course! These guys have something in them that you can claim, if nobody else has. They reset every so often, so checking now and again won’t hurt. If you manage to build a home near some, you can try to 18

Skulls indicate acidic pools. They are deadly. Be very careful around them, as a little contact will quickly drain your health. Another danger is the sword, where powerful foes tend to gather. They are a good source of adventure, challenge, and experience if you are ready. If you are not they are a quick trip to the grave.

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The last map icon to consider right now is the tower with an orb on top. These are quick travel points, allowing you to teleport between them once you have unlocked at least two. To unlock them, travel to the top of the tower and activate the orb for the first time. Once done, you can activate that orb to travel to any other tower you have unlocked.

Settling down: Once you have learned to build something in the structures portion of the knowledge tree, you can decide to settle down and place a home. The building

system allows you to place the various parts freely in the world. This could also be used for things like making a stairway to a place you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t reach before you have a broom, or if you wish to save mana. Each item built has a cost associated with it. If you have flooring that is elevated it will require supports. You can build them yourself, or in many cases the system will automatically have some attached for you. This does increase the resource cost of buildings. The resources needed are already a bit of work, but thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s plenty of them around. One of the things to note is that doors require a wall to place them in. Without knowing this it might

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appear that there is no way to set down a door to your new home! Simply build your walls, then place the door, and it will retrofit your wall into an entryway! Another important item is the throne, which claims the property as yours. The throne, along with other important objects, is found under the magic tab. If you make a mistake, don’t worry too much. The last selection in the build menu is a deletion function. You can use this to reclaim a few resources as you remove that blemish on your beautiful new abode. By now any builders out there are very tired of trying to scrounge up sticks. That would take forever and a day to build a little hut! Thankfully there’s a fix to that. At level 5 you can select the ‘Extraction’ spell and bind it to a weapon. This wonderful tool allows you to gather from large objects in the world, such as trees and boulders. It is also the only way to gain some materials, such as precious stones from ore nodes. Using extract to gather materials should be much faster, although you will also gather things you might not have intended to. There is a storage chest in the structures tab, and having one will allow you to save up these materials for things you will want later.

Closing tips: 1. If you are ever having problems finding something for an item, look at it in your crafting menu. This will usually tell you where to find the item. If you still aren’t finding it, look for something new to extract from. 2. Flying, once unlocked, takes a lot of mana. Ensure you have a stock of potions to recharge your reserves! Flight is fast and efficient for exploring once you do. 3. At level 10 you can form a wizarding house, and gather together with friends in a joint effort. This should turn your home into a guildhall, allowing everyone to work and live together. 4. Potions are an excellent knowledge to gain at level 3, they are far better than the herbs alone. 5. You can only equip one trinket at a time, swap them based on your needs. For more information you can find Citadel: Forged with Fire on Steam, or visit them at www.citadelgame.com

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Cover Story

Contents

Interview: A Return to the Crystal Desert with Mike Zadorojny

Interview: Maclaine Diemer Brings Musical Magic to the Path of Fire Soundtrack

Interview: Guild Wars 2 Talk Path of Fire Narrative

Review: First Impressions of Path of Fire

Guide: Crystal Oasis Masteries

Guide: Surviving the Fall - Avoid becoming the next Casualty of Floor

Fiction: Tinteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Adventures in the Crystal Desert

Tribute: Home Is Where The Heart Is

Fan Artist Spotlight: Pink Alp Bananas

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A Return to the Crystal Desert with Mike Zadorojny By: Benjamin “Foghladha” Foley Greetings and thank you so much for agreeing to speak with us. Before we get started can we ask what is your role at ArenaNet and what does your typical day look like? My name is Mike Zadorojny and I’m the Lead Designer on Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire. Most of my job can be summed up as making sure that the expansion team continues to hold true to the core philosophies of Guild Wars 2, while still pushing the boundaries of the online genre. What do you find is your biggest challenge in your day to day life? I would have to say the biggest challenge for me is balancing the 24

importance of quality against creativity and the player experience. Content and systems get iterated on numerous times before they are shown to the players for the first time. Through each play session, I have to provide feedback to the team that sometimes will sacrifice a cool or unique concept to ensure the ultimate experience for the player. What do you feel are core characteristics that a person in your position needs to possess? At any point in time any or all of your teams can be on fire with things that need attention. The best thing that a leader can do is remain calm, listen and provide

suggestions or guide teams to find the right solutions. If people see their leaders panic it only causes those emotions to ripple through the rest of the group. In game development you’re also not going to get everything right the first time, so being able to navigate through iterations and encourage teams through the process is critical. Players generally will never know what it took to get something to its end state, they won’t see the trials the team goes through. So being able to pull away from a piece of work and objectively think about the player experience is crucial to understanding how and when to prioritize work.

Now your time at ArenaNet goes back quite a ways, can you share with us how it all began for you?

delivered that could be improved upon and chose to focus on those.

Thinking back on Guild Wars 1, it was a very innovational title. It was one of the first Buy-2-Play titles on the market and featured a unique dual class system. When you think back to that time in ArenaNet’s history, did you receive a lot of criticism for trying to break the mold?

The Crystal Desert holds a very special place in any fan of the original Guild Wars heart. When it came time to revisit this place what were some of the key points you felt ArenaNet absolutely had to get right?

ArenaNet was founded on the ideas of innovation and not being afraid to take risks. The team was always focused on making the best experience possible regardless of what typical business models or games were doing at the time. That foundation continued into Guild Wars 2 development where we looked at what the rest of the industry was doing and decided that there were types of content or ways that content was being

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I first started at ArenaNet in January of 2006 as a Quality Assurance Tester on Guild Wars Factions. I was responsible for making sure that the quests, story missions, competitive missions, cooperative missions all functioned correctly, as well as making sure there weren’t any immersion breaking bugs with maps like buildings that are missing walls or rocks that are floating up in the air. While working on the project I started developing tools to help teams communicate more effectively with one another and how the QA team could better serve the company as a whole. Soon after I took over the department and was even in charge of the production of the Guild Wars Live team while the

rest of the studio was working on Guild Wars 2.

The love and nostalgia players hold for the Guild Wars is something that the studio holds as well. We always knew that the story of Guild Wars 2 would take us back to the Crystal Desert and when it did we would have to make sure that players were able to have a unique experience when they returned while still paying homage to the work that came before it. That includes a lot of different parts of the experience – from key map locations to parts of the original storyline to the

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customization options we wanted to open up for human players. Senior members of the Path of Fire team that were here during development of Guild Wars helped newer members integrate their efforts with Tyria. We spent a fair amount of time in pre-production looking at specific Guild Wars storylines or characters that players witnessed in the Crystal Desert and tried to bring as many of those through lines up through the 250 year difference between the games. Some examples of this are the legacies of the heroes

that journeyed with players in the Nightfall campaign, and the tales of some prominent ghosts in the Crystal Desert. In the second Guild Wars 2 expansion Path of Fire, the zones have grown in scale and so has the epicness of the landscapes. These zones have moving parts and cinematic scenery. What were some of the driving factors to the new style? We started by looking at the layout of the original maps and identifying iconic locations or

settings that we wanted to carry forward. From there we started laying the groundwork of how the unique movement mechanics of the mounts would play in these regions. This allowed us to focus on how players would explore the maps and what they would find. With the work we did on storylines we then started drawing out how each of the maps would flow and how the content could either accent the scenery or how the scenery could best support the stories we wanted to tell. The core ideas we kept referring to during each

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iteration was the joy of movement and exploration. Now that Path of Fire has released, what’s next for the team? What areas are you looking into improving over the next few months? The team is still monitoring the game and addressing issues as they arise. Beyond that, we are working with the Living World team to make sure the transition back to them is as smooth as their hand-off to us a couple months ago was. Living World Season 4 will come with no break, as well

as the upcoming Halloween and Wintersday Festivals. All in all it’s going to be an exciting year for Guild Wars 2 players! What is your favorite little known secret to the Guild Wars universe? The first pieces of content that I designed for Guild Wars was the redesigned quests to unlock Olias and Zenmai, the Prophecies and Factions heroes for the Guild Wars Nightfall campaign. When the campaign originally launched the team didn’t have time to build out anything detailed and based

on the background lore for the characters I wanted to make sure we did them justice. The design team here basically told me if you are passionate about it, help create something better. That philosophy of passion is something that continually reinforces the teams here at ArenaNet. Any words of wisdom for adventurers giving Guild Wars 2 a try for the first time? The three biggest things I can recommend to new players are: slow down, this isn’t like every other MMO and this game has one of the

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nicest communities. Players who tend to get the greatest enjoyment from the game are those that stop to smell the roses occasionally. Racing to level 80 isn’t the journey, it’s just a milestone. The game is packed with hidden areas and secrets for players to find. And even once you’ve hit 80 there are masteries, fractals, raids, wvw, pvp and more to experience. Guild Wars 2 also doesn’t play like every other MMO. The language is similar but it’s not the exact same. So things that you expect to find in traditional MMOs, like NPCs with exclamation marks above their heads to give you quests, aren’t a thing in our world. We’ve also developed a design around collaborative gameplay

in the open world with things like Dynamic Events that everyone gets rewards for participation, gather resource nodes that are player specific, and everyone being able to resurrect downed or defeated players. Our mantra is that you should always be excited to see another player in the open world. But even if it seems a little foreign for MMO players, the community is absolutely amazing in their willingness to help others and the kindness they show each other. Lastly how do you see new technological improvements like VR, cloud computing and artificial intelligence shaping the future of ArenaNet and the game development industry as a whole? Is it all hype or has it enabled a

renaissance in game design? All technology is just different tools to help developers express their ideas and their vision to their fans. We are constantly pushing ourselves to deliver the best possible experience to our players. Each of the improvements you listed have the potential to have dramatic impact on how games are developed. I don’t think we’ve seen a stagnation in design as a whole across the industry so I’m not sure the idea of a renaissance of game design applies here. Whether these technologies end up just being hype or something more is going to be up to the players. They will support the features and the games they love.

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the Living World of Guild Wars 2

The Living World You deserve to experience a truly living, constantly evolving world, so we ship new content and features on a regular basis

Exploration Tyria is full of millions of things to see and do – you earn rewards just by exploring this ever changing fantasy world.

Competitive Play Join hundreds of other players in epic World vs World battles or test your skills in quick, fun Player vs Player matches!

GUILDWARS2 ©2010–2014 ArenaNet, LLC and NC Interactive, Inc. All rights reserved. Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet, NCSOFT, the Interlocking NC Logo, and all associated logos and designs are trademarks or registered trademarks of NCSOFT Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Maclaine Diemer Brings Musical Magic to the Path of Fire Soundtrack By: Edward “Screenager” Orr

Sounding Out the Crystal Desert The first time I stepped outside Amnoon, I took a rare moment of respite to just sit under the stars and listen to my surroundings. The wind that graces the sands around the port city brings more than a cooling breeze for those who take a moment, it delivers promises of a sweeping adventure, new exotic encounters, and a 30

grandeur that Guild Wars 2 sorely needs. This was my first moments in the reimagined Crystal Desert and I quickly discovered Guild Wars 2’s Path of Fire is more than beautiful landscapes. While the beautiful vistas and incredible graphics included in Path of Fire might be worth a thousand words, the music of Guild Wars 2

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really communicates in ways that dialogue cannot. From the bombastic opening moments of the very first loading screen, through the quagmires of the Maguma Jungle, to the launch of the latest adventure, the Guild Wars 2 soundtrack has accompanied players on epic adventures. Now, ArenaNet release the latest edition to their musical adventure, the Path of Fire Soundtrack. The work of Maclaine Diemer, Wilbert Roget, Stan LePard, Brendon Williams, and a host of collaborators, this sweeping expansion was recorded across the globe, taking In performances from Seattle, London, and across Europe.

We had some time to chat to Maclaine Diemer about the music that make the Path of Fire.

When the player steps into Path of Fire one of the first locations to set the tone of the expansion is Amnoon. Aesthetically it borrows a number of cultural ideas from the real world. How did you go about setting this scene and building a musical canvas that you could represent this with? Two of the pieces that play in Amnoon were actually the first two pieces I wrote for the game,

about a year and a half before it was released. I was asked to set the tone for the map and the expansion itself, and it seemed like a good opportunity for me to establish the palette weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d be using and breaking away from the Heart of Thorns sound. At that point, the game itself barely existed. If I remember correctly, there was only a very early version of the Crystal Oasis map. It was barely populated with anything beyond a few structures and some rough terrain. There was, however, lots of concept art. Concept art and ambient music serve a similar function, in that they are designed to convey the high level emotions of a map or scene. The tone of the map 31

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was very clearly established in that art, with grand architecture, sweeping desert vistas, and vibrant and exotic color combinations.

From the real world, there was clearly an influence from Morocco, North Africa, and parts of the Middle East. Musically, that led me to featuring types of percussion that are common in those areas like the djembe, frame drum, riq, and a bunch of other fun stuff, as well as some wind instruments like the ney and duduk. For the orchestra, there’s already a kind of musical language we in the western world associate with that type of setting and landscape. A lot of it starts with Maurice Jarre’s music for Lawrence of Arabia, which I listened to a lot when I wasn’t feeling inspired. For the music nerds, a lot of it revolves around the Phrygian mode with a raised 3rd scale degree. In layman’s terms, it’s a variation on the normal minor scale that instantly gives a sense of mystery and exotic locales. Another sound I really wanted to use was entire string sections playing in octaves, with heavy use of portamento (a technique where you accentuate the leaps between two notes by sliding between them on the string). It’s like an instant recipe for “desert music”. Sometimes the old tricks are the best ones.

Much of the game play in Path of Fire seems to have moved back towards the kind of sense of wonder and exploration that ran throughout the core launch. Was there a move to replicate this in the soundtrack? Absolutely. The soundtrack for Heart of Thorns intentionally mimicked the map setting and level design, i.e. dense, dark, and claustrophobic. One of the very early things that was discussed for Path of Fire was that the maps would be huge, bigger even than the core game. This was specifically so you could have a lot to explore with the newly added mounts. Guild Wars is no stranger to epic, sweeping music, but over the years I’ve tried to take it in a slightly more stripped down direction. Some of the music in Heart of Thorns, like the piece called Rata Novus, has a big cinematic feel to it, but the music itself is pretty minimalistic. I think it works really well for that game, but I knew we’d have to go back to big, soaring string lines, bold brass, and heavily layered percussion in a way that we avoided with Heart of Thorns. If you’re sailing across sand dunes on the back of a flying manta ray, you need music that matches that feeling, and “stripped down” isn’t quite the right vibe.

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While the locations play a huge role in the soundtrack, characters and creatures also have their own distinct part to play in the game. How to you infuse the soundtrack with these new faces? It was really important for me to make clear distinctions between the various creature armies you face in the game. I spent a lot of time (maybe too much) thinking about how to convey the essence of these creatures musically. For instance, the Awakened are essentially undead, and their design incorporates elements like sand, tar, bones, and scarabs, so their music is slow and ominous, with dissonant passages of strings going slowly in and out of tune. It also features brass instruments played with mutes, which gives it a thin, hollowed out sound. For the Forged, the idea is that they are souls captured in suits of armor. For their sound, I combined violin harmonics, which have a scratchy, whispy quality to them, with crotales played with a violin

bow. Crotales are like tuned metal discs you normally play with a mallet, like a xylophone, but if you play them with a bow, you get a sharp, metallic ring that’s almost a little painful to the ear. Even though these kinds of details don’t usually stand out to most players, I think it’s important to put some intention and thought into the musical choices for every piece. It helps solidify the connection between the music and the game, and that’s always my primary goal.

What, if any, influence did existing pieces for locations like the Silverwastes, and even the first Guild Wars soundtrack have on Path of Fire? I wanted to separate the Path of Fire desert from the Silverwastes desert a bit. While they’re both desert locations, they’re pretty different beyond that one connection. The only thing that really crossed over was a heavy focus on woodwind instruments, 33

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particularly flutes. They are sorely underutilized as a section in movie and game soundtracks in general, in my opinion, so I think they instantly stand out when you hear them now. They blend together so beautifully and also shine as solo instruments, and to me they also do a great job representing a desert breeze shifting and shaping sand dunes in a wide open landscape. There is also a good amount of thematic and melodic material from past Guild Wars games sprinkled in here and there. It’s primarily from the Nightfall expansion, however, since Path of Fire is set in a lot of the same locations, I didn’t want to completely recreate some of those old pieces. I felt I owed it to fans who spent time with the original game to pay homage when appropriate. Sometimes I would try to use a melody as a starting point or an anchor for a piece, and sometimes it would just be a chord progression to hint at the previous music. There are a few really sharp eared listeners out there who are good at putting the musical clues together, so I’m curious when and if they find the little bread crumbs I’ve left for them.

With the Heart of Thorns piece there’s always one track I find sticks out as unique among the rest. The Jaka Itzel in particular. What was your stand out moment from the soundtrack? There’s definitely a spiritual successor to Jaka Itzel on the Path of Fire soundtrack. It’s called Pricklepatch Hollow, and it’s the theme for the Choya, who are these goofy looking but dangerous little cactus people. I always like when I can do something a little out of the ordinary for Guild Wars, and those two pieces are it, almost completely lacking in orchestral instruments and relying more on percussion and silly or fun sensibility. For me, one of the most fun tracks to work on was Maws of the Ruptured Heart. It might not be as in your face as some other ones, but it was a lot of fun to work on. It’s written as a bass flute solo, which is an instrument you should look up if you don’t know what it looks like. It’s massive and has such an amazing, unique sound. The soloist who we recorded is an expert at just about every kind of flute, and she came

Looking back would you have done anything differently, with it being such a monumental project? The only problem I have, and this is the problem I have with every Guild Wars soundtrack I’ve been a part of, is that I wish there was more music. Guild Wars is a game that you can spend a lot of time playing, and it’s easy to burn through all the music in a relatively short amount of time. In a perfect world, each game or batch

of content would come out with two or three times as much music, but that’s just not feasible. I will say that I had some wonderful collaborators on this project to help me bring the soundtrack to life. They are Stan LePard, who I’ve worked with for years both as a co-composer on occasion and orchestrator for every live recording we’ve done. He wrote four of the five pieces associated with the various mount creatures and did a terrific job. The others are Wilbert Roget II and Brendon Williams, who split the duties handling all the combat music. In a couple instances, I handed them a theme and they ran with it, but for the most part they just went nuts and did an incredible job. I love collaborating, since I think it makes the final product that much better, and these three gentlemen were about as good of collaborators as I could hope for.

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in with a lot of suggestions for additional techniques for playing the instrument. We ended up recording the piece as I wrote it and then just letting her go nuts. She would do things like growl in the back of her throat while playing a note, which made the flute sound alive, or hum the same note she was playing and then go slightly out of tune with the flute, so you would get these crazy, dissonant notes rubbing against each other. I ended up taking those pieces and manipulating them with effects to use as sonic textures in that piece and several others, so it was a very fruitful session for just one piece!

If you want to hear the drums of war again or simply hear the songs of the desert then Path of Fire’s Digital soundtrack, it is available at Amazon or iTunes, while the stunning Vinyl version is available to preorder now.

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Guild Wars 2 Talk Path of Fire Narrative By: Edward “Screenager” Orr

Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire is almost upon us. We’ve already had a glimpse of the expansion content. We’ve all felt the Crystal Desert beneath our feet and galloped across the sands on a raptor, but the expansion is more than that. It continues to follow the remaining members of Dragon’s Watch as they battle the rising power of Balthazar. Facing mighty adversaries and personal crises on unfamiliar shores will challenge our heroes like never before. We got some time to quiz Matthew Medina, Content Designer on Guild Wars 2, on crafting Path of Fire’s story and how it will unfold.

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With Living World it became evident that ArenaNet has had a massive story arc in place for a long time. How far in advance did you have Path of Fire planned? Matthew Medina: Thematically, we knew even from the launch of Guild Wars 2 in 2012 that we would at some point be returning to the story of the human gods. As a result, we knew at least the high level story beats of Path of Fire, before Heart of Thorns shipped, as the Living World team was already beginning work on Living World Season 3 when we were finishing up that expansion. This enabled us to have a roadmap for Path of Fire’s narrative even before we began preproduction.

In many ways the writing team has done a fantastic job with Braham. Everyone seems to hate him right now. How are his actions likely to impact the rest of the characters during Path of Fire? Matthew Medina: Braham is focused right now on the things that most concern him, and he won’t have a role to play in Path of Fire.

How does the old world of Tyria and The Crystal Desert intertwine with the new world? Will we see any of these legends again? Matthew Medina: We’ve taken great pains to ensure that the regions of the Crystal Desert and northern Elona feel familiar and yet also like brand new places we’ve not yet been to. We worked very hard on incorporating important landmarks into the present time period, while ensuring that players can see just how much things have changed since the time of Prophecies and Nightfall.

One of the biggest problems that we see with ensemble casts is balancing the demands of multiple larger than life personalities in a given time. How do you manage that? Matthew Medina: It’s always a challenge, and with this expansion, we set out from the beginning to focus our cast to a smaller, more condensed group that we could spend more time with and who each have unique things to add to the story.

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The change from Living World to Expansion seems not unlike a move from a television series to the big screen. How did that change the way you told the story and paced content ? Matthew Medina: Our format bears a lot of similarity to the film and television format, and by employing this strategy it’s continued to push us to make our story chapters more meaningful and concise, while also allowing us to focus more on characters and their bonds, relationships and growth as individuals. As a team, we’ve also had to greatly improve our own communication and to grow ourselves as we work to mature the medium of our story to meet everimproving standards.

While the Path of Fire leads us even further into Tyria how do the characters that we leave behind influence the story both in the Crystal Desert and back in core Tyria? 38

Matthew Medina: We will get a small taste of what’s happening back in central Tyria at certain points in the story, but as with our other stories, we really want players to drill down and focus on the immediate threat that Balthazar poses to the region, and to the world at large.

It’s not just writers that tell a story in games. How important are the other aspects like environment and audio to selling a narrative idea to players? Matthew Medina: Every element is critical to us, from the smallest detail of the audio track to the biggest game mechanics and encounters. At ArenaNet, a story chapter is a truly multidisciplinary effort, with designers, writers, artists, and all the other departments contributing in some way to the implementation of our story. A lot of work goes into every story instance, and we go through copious rounds of feedback and iteration to ensure the highest possible quality for each moment.

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Balthazar and The Crystal Desert are a jackpot for those fans interested in the lore surrounding Tyria. How do you live up to the expectations of those fans and drop in lots of lore without excluding newer players? Matthew Medina: I think it starts from the fact that the people building the story are fans ourselves, so everyone on the team takes their part in crafting the story very seriously. Our devs are constantly looking for opportunities to imbue the content theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re working on with that level of care and polish that we want to be known for, so we are always researching and reading up on what expectations would exist for a given release or piece of content, and we do as much as possible to meet and exceed those expectations. In particular, Path of Fire has a lot of nods to the lore of our world that we think fans both old and new will greatly appreciate, and we will lay down some new information as well.

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First Impressions of Path of Fire By: Briseadh

I expected something similar, but with a brand new flavor. I am not disappointed. The new zone is gorgeous. The monsters have cool ways of trying to kill you, let alone never seen before additions. There are multiple challenges to getting masteries. Let’s not forget mounts!

First Things First Every class has a new specialization they can add. I decided to use my elementalist as my exploration character, so I installed the Weaver specialization on my build. This proved interesting because with it you are not in only one element. Each time you change, the one you select is your primary 40

and shows on skills 1 and 2 and the previous primary becomes the secondary in slots 4 and 5. Slot three is a new combo skill based on which two elements are up. I hardly play with it other than to see how it rotates and plunged into the Path of Fire. I, however, decided to stick to my staff rather than trying the new sword. At least, I knew my skills.

Prologue To get to the new content you have to do a story quest called the Prologue that starts in Lion’s Arch, with you requesting a ride to the Crystal Desert alone to go beat up Balthazar. I found this amusing

because I’m off to kill a god, not just a dragon. Due to issues we can’t land in a safe place. No, we must help clear out a mine and then the village beyond. The fights are soloable, though I died about six times and in part due to my disabled hands. Weaver helped me solo it. The fights flowed nicely and then helping the villagers all made sense to the story. I enjoyed myself and laughed through my mishaps. Once through the Prologue you will have your first mount, the Raptor. You will also find yourself in the city of Amnoon. From here you can explore and continue your story at will.

Mounts

Even better, once one character has done the Prologue, all the characters on your account have access to the Raptor mount. All of the other mounts can be acquired as you progress through the Crystal Desert zones and are account wide usage upon acquisition. You will have to pay for the mounts you find after the Raptor. There is a mount, the Griffon, that is not listed in the PoF masteries, but he is the fifth mount you can acquire while exploring the new maps.

Mounts can be used in most PvE areas outside of PoF, as well. This brings a new dynamic to the game.

Masteries, Vistas and Hero Challenges These all work like they do in other areas. However, PoF adds some new dynamics to reaching some of them due to the new mounts. Many in the first map can be reached without more than the basic raptor, but there are enough where you will want the other mounts. I like that they make you need to acquire them all over time, just like you had to level up gliding and other things to better traverse the Jungles of Maguuma.

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There are four mounts: Raptor, Springer, Skimmer and Jackal that have masteries and are listed for you to see. Each one can be trained up to do more skills via Mastery Insights. On your mastery page you will find Path of Fire. When first starting the only open one to work on is your Raptor. Mounts work a lot like gliding from Heart of Thorns in that you get more skills and can get more places. Most of them have a skill that makes them much stronger in their primary use. The Raptor will jump further, the Springer will jump higher, etc. This skill is the third one that can be mastered. Once I had the Raptor through the training of its third skill, a note popped up about where to go find the Springer. I liked this tooltip and glad it could be rechecked of where I needed to go when ready to do so.

The fun thing with the Raptor mount was using the tail swipe to damage things. It dismounts you, but it is one way to run into a fight and get some minor AOE on your enemies before you jump into your own skills. All of the mounts have some form of attack that dismounts you in the process.

The vistas do a fine job of showing off the artwork of the new zones. A couple of my screenshots for this article are from viewing a vista. I love how the area has its

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own unique look. The only place that gave you a minor taste of the Crystal Desert was in Blazeridge Steppes. I think the most challenging mastery and the first one I ran into was being a sous chef. For one, my hands donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t work well so I do hit the wrong button more often than I want. I still, despite being frustrated many times, had to laugh as I tried to grab the right food and throw it at the head chef, who did not stand still long and had several places he would move to. Figuring out where over a dozen food items were and then getting them to him on time proved infuriating at times. I doubt I am alone in wondering if it could be done because I was not the only one that took several tries at it. This seemed appropriate for a mastery in Amnoon.

Group Exploring You can roam solo, but as a group you can beat on champion level content that occurs quite regularly. I think in a two hour run of an event around Crystal Oasis, we killed at least 7 or 8 champs. One of them will run around rampaging at certain health intervals and the only way to stop him is by at least five people getting close enough to lasso him. In our group of 25 or so, this proved quite easy. Everything scaled well to the number of players entering the event area. It made the champions still feel epic, even with 25 of us beating on them.

New Currencies and Items Like any addition that ArenaNet has added to GW2, there were new

things to dig up, uncover, loot, etc. I recommend an inventory with lots of space when you first explore and start acquiring them. Thankfully most of these new things stack and many are consumable. I found it easier when running with the large group for a couple hours to let them stack up and consume them when I was done. Several of the new items are consumed for various amounts of karma. I have seen around five or more different types of consumables of this type. I have also noticed that the second map had some new names for them compared to the first map. There are also new item drops that are unidentified which are salvageable. You donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have to identify them unless you want to. I found it easier to just salvage the blues and greens, but did identify

keys from heart vendors for a cost including Trade Contracts. Though initially it is best to not buy them and save your currency to pay for your mounts. Go hunting in the Crystal Oasis and don’t forget to check out them bone piles for more keys as the cheapest way to get them, though it may be more time consuming.

the yellow grade items out of curiosity despite salvaging them, as well. Another important item are Trade Contracts. These are the new currency added for PoF. You will either have it directly deposited into your currency wallet or you will find consumable ones in your inventory. I’m not sure why they went with a combo of direct to the wallet and with a consumable. However, it makes sense that

completing hearts and missions gives you direct deposit and loot off mobs out in the world give you a looted item version to consume later, like having to change a banknote into money. Then there are the Trader’s Keys that will open up all sorts of chests throughout the Crystal Desert. In the first zone you can find these keys in piles of bones. You also may get keys when you open chests. You can also buy the

I found this new expansion thoroughly enjoyable and a delight on the eyes. I find it better than the Heart of Thorns, though I did enjoy it and still have some things left to clean up there. I am only through the first two zones upon writing this, but will probably have most of it done by the time this is published. I hope you enjoy the Crystal Desert and all its new wonders as much as I have.

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Conclusion

Thank you ArenaNet for the opportunity to enjoy another great expansion to the game and I’m looking forward to how the next chapter of the Living Story ties in with this.

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Gmaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Guide to Crystal Oasis Masteries By GmaFog

I am in love with Path of Fire. There are so many fun things to do and lots of challenges to be achieved. However, I am a map completionist at heart and donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t like to leave things half way. This mentality caused a bit of frustration at the beginning of my Path of Fire adventure. I like to make every effort to map complete as I go through a zone and that is where the problem lies. In Crystal Oasis, to obtain a few of the masteries, I had to move on to earn my mounts in other zones first. This had become a two-edged sword because I needed the mounts for the masteries and needed the masteries to complete the abilities for the mounts. I did have to make 44

some choices along the way earn and use my mounts; go back to Heart of Thorns and finish my advanced gliding skills, or find a nice mesmer to port me up. I wanted to complete this map the proper way, without my mesmer friends porting me and found a fun process of events, achievements and running around to do this. So, I basically set up a way to do all three things simultaneously. As you go through Crystal Oasis, getting the mounts and masteries are definitely a team effort. If you are an awesome fighter, you might be able to do it on your own, but not me. I needed all the help I could get. By clearing the map, doing events, and getting achievements as you

go, it will make it easier to move around to the other zones. The raptor abilities: Ravenous Strike, Round Up and Canyon Jumping are mandatory for both mount and mastery insights success. Until you get to that level and are able to receive your Springer and Skimmer, a couple of the masteries in the Crystal Oasis will not be obtainable unless there is a mesmer around. As you see from my descriptions above, mount and/or gliding skills will be essential for completing mastery insights. I will try to give you my suggested timeline and how to proceed for a level of fun success, instead of frustration and headbanging.

Step 1: Raptor Mount Acquisition For your first mount, take a level 80 into your Path of Fire story and I suggest going with your friends. You will start in Lion’s Arch, talk to Captain Kiel just east of Western Ward and she will send you over to the airship by Claw Island Portage Waypoint. Finish the Sparking the Flame storyline. This will be where you acquire your raptor mount. Once you go through to the end of your story and gain your raptor

mount, all your other characters will also have the raptor. Next, take a look at your hero panel (press H). Go to the bottom button on the left of the hero panel that says “Masteries” and click on Path of Fire. You will probably see a check mark next to Ravenous Strike. At this point you will need one mastery point and lots of xp to get this ability. No worries I have ideas on how to do this at a comfortable pace.

From Amnoon waypoint to the west, go for a swim to the easiest mastery in the Oasis. Being you are out there, do whatever event is around and get your point of interest a bit further west. Swim back east to the south coast at the dock and hop on your raptor and go south to the vista. Turn Directly right as you go up the stairs and jump over to the vista from the planter on the corner. This will all help get that yellow bar of completion so you can use that mastery insight for the Ravenous Strike skill.

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Step 2: Bay of Elon Mastery Insight and More

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You should be close to completing your second skill, Round Up. When you complete that onto the Canyon Jumping ability we go! Finish all the hearts, POIs and add a few more events in the Oasis. Once you get the final skill Canyon Jumper, the two trainers for springer and skimmer will be found in the next 2 zones.

Step 3: Amnoon Bazaar Mastery Insight From the center of Amnoon go east to the Amnoon Bazaar, there is a set of stairs on the left. Ride up the stairs and turn left one more time to another set of stairs. Go to the roof. Turn right and jump to the mastery insight.

Step 4: Events and POIs and Crazy Cooks Mastery Insight. So on your way over to the cook, there should be a couple of fun events. Running around collecting Casino Coins, raptor races or the 46

stampede of Choya trying to break down the gates. From the Amnoon Bazaar Mastery insight you will want to go southwest through the center of town (near the raptor race starting line). Go west out to the dock and turn right - up the stairs into the building and straight ahead down the opposing stairs will be the cook. When you talk to the cook he will tell you to get certain food items and you throw them to him with your #2 skill. You need to be fast because time runs out. My memory of where the foods are is not as good as it used to be. The cook does take the same path each time, but he just asks for different foods each try. If you accomplish this, you will be known by GmaFog as an awesome cookâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s assistant. At this point she has been trying it for days and having a hard time accomplishing the feat.

Note: I failed to receive enough mastery insight points at this stage. If you have the same problem go back to your Hero panel and look under achievements - Look for things you can do to receive these Mastery Insight points. The Storyline is a good one for this. Once you have them, move on to Step 5. Also the springer and the skimmer will cost a bit of gold to buy. Make sure you have some gold and Trader Contracts, the new currency.

Step 5: Working toward your Springer To Open the zone of Desert Highlands, go to Temple of Kormir waypoint. From there travel north through the portal. Go northwest to the heart at Highjump Ranch

Waypoint. You need to find Stable Master Unja and do the heart to get your Springer. When you are finished buy your Springer and port back to Amnoon Waypoint. Guild Wars 2

Note: at this point you have two mounts. You can go into options and put each of your mounts on a different keystroke so you can just jump on the mount of your choice.

Extra Credit: Mastery in Elon Riverlands

Step 6: Working toward your Skimmer The skimmer trainer is next. From Amnoon Waypoint head south and run down the Southern outskirt. Stay on the road to Destinyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Gorge. Go south into Elon Riverlands. Move south and then west to Skimmer Ranch Waypoint. Talk to Skimmer Trainer Ardra and complete the heart to receive the skimmer. After completing the heart, you may buy the skimmer from her.

If you want to do a big battle, another mastery insight and get your diving goggles on, there is a mastery close by. From Skimmer ranch waypoint go southwest to the big rock. Run counter-clockwise up the rock. You will come to a beam that you need to run up and be ready for a big fight at the top. Find the closest edge to the mastery and glide over to the rock island.

Step 7: Final Mastery Insights in Oasis

#1 South corner of the Bay of Elon From Amnoon Waypoint, go west out to the dock and move south. When you get to the water swim over to the archway on the rock out in the water. Go to the ledge on the right and jump up with your springer. Then get on your skimmer and float to the ledge where the island is. Get back on your springer, after you kill the drakes, and jump up to the mastery insight. Bring a friend as there are some mean drakes in there that you will have to kill as you jump the ledges at the top.

Congratulations! You have managed to get 3 mounts and are ready to get the final mastery insights in Crystal Desert. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be afraid to fight foes, and do events and hearts as you head for the next masteries. It all works toward your training abilities for your mounts. 47

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#2 Sifiuri Sand Sea This is the Mastery that has the 3 choices: make sure you have the advanced Gliding skill, use your Skimmer and move over the quicksand, or find yourself a mesmer! If you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have your advanced Gliding, take a jaunt back to Heart of Thorns. It would be prudent to get your own gliding skills as there are many times, when you need to fly away from a fight, it will come in handy. However, if you have been working through my steps, you will have your skimmer and springer at this point. So, move from Amnoon Waypoint and go north to the quicksand, I find the west edge of the quicksand is the better way to head to the island. Just hold down spacebar to rise yourself onto the rock. Dismount once you are on the rock, get your springer out and jump up to the mastery. Easy peasy.

Here is another more adventurous way to go for the ones with advanced gliding skills who like to fight and get a few shinies on the way. Hop on your raptor and run from Amnoon waypoint. Head north up the road, go left out of town and around the first pyramid on the left - head west to the bigger pyramid - and walk up the side. Go across to the next pyramid to 48

the top and follow it around to the north east corner and jump up. There is a big battle for a chest up there. After collecting your shinies, turn around and fly off to the northeast onto the top ledge. Follow the ledge around and you can glide to the Mastery Insight.

#3 Teleporter Mastery Insight

From the Sifuri Sand Sea mastery insight, skim over the quicksand and get on your raptor. Run east over the sand dunes, along the cliffs and dodge over the snakes and sand sharks. The Teleporter Mastery Insight is just to the north. This one reminds me of a musical light game. First speak to Pahan and turn around. There will be 6 light markers and I suggest you write down the pattern before you get going. When they flash in a certain order, you need to go and interact with them in the same order. There are 3 rounds of this to acquire the mastery insight. Next to this get your close by vista, hero point and POI to the east of the

mastery. There are multiple fights, so you might as well get that first before going for the vista. #4 Kusini Crossing

This is the final Mastery insight in Crystal Oasis. The picture of my map will lead you where I went. Go to Destinyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Gorge Waypoint and move north and then west I suggest mounting your raptor as you will have to first traverse through the camp and over some ledges on your left. Once you start going into the cave you need to be on your springer and jump up the left side wall using full burst. Once you get to the top keep running left around the corner until you see some more ledges on the right. There are multiple ways you can jump. Turn toward the middle and you will see the mastery insight. Depending on where you are, either jump over or glide over to the mastery and commune. At this point, I still have some

areas of the map to clear, but now that I have my mounts, finishing Crystal Desert will build up my abilities for my other mounts. I hope you take the time to talk to the NPCs, get all your hearts, POIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s,

hero points and do your storyline. As I said in the beginning, most of these are better to do with friends. Thank you to my friends: Gill, Kitty, Rhynor, and Winterlight for helping me achieve my goal.

Keep your eyes out for the next issue because I will start writing the next articles on Elon Riverlands and Desert Highlands. I see more Mastery Insights in my future!

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Surviving the Fall Avoid becoming the next Casualty of Floor By Gma Fog I must admit, following Foghladha around in his events, more than once I have fallen to my death. As I strive to catch up with him, I now know to look before I leap. Learning different approaches to jumping off cliffs in Guild Wars 2 is very important for survival. Some of the common and fun places to jump will be mentioned in my explanations. My goal in this article is to share how and where to jump with survival in mind. This is what happens when you don’t watch where you glide: The things to keep in mind are: where gliders and mounts work; what fall damage traits you can use; where the best ledges and haystacks can be found; and what are the techniques of jumping. At the moment, in WvW, mounts do not deploy and gliders only deploy on your captured soil. So you can potentially die in some areas if you are not watching. In PVE, gliders have no fly zones in jumping puzzles, fractals, dungeons, home instances, and personal storylines.

Traits You might ask, “Are there any traits I can use to help this issue?” Yes! Each profession has a fall damage trait of some sort. Press ‘H’ and click on the Build tab to the left. The specialization listed for each class 50

must be equipped to activate the trait. The pictures and explanations below will verify where you can find Fall damage traits: • Elementalist: In Arcane, look for Arcane Abatement on the first column at the bottom. • Engineer: Under Explosives, the top skill in the first column is Grenadier. • Guardian: Under Honor, Protector’s Impact is on the first column, at the bottom. • Mesmer: In Chaos, First column, the top skill is Descent into Madness. • Necromancer: In Curses, Terrifying Descent is on the first column, top skill. • Ranger: Under Wilderness Survival, Soften the Fall is in the first column, top skill. • Revenant: In Retribution, first column, top skill is where you will find Planar Protection • Thief: In Shadow Arts, Last Refuge is in the first column, top skill. • Warrior: Under Strength, you will find Peak Performance first column, bottom skill.

The Fun Begins Once you have your traits chosen, you should survive most jumps as long as you watch where you are. To land safely seek out haystacks (Red borderland and Drytop) or a bucket (Edge of the Mist); find ledges if it is a long drop; plunge into the deep water; walk off don’t leap off; know how far you can fall; and know when wings won’t deploy. Here are some places you can experiment with your techniques.

The Bucket

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Most are places Gma Fog learned with her travels in WvW and exploring Tyria with different events. There are a couple of tidbits of information you might want to know before experimenting with these jumps. If you leap, your glider can deploy in some of these jumps. There are 2 ways to disengage your glider. To help with these ventures, find places with diving goggles or walk off instead of leaping off cliffs.

the top. Go onto the first sail to the front edge. Walk off and steer down. It is best to drop when there is no dust storm.

Haystacks

Jumping into a haystack does take a lot of practice. There are many places haystacks are seen in Red Borderland. A favorite one is at Osprey’s Palace. You can find a tiny bird on top of the cliff right above the hay bales. GmaFog has only landed correctly once following commanders in WvW. But there always seems to be a group to revive you at the bottom.

I only know of one achievement where you jump off a tall, tall, tower into a little bucket. This one is sometimes very hard to get to as you die when attacked by enemies. There is no gliding in Edge of the Mist. Go to Stonegaze Spire, jump into the bucket and flush. Once you are at the top, look north toward the bridge. Two streamer flags will be just below you, one on each side. Run and leap between the flags and steer your way down. This one takes lots of skill but it really feels like an awesome achievement when you land it.

Another haystack is in Drytop. Go to prosperity waypoint. Run up and around to the jumping puzzle - The haystack is to the left of the start of the puzzle. Do the jumping puzzle as far as the set of sails near 51

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Ledges Looking before you leap is a very good idea. There are a few good calculations to make at this point: know how far you can fall without dying and look for ledges. I experimented with this in Lornar’s Pass at Mistriven Gorge. I found a mountain with ledges and moved up to the top onto the wooden deck and found a place to jump. Looking down, I could see a few stops to drop to. I walked off the edges and tried sliding down in another area. Trying to slide down, I received more fall damage than jumping ledges. If you can, wait for your health to recharge before trying another jump.

In WvW go to Green Borderland, Citadel Waypoint. Go out around the back of the merchant’s hut, toward the house to the southeast. Look down and you have step ledges to jump.

Leaping into Deep Water Three of my favorite places to dive in game are the backside of Garrison in Blue borderlands; in our guild hall, Lost Precipice, off the waterfall; and the Lighthouse in Lion’s Arch. Another good ledge to practice on is off a Vista in Wayfarer Foothills to the northwest. Great ledge jumping if you don’t have a glider.

Borderlands Garrison Press B and go to the WvW Borderlands - Head to Garrison waypoint and move south to the ledge

where you find the vista. When leaping off the ledge, be cautious to steer around the rocks as you jump.

Lost Precipice Guild Hall

In the Lost Precipice guild hall, this jump was off the waterfalls in the northeastern corner. Go to Upper Plaza Waypoint and run east as far as you can to the bridge - you will see the waterfall below you. Jump onto the rope and glide down to the top of the waterfall and walk off. If you leap off your glider will engage. There is a big boulder at the bottom that can kill you, so get centered up on the waterfall edge. The third rock in the water from the left will be center. Enjoy the fall!

This is at a diving goggles place on top of the Lighthouse. When you are using the diving goggles, make sure to leap off, so you can steer and miss the rocks on the way down. If you already have the diving achievement and are glider equipped, it is a beautiful fly. Just make sure you are over water when you glider runs out.

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Lighthouse Dive in Lionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Arch

The final way to practice, is to join any of the Gaiscioch Events. Whether GmaFog, Smitty, Terafer, Old Goat, Namrie, Kitty, or Foghladha are leading, you will have a great time jumping (and falling) off cliffs.

Bounce well my friends. Foghladha is such an experienced survivor. I added, with his permission, a video of his antics in jumping entertainment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylgZbFNQyzI

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Tinte’s Adventures in the Crystal Desert A Path of Fire Story - Part 1 By Briseadh

Once one menace to Tyria found its demise another one arose. Having dealt with Mordremoth, I now had to deal with Balthazar. What was I thinking? He claimed to be a god, one of the six that humans worshipped. I never got into worshipping a god, being an Asuran, but I still had beliefs in things greater than ourselves, greater than all the races. Thinking of what defeating a god could mean made my head spin. If Balthazar could go down, then was he a god at all or just some super force doomed to meet his match? If defeated, what about 54

the other gods of the humans? Yup, I found not believing in gods like the humans far easier even if it all led to questions better off for a philosopher rather than my analytical self. Regardless, Balthazar’s actions could rip Tyria apart. I had to get to the Crystal Desert and fast! Thankfully I could convince Captain Kiel to give me an airship ride from Lion’s Arch. I went alone, making the whole crew wonder how on Tyria I would defeat a god. The landing came at an unexpected point in order to help

save a mine and village. I did not expect to find minions of Balthazar. We took them in groups, but wound up having the whole bunch coming at us. I pulled off smaller groups to blast with various fire and lightning effects using my new Weaver abilities. It proved quite satisfying. The Herald of Balthazar showed up. He had some powers one had to watch, but he ran off before we could do much. I chased him through the mine, managing to get some hits on him here and there until we came to the village.

At the village, he pulled out more minions while he went about setting fires to raze the place. Things got sketchy in the fight and I have to admit to going down more than once trying to deal with the number of minions and the random attacks of the Herald on me in the midst of his fire starting.

By the time, they were dispatched I was tired. No time to stop now. The village stood in flames with many downed villagers. I acquired an amazing fire extinguisher from one of the survivors and access to a raptor I could ride. I’ve only driven a reliable golem, so hopping on the back of a scaly beast felt daunting. Especially with how it could jump over large gaps between buildings or missing parts of bridges. However, without the mount, I would never have reached all the villagers and fires. My reward for helping included the raptor mount I had borrowed. It did not take long to find it a boon to traveling the desert for the first time. This included some tail swiping of spiders to clear out another mine area in the direction

In Amnoon, I met up with Rytlock, ready to kill a god, and Lady Kasmeer Meade, who wondered about what would become of worshipping the Six Gods. A reminder that I was glad to never worship a god that had the possibility of being destroyed by mortal efforts. Talking to Captain Rahim, I was sent off to talk to three people: Deputy Qais, Chief Councilor Imann, and Deputy Agomb. I went to see Deputy Qais first, who sent me on to talk to Zalambur. It turned out Zalambur ran the casino and involved himself in other nefarious things. One of those nefarious dealings involved Archon Iberu, a necromancer of great power. Bad business decision by far. Meeting the guy made my skin crawl and then he left the casino leaving behind awakened minions. I had enough of undead of any type in prior adventures and found anyone wanting such minions had only themselves in mind. Needless to say I had some fun cleaning the casino of those awakened. It also put me in the better graces of Zalambur, though I wonder about a man that would deal with such an evil man. Next I dealt with bickering counselors with all different ideas of how Amnoon should handle the issues at hand. It gave me a worse headache than a debate

of the proper way to construct a new machine. I managed to parse all the information to come down to three choices: Amnoon stayed independent without making allies, it allied with the Sunspears, or it accepted Joko’s offer. Now this led me to an issue. Joko proved to be the leader of the awakened, so how did Archon Iberu fit in the equation. Maybe they were one and the same or the Archon was a minion of Joko. Either way I would never side with them. Amnoon would have no independence and probably wind up mindless awakened if they took the offer. The idea made me want to retch.

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Then the Herald ran off again. What was it with the evil ones? Thinking they can save themselves and have minions kill me off. I’ve proven I don’t die easily and so far I’ve gotten up more times than I went down. Two rather large forged minions reminding me of dogs appeared. I spent half my time dodging the tag teaming minions while managing to lay down some of my own destruction upon them.

the Herald had gone. I never saw the Herald again, but I made it safely to Amnoon.

I told them to resist Joko, using the Sunspears for help. This meant Amnoon had to finally take sides and stop hiding behind its walls. Probably the better thing even if the change could cause more trouble before it got better. Lastly, I talked to Deputy Agomb in the refugee camp. He suggested talking to the refugees to find out what happened as they ran from the hordes of Balthazar. Some reported the hordes were marching from the north which made sense from what little I’d seen of the lay of the land and the location of Amnoon. The more interesting tidbit got my attention. Vlast (aka Gleam) had saved some of those fleeing before the horde. What was Aurene’s brother doing here? I had to go to a high point south of the refugee camp in order to get in contact with Taimi. She proved 55

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to be her usual talkative self full of ideas and complaints about tours interrupting her work. One of the things we agreed upon was that going after more dragons would only make things worse for Tyria. Taimi would try to convince people of this and that Balthazar needed to be dealt with. Back in Amnoon I find I need to return to Zalambur. Once in the casino I found Canach, who wanted to join in the fight. The usual sarcastic camaraderie immediately flowed between Rytlock and Canach. At least some things were predictable. So I walked into Zalamburâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s office with three friends this time. Zalambur confirmed what I feared. Balthazar hunted the crystal dragon. It appeared he wanted to use its power one way or another. I could not let this god gain control of Vlast. Thankfully dragons could handle a lot more than I ever could, but we were talking of a god here, or at least a selfish immortal with too much power for his own good. Our next step required checking

out the most advanced camps of the Forged. Canach stated he wanted to scout the main camp, but Rytlock did not want to let him go alone. I guess he still felt the need to babysit the Sylvari after our last adventures. Of course he stated his excuse included the need for a fight because of his boring vacation. I let them have at it and would meet them near there after checking out the two subcamps, since Kasmeer wanted to get to the Temple of Kormir. I had to sneak in and out of both camps to accomplish anything. Part of this occurred to get the lay of the camp and then determine the best route to complete the tasks required. In the northern camp I used explosives and my own magic to destroy cannons that could come too close to raining havoc down on the areas just outside the city walls. With some work they may have been able to hit Amnoon. The camp to the southeast of the city contained forged parts and intelligence worth having to understand the Forged. After spending more time than I

expected dealing with these camps alone, I met up with Rytlock and Canach outside the main camp further to the east of Amnoon. Being the sneaky types we were, we went in the main gate. Okay, Canach managed to open it quietly, but we charged in noting where scouts were stationed. The place crawled with Forged and we managed to take out scouts that ran for the warning alarms to alert the rest of the camp. It took several skirmishes to clear our path up to yet another gate. Not far from this gate, we found a note to get at the dragons through Vlast. That did not bode well. Canach managed to open the next gate. We entered the heart of the camp to realize we had four captains and more Forged than I liked to defeat. This fight proved more grueling than the outer part of the camp. I was glad for a repair canister with how I took a beating. The captains fell, but then it got worse. A Forged Bastion with a good array of fire and other attacks appeared. As we fought to take him down, more Forged showed

we went to the Temple of Kormir to meet up with Kasmeer. I made another ally there in Kito, part of the Order of Shadows. I had never heard of them, but he seemed a worthy fellow, especially since the Herald of Balthazar showed up to ruin the day.

By the time, it finally fell my armor had taken a great deal more damage and I did not have another repair cannister. Sometimes I wondered about my choice of running into the thick of things as an elementalist with a staff. I got better at weaving my elements with all this fighting, but it needed work. A lot of work. I thought I would get a rest once

The battle raged until I had to ditch my armor due to it taking too much damage. I did not care that I was running around nearly naked. This Herald would eat some elemental anger from me. Things felt promising when the

Herald complained to Balthazar about how we were kicking his butt. Then the weasel escaped through a portal before we could finish him. We had gained a lot more intelligence on his skills and abilities. Next time he might die faster.

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up. We had to pull off to clean up the minions and then rush in to damage the Bastion some more.

I had to round up refugees and get them to a place safe from the Herald, The priestesses did not slack in joining the fight, which kept the Herald from attacking me. Unfortunately some refugees were killed while trying to get them to a safe area. It was frustrating to clear one area only to return and see the Herald running after more refugees in another. That fueled my anger.

We all traveled to Makli Outpost where we found the nomads trying to flee from the destruction the Forged continued to rain down on the outpost and all over the salt flats. I did not have the heart to tell the leader of the evacuation that nowhere would be safe if we died. Considering the effort to get this far, it would not surprise me if someday soon I never got up again. We knew Vlast was somewhere in the salt flats, but no one would open the gate to let us out. No problem, over the wall we jumped and it did not take long to find a Forged to beat on. It took longer but we scoured the area for all the Forged, saved some fallen nomads, and cleared out elite squads of the Forged by the skin of our teeth. My armor did not get ripped off this time. 57

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A crystal shard gave us clues that Vlast indeed had been here. I’m glad I had the added help of Limia Rocksdale on this part of the mission to snipe things from farther than my spells could reach. It helped with some tricky spots of getting the attention of the Forged without all of them coming at us. Even so I found myself on the ground more than I liked. I’ve jokingly been called a glass cannon by friends. Keep me on my feet and I can rain stuff down, but unfortunately I can trip over my own feet at times. We find the Herald again. He doesn’t seem as cocky this time and we defeat him. It did not even seem all that climactic despite him

throwing all his usual tricks. We still had to find Vlast and would probably have our first face off with Balthazar himself. The Herald at this point proved to be a bump in the road. Gods are no joke to fight. I have to admit I’m not sure it felt harder to fight than when I faced Mordremoth, but this time I had no idea if I could kill my opponent. Vlast had chains about him magically created by Balthazar and the god takes a moment to call Rytlock friend. Then the god started slamming everyone. I know I blacked out for a moment with a huge knockback.

Vlast erupted from his chains and dove between me and Balthazar. I see the sword sink into the dragon and then this time a white out. The explosion makes my ears ring. Once my body overcomes the shock there is no sign of Balthazar and a crystal shard from Vlast remained. Inspecting it further I find a message to his sister because it is a memory crystal. What I could surmise from the message: Balthazar wanted Vlast’s power that he carried within the prophet’s shadow and his sister had to unlock the power before Balthazar could. I had no idea what the prophet’s shadow meant but Kasmeer stated it meant Glint’s lair.

This made my head hurt. I had no issues with Rytlock helping a man that helped him. The theology this implied could unravel all sorts of things about the six. So a god can be chained with no way out at all. Did the other gods do it? If so, why? If not a god, then how could any of the six claim to be gods. It felt easier to dumb it down to immortals not wanting to share the power of ruling over humans. It appeared Balthazar wanted the ultimate title of god. Not that I would worship him, upstart that I

found him to be, even if I doubted I could kill him. Regardless of what this all meant, one thing I did know. I had to go scour the desert and get all of Vlast’s exploded fragments before Balthazar’s horde did. Rytlock, Kasmeer and Canach headed for Glint’s Lair. Canach gave one piece of final advice to figure out how the locals got around this part of the Crystal Desert. I had a feeling I needed a new mount. I acquired the new springer mount and used my exploration of finding all of Vlast’s memory shards to help train it. I’m not sure how long I explored, but I found some interesting places. Some of them I will return to when my mounts have further training completed. Vlast’s memory crystals, which I know I did not pick up in order, confirmed what I already knew and clarified the pieces that I had missing. For instance I already had hints of a weapon of massive power that Balthazar wanted to get his hands onto. It could lead

to something unpredictable if he gets to it first. The weapon was made so mortals had a chance to fight cataclysmic events that could destroy all life. Vlast knew Balthazar sought the weapon for the wrong reason and that he and Aurene did not stand ready for this. So I had to find a way to beat Balthazar to the weapon knowing he already tossed us like rag dolls in our last encounter. Vlast’s mother never let him destroy the weapon and he never shirked his responsibility: however, he felt trapped. Killing the jungle dragon had increased the power of his sire. Kralkatorrik still grows in power with the death of Vlast’s mother unavenged.

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Then I had to face Rytlock. We spoke privately because I wanted to know how Balthazar thought Rytlock a friend. Rytlock reluctantly confessed that while in the mists, he finally found his sword, Sohothin. A man in chains was near by and helped free the sword and restore its fiery blade. For the help, Rytlock freed him. The man sent him home through a portal. Not until Balthazar called him friend did Rytlock realize who the man had been. Now he vowed to atone for letting Balthazar lose.

All of this plagued Vlast, and the fact he had never met his sister added to it. I’m sorry he was brutally slaughtered in order to save me so I might complete my mission by finding the weapon first. I’m not sure how Aurene will take this, but I know via Taimi that she became suddenly upset and is even snapping at her exalted. I’m

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not sure how I’ll face her when telling of her brother’s courageous death and steadfastness to his mission. I might just hand her the completed memory crystal and let her listen to his message. I have lost friends, but never family, leaving me wondering how Aurene must really feel knowing a brother she never met already caused a severed connection she strongly felt. I made my way to the entrance of the area where Glint’s lair should be and used my springer mount to get over the gate. I landed amongst my comrades busting on each other and then razzing me for a late arrival. Kasmeer and Rytlock have been to the lair before, but never via the path we were taking and I don’t think together. A little exploring led us into Forged that appeared settled here longer than a search party would. They were 60

mining branded crystals. We found strange tracks of something large and heavy Canach had never seen before, and a cannon appeared powered by branded crystals which just added to the curiosity. Even parts of an enormous machine littered the area. We

found

one

Glint’s

memory crystals further into the area. The message showed that Glint wondered if the heroes had sufficient courage, and that the only way to win was to unite all the races. Tyria could not survive otherwise. The crystal also appeared to have reacted to Rytlock’s presence. He can feel Glint’s power in them.

It took some time checking for all the crystals and piecing this information together. Upon checking what appeared to be the last crystal, a portal opened. Rytlock was sure it went to her lair, so we went through it.

to the outcome of that adventure. Kralkatorrik still lived but Glint, Snaff and Eir did not. He still needed the answer to make all this right and I’m not sure I can give it to him. We destroy the spear though Rytlock thinks that is a bad idea. We can’t afford Balthazar getting ahold of it. The last time we met him he had wiped us up like mud

on his floor. We did not need a weapon we were not ready, or possibly unable, to use. We needed something far greater in order to defeat a God. We decide to get answers from the gods themselves…. ----------------------------To be continued in Issue 15. Return then to see how the gods react and where the adventure leads beyond.

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We gathered several more. Glint gained compassion for the mortal races upon seeing that the world would be consumed. She had to figure out a way to stop it. Vlast’s birth started a new age and he would carry the burden. She could feel Kralkatorrik stirring and feared what would happen when he awakened. She still felt connected to him despite the cleansing she acquired from what the Forgotten had done to her.

We entered to find the spear made by Glint to kill Kralkatorrik. Before we could debate on much we wound up in a nasty fight against a Facet Guardian. It took some figuring out, but the minions that would come to his aid had to be killed. They would then drop essences of darkness and light. Using these properly I could shield myself against the Facet’s attacks to get close enough to dispel its shield. There were several tries that hurt immensely due to not timing it right. Most of my attacks could be done from a safe range until I had to work on dispelling the shield. The dance took some time before the battle was won. Glint was most uneasy with the prophetic visions she had of the heroes gathering to face the Elder Dragon. Rytlock is mad due 61

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Home is where the Heart is By: Benjamin “Foghladha” Foley

ooking back at the long road we’ve traveled as Gaiscioch, few games really have that sentimental attachment like Guild Wars 2. Our journey to Guild Wars 2 began in 2009 when I first picked up a gaming magazine at an airport and read about Guild Wars 2 for the first time. At the time we were heavy into Warhammer Online and having a fantastic time leading large scale siege warfare. One of our top warlords and essential part of the Gaiscioch Trinity (Three Raids, One

Warforce) was Oldroar. As Guild Wars 2 began flushing out their plans and making their game more public, Oldroar became really excited about it. He kept our eldership team apprised of all developments, right up to the point where he encouraged me to head up to Seattle and meet them at PAX West in 2010. At that conference I would meet Martin Kerstein, who I was introduced to by my ol’ Mythic buddy, Andy Belford. That introduction would serve to pave the way to the most successful chapter in Gaiscioch history.

That short introduction would bloom into a wonderful relationship between ArenaNet and Gaiscioch, which has lasted almost a decade. Unfortunately between PAX West in September 2010 and the time we’d be involved in alpha in February 2011, Roger “Oldroar” Rall, the person behind getting us involved and excited about the game would pass away. Just 3 months before he would have had the chance to play. This was the first time we lost a member of the community and

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it hit us tremendously. The second week the game was live we hosted a public memorial for Roger on the Sanctum of Rall at Shaemoor Garrison. Over 700 players from Warhammer Online, Guild Wars 2, and World of Tanks flooded into our Ventrilo server to say goodbye to our dear friend. At the time it was a bitter taste of the reality our future held. It was our first, and would not be our last. Over the course of the next few years we lost Jexia to cancer, Zurdot to cancer, Morrigana to cancer, Paleus to heart failure, and most recently Myrinbird to cancer. Today 6 statues sit inside the Gaiscioch na Rall guild hall, giving us a reminder that life is so short,

and those we love we must cherish every moment we have with them. As I look to our past, I can say with certainty that those ascended Gaiscioch won’t be forgotten and will always hold a place in our hearts. Running a gaming community has been filled with heartbreak and devastating moments but we continue to push forward as a family and honor those who have ascended. It has given me motivation to make everyday a memorable experience. To make every second count. Life is too precious to let it slide through the fingers of everyday life. Embrace it, celebrate it, marvel in it.

What I can tell you is, regardless what the future brings, Guild Wars 2 will always hold a special place in our hearts. To think it all began with an excited mentor, a gaming convention, a friend introducing a friend, a premature goodbye and an arsenal of cookies. To us Sanctum of Rall will always be home. It’s not a server, it’s a memory, an emotional attachment. A place to honor a friend and stand when others choose to flee. Roger never did like the easy road. The most memorable battles are the ones where you are out gunned, out skilled, and out matched, yet somehow you manage to succeed.

Guild Wars 2 Fan Artist Spotlight:

Guild Wars 2

Pink Alp Bananas

Biography:

Guild Wars 2 Background:

When I was little our home was filled with comics

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been playing GW2 from the start and main a

like Tintin and Asterix and I loved them and read

ranger that has 90% from my 2000+ hours in the game.

them many times over and over. I wanted to some

I really enjoy the relaxed casual vibe of the game but

day draw a comic just like them. Of course I also read

still I recently crafted my first legendary, Kudzu, that

Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes, two iconic comic

proved that I can have long-term goals in the game

strips that remain my inspiration for this project.

too.

Guild Wars 2

Follow Pink Alp Bananas At: http://pinkalpbananas.tumblr.com/ Twitter: @myshachu 65

Headhunting in Rift Foghladha’s Intro Guide To Bounty hunting RIFT

By: Benjamin “Foghladha” Foley

There’s a new sheriff in town, and the villainous, corrupt, and downright evil never stood a chance. Across my exploration of RIFT I came across a mysterious achievement line under the title “Bounties”. Upon scouring across the Internet and asking Uncle Google and Aunty YouTube if they knew what RIFT Bounties were, I came up empty. Like any good mystery it got it’s hooks into me and I felt compelled to find the answer. I came across a few old forum posts in the archive section of the RIFT forum that mention these are the creatures that spawn every 12-14 hours randomly in set locations. They are noted with the Guild Tag <Most Wanted>. With this tidbit of information I was able to find a few locations of these “Most Wanted” and felt compelled to share them with others. But first, we must ask. What are bounties and why should I care? Bounties offer a great potential for achievements and revenue. There are a few key points you should know about these creatures.

1. You must be of close level to them to receive a reward. If they are not Green or higher to you they will drop nothing. Use mentoring to adjust your level to the correct level. 2. There are Epic versions of these which will require a group to successfully pull off. These versions can be killed with ease at a higher level, yet will weild no reward. At level they will rip your face off and eat you for breakfast. 3. These Bounties will, 100% of the time, drop a special artifact that will be part of a bounty collection. 4. Bounty Collection rewards are pretty sweet loot upon completion. 5. Most Bounty Artifacts can range from 50 - 500 gold on the auction hall. Making it one of the fastest ways to stockpile wealth in Rift. For this first look at bounties, let’s take a look at the Tier 2 Bounties of Gloamwood and Stonefield.

Tier 2: Stonefield & Gloamwood the bounties

Contract

Sheriffs Notes

Bessie Deathlight Eialos Eye Gouger Gore Ripper Grunk Ieasis Packmaster Vrexis Queen Ia Skyslayer Stonegaze Tewop Yedisth Harbinger of Regulos Fluffy

Once known as the Battle Cow, Bessie is out for blood. Beware of this angry cow. A wisp gone wrong, this corpse candle got a taste for blood. A Manticore with devastating melee attacks but a weakness for ranged combat. This Cockatrice has a weird appetite for eye balls. No idea why. A serious murderer this Bloodstrutter should be an easy kill for the right hunter. A mountain troll who is wanted for moving rocks illegally. A spooky bat whose wanted to terrorizing locals. A mysterious Kobold who has lead an uprising in the mines of Stonefield. The queen of an illegal Ant Empire. Wanted for steeling Ashaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Crumpets. Wanted for defecating on public property. Bring this Roc to justice. This Basilisk has created some of the more modern statues in our Dimension. A Forest Troll that has been terrorizing bird watchers St. Patrick missed this one, help us out and remove this snake from Telara Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not just a Bunneh! Bring friends or lose your face. A vicious werewolf. Do not engage by yourself or you will suffer a terrible fate.

Last known Whereabouts RIFT

Elder Scrolls Online

Armchair Adventures in Tamriel Playing Elder Scrolls Online from the Playstation 4 By Don Rush I have played Elder Scrolls Online before on the desktop and I did enjoy it, but I stepped away from it for a long time. Shortly after Morrowind launched, I decided to give Elder Scrolls Online another try, but this time I wanted to play it on the Playstation 4. What I soon discovered was a new found joy for Elder Scrolls Online. I could sit back on my comfy couch and get lost in Tamriel. This was also the first time I had experienced One Tamriel since that update had launched and I felt like I was playing Skyrim once again. The walls of the sandbox came down and I could explore wherever I wanted with whichever character I created. When I started playing on the Playstation, I began my adventure with a Nord Dragonknight from the Ebonheart Pact, same class and race I used when I played on PC. I reached about level 8 and started to 68

feel a little bored with the game, not the game’s fault but mine, I am viewing game content that I have seen before. So before calling it quits, I rolled a new character in the Aldmeri Dominion, an Altmer Sorcerer. Funny part is I tried to play this class as a tank. Started out ok but got a little tougher as I progressed. Even though the sorcerer/tank attempt wasn’t going as well as I would have liked, I found myself losing time while playing. Guess I must be enjoying the game to go into “Coma Game” mode. I was enjoying it so much that I decided to get the Morrowind expansion, which only added to my enjoyment. However the new expansion created a new problem that is common among most gamers, Alt-itus. I tried the new warden class but quickly found that this class wasn’t my style, so rolled a Templar and this class has become my primary character.

I can say that I am very happy that I gave Elder Scrolls Online on the console a chance because I have found incredible enjoyment from the game. In my opinion, a sign of a good immersive game is when you say “Oh I’ll just play for an hour or so,” and after the said “hour” you look out the window and say “is that the Sun coming up??!!” Oops. Your “hour” of gameplay turned into an all nighter. I may or may not have had this experience before. Have fun exploring Tamriel from your couch.

Elder Scrolls Online

As for the gameplay of Elder Scrolls Online on the Playstation 4, I found it to be very smooth and easy to use. The combat system with a controller very much reminded me of Skyrim, only with some skills added. Mapping skills to the buttons is pretty simple, I did find I had to remap or rearrange what skills were where, based on how I used the controller. Less common skills such as self heals I would map to the left button and buffs I would map to the right button. Attack skills I would map to the square, circle, and triangle buttons. The controller tutorial early on was easy enough to follow. I haven’t used many of the social interactions as of yet. The text chat system isn’t as fluid as a computer, but that is to be expected. Essentially you have to stop your gameplay to bring up the chat screen and “type” your message. I recommend you use chat from a safe place.

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BEST OF PAX WEST 2017

Ashes of Creation Makes a Huge Splash By: Benjamin “Foghladha” Foley As you walk around the floor of PAX West, you begin to notice the famed red hats “Make MMOs Great Again” wandering among the crowd. Then you see the booth. Ashes of Creation went all out and when you compare it to the other crowdfunded projects in attendance you can see that their focus is getting the players hands on their product. The line to get hands on with this title wrapped completely around the larger sized booth which rivaled Ubisoft. Players were very excited to try out this new innovative MMORPG. I had a chance to get hands on with it for the first time and I can personally attest that this pre-alpha build was a very significant influence on raising my faith in the game. While much of their pre-alpha build is in an experimental state

and is likely to change before launch I can share some of the key points that bring a lot of promise to the title.

Audio is Magic There has been a lot of innovation over the years when it comes to audio. For the score of Ashes of Creation, they recruited the legendary composer Bear McCreary, known from Battlestar Galactica, Outlander, Defiance, Da Vinci’s Demons, Agents of Shield and The Walking Dead. In addition the sounds when you’re casting spells and landing a hit are seriously adrenaline inducing. You can feel the impact in the bass and it all comes together beautifully like a cinematic movie that you’re playing.

Collision is back!

World Abilities This is a fairly new concept to MMOs that In my travels I have not seen in practice. Each class has their own skills that help players traverse the world. Mages can levitate bridges to cross chasms, tanks can spot enemies moving in the distance, rangers can track footprints, and clerics can cleanse environments

Fluid Motion

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Finally, a game has returned to what made Warhammer Online legendary for it’s time. Collision with hostile and friendly players makes tactics like shield walls applicable. One of the very first things I did in the demo was try to run through my brother Donaliam. When I could not I jumped onto a tent and jumped onto his head. There was a full collision box around him. Later while we were fighting NPC’s the collision box was on them as well. This will allow for bottlenecking which allows mages and archers to enjoy open season. Siege warfare without collision never seemed as epic.

allowing groups to pass through poisonous terrain. Each has their own unique skill that can help groups unlock secret areas, alternate paths, and discover treasures.

Oh, you know there will be a new Foghladha Free Running video in the mix. Ashes of Creation’s movement controls remind me of Unreal Tournament. Silky smooth, non clunky, and very responsive. The animations go right in line much like playing Assassin’s Creed. For a pre-alpha MMO the character movement is unmatched. I didn’t feel restricted in how my character controlled when jumping from object to object. I even had a little free running experiment in town jumping from tent to tent to wagon to tent.

Anti-Griefing Mechanic As with any PvP game that features a wealth of PvE, there will be a wealth of players drawn to that PvE 71

that might not want to PvP all the time. The good news is that Ashes of Creation has a PvP flagging system that players who do not wish to PvP can disable. When the tag is disabled and you are accosted by another player and do not retaliate you suffer minimal loss on exp, and some items you’re carrying in your bag. You will not drop any equipped items. However, the person who accosted you becomes penalized in a big way. The lower their karma score the more they drop when they die, and the only cure for their bad behavior is death. As their karma level decreases, their bounty grows. Bounty hunters will be able to pick up their bounty in town and see them on the map. Those players that attack non-combatants will be killed and will lose everything they’re carrying. In addition they will lose an increasing amount of exp depending on how many people they have killed. This should deter jack wagons from camping those low level quest hubs looking to spoil a new player’s experience.

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There are exceptions to this rule. There are specific hostile zones where you will be flagged PvP regardless of your flag. In addition caravans have a floating PvP

radius around them that will make anyone nearing the wagon killable. When PvP is consensual neither party suffers full loot drop or major exp loss. PvP is encouraged in the game, but it is encouraged in a consensual manner. While you can be killed at any time, anti-griefing mechanics deter players from killing you when you don’t wish to PvP.

My Experience The only drawback in my short play session was the skill shot based skills. As a healer I was concentrating on the health bars of my allies and could not seem to keep an eye on the skill shot bar and their health bars at the same time. So I ended up avoiding the skillshot skills all together. As Steven mentioned, that system is experimental and will likely change. He did mention however that there are two types of skills: single press skills and action skills that require a skillshot. It’s entirely possible to slot and spec your character to never use one or the other. If you’re not a Hot Shots Golf legend, you might want to avoid the skillshot skills.

Steven’s Unique Leadership Style Now the last thing I’d like to share with everyone is about Steven. This was the first time I was able to meet him in person and see what kind of leader he was. Like everyone else I was a bit skeptical that a “Player” could set into a “Leader” role of a gaming studio and be successful on his first try.

He listened to our feedback, answered our questions, and treated us with respect and kindness. This was the first time I’ve seen someone in a leadership position do this and in the business world

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However after meeting him, seeing his vision, witnessing his conviction, and seeing how he interacts with his team, I believe he might just be able to pull this off. Now as a person who primarily works in the business world, I get to meet a lot of CEOs and top tier leadership. I can tell you one thing for certain, most leader positions will seek to elevate themselves over people they are conversing with. Whether it’s a stage, podium, or have everyone sit while they stand. Well this is what really struck me as unique about Steven. When he brought six of us media folk into the media room, we were all standing and Steven chose to lower himself to the people he was speaking to by sitting down.

this is unheard of. Traditionally the leader is the last to sit. This is when I realized that while Steven may be the leader at Intrepid Studios, he does not see himself as more important than his audience. He leads through encouragement and relies on his team to bring knowledge and solutions to his overall vision. He is humble, and the type of person who builds people up. He is an enabler making everyone around him feel important. I can now see how this product has become so polished so quickly and his team is quick to rally behind him. This experience solidified my opinion that he could in fact pull this off.

The Takeaway Even in pre-alpha, Ashes of Creation has come together beautifully with breathtaking visuals, visceral combat, and a truly immerse experience. I for one can’t wait to dive into the Alpha this December. Things are shaping up nicely and Steven’s focus and vision is driving this team forward at an amazing pace. The way his employees speak of him and the way he interacts with people gives me great confidence that Ashes of Creation will live up to his claims. So far with very little time in development they’re off to a great start.

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A New Challenger Enters the Battlefield By: Benjamin “Foghladha” Foley

When I first played Demon’s Souls for the first time, I nearly broke a controller. But for some reason I kept coming back. Since then there has been a trickling of games of similar style and difficulty. I like to refer to them as “Grey Hair Games”. They bring back that classic feeling of overcoming a tough if not near impossible foe. This is an emotion that has long since been washed away by the easy-mode formula so many games now share. During my trip to PAX West, I was introduced to Immortal: Unchained, a new game from Toadman Interactive. Immortal: Unchained takes a bit of a futuristic apocalyptic spin on things, complete with an unlikely guntoting hero in the form of an Immortal that was imprisoned for thousands of years. With the world in dire straits, he is released as a weapon to combat their impending doom. Preview

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Unleashing Powerful Weapons There are a wide array of weapons available in the game from swords, hammers, and guns as well as a crafting system to allow you to make new weapons. All of the weapons, including guns, will consume stamina which means you can’t just unload without repercussions. You must time your shots and strikes to ensure you have enough stamina to dodge, block, or counter. It’s not your traditional button masher with the high cost of death you can expect in any souls-like game. In the short demo we saw, our trusty guide 76

Sebastian showed us examples of the melee combat, ranged combat and even a bit of the problem-solving woven into the game. He explained that there will be many worlds that the player can explore.

Of Lore And Legend From a story perspective we can expect a pretty indepth narrative as two great minds have been hard at work giving this game a plot that we won’t soon forget. Anne Toole, who you may recognize from the Witcher, and Adrian Vershinin of Killzone: Shadowfall and Battlefield 1 take the helm in storytelling for

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Immortal: Unchained. While our demo did not have a wealth of storytelling, as it was meant to show off the combat and death systems, I can’t help but be excited to see what the lore team weaves into the story.

My Takeaway

some unique gameplay elements like guns, puzzles, and exploration to a genre that doesn’t get enough love. I suspect that it will be a love/hate relationship but one that players look back on and can say with pride, “I beat that”. I am very much looking forward to getting my hands on the game and will likely stream it a bit when I do.

I’ve played all of the Souls titles: Bloodborne, Lords of the Fallen, The Technomancer and The Surge. I long for that classic gaming experience where victories are earned not given. That intense feeling of victory that has since been systematically murdered by today’s game design techniques. Immortal: Unchained brings

Remember, Legends are born of strife. Nobody talks about the guy who had everything and still has everything. It’s the guy that lost everything and still prevailed against all odds that they write legends about. This game has the perfect setup to give gamers one hell of a memorable experience. 77

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Getting Volatile in Biomutant By: Benjamin “Foghladha” Foley Along my adventures at PAX West I stumbled upon the THQ Nordic booth, who just happened to be showing off Biomutant, a new action rpg where you take the form of a furry harbinger of destruction. In what I can only describe as an Assassin’s Creed meets Ratchet and Clank, this little gem has some serious gumption. From my short playthrough of the demo, the thing that struck me about Biomutant is the fluidness of controls. The contextual dodge mechanic can read the opponent and move your character under, over, or around them based on their current action. In turn you get a cinematic display of bullets and brutal melee mayhem wrapped in a furry package. 78

The art style of the game is very natural in tone. Lots of nature overgrowing destroyed structures brought back the ol’ Last of Us vibe. Then they throw on the problem solving layer to the game where you can learn skills that allow you to traverse various challenges with ease. Overall, Biomutant has a lot to offer to the action rpg genre and even plays on our past platformer experience. Even in it’s rough pre-alpha state it was very fluid and looked great. The weapon crafting system and augmentations made for a very diverse and almost limitless array of weapons to choose from.

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We played Little Witch Academia and, yes, it’s Magical! Preview

By: Edward “Screenager” Orr When you have a pedigree in over sized animated, drilling robots and fashion wars that feature more flesh than fabric, a coming of age story about friendship and magic might not seem like a natural fit. Thankfully, Yoh Yoshinari and much of the team at Studio Trigger seem to excel at shattering those expectations and producing some stunning anime at the same time. Little Witch Academia is the latest title from this Tokyo outfit and not content with wowing Netflix audiences, the team behind this charming tale are bringing Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time to PC and PlayStation 4 in early 2018. When Bandai Namco brought Little Witch Academia to the UK for the first time, Gaiscioch got hands on with this action role playing game that features a whole host of familiar faces. While we already know some of the playable cast include Diana, Hannah, and Barbara, our time in the prestigious 80

Luna Nova Academy put us in the shoes of the show’s protagonist, Akko Kagari. Accompanied by her two closest friends at witching school, Lotte Janson and Sucy Manbavaran, we tried to unravel the mysteries behind the Chamber of Time. This side scrolling preview is split up into several stages, and deposits Akko and her friends in a creepy cobbled street named the Labyrinth of Pollux. This level is split into several stages, each containing waves of monsters for the three young witches to defeat. Controlling Akko was relatively easy with an intuitive control set and very little room to get lost. Combat systems are also easy to unpick with a set of basic attacks and jumps accompanied by an array of much more impressive looking spells. Each of these six unique spells are clearly telegraphed on the game’s UI and do not take more than a couple of button presses to complete. A pleasant surprise

After crashing through a host of enemies,

completing five fairly linear stages, and uncovering a secret room, a final challenge awaits players in the Labrynth of Pollux. A huge monolithic golem guards the closing moments of this instance and it ratchets up the difficulty. Utilizing a range of attacks, and counter systems, Akko and her comrades need to avoid the massive hands, projectiles, and spells as they reign down on the party. This boss encounter is, again, not overly complex, but I can’t say it was a total breeze either. After absolutely no perpetration, I got Lotte killed and only just scraped by the final boss in a manner that I found was just an adequate challenge and still fun.

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is that rather than delve into deeply complex turn based strategy or team order systems, Little Witch Academia’s AI allows Lotte and Sucy to go about their business blasting gargoyles and slaying wolves while players concentrate on enjoying the game. This really lowers the barrier to entry for a title that should have a wide range of appeal. Thankfully these stages are also short enough that this intuitive combat does not become repetitive too quickly. Whether this means that the game’s final form will just be short, or well proportioned, I can’t say.

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That joy and wonder is central to Little Witch Academia anime and it’s great to see it in game. A+ games has crafted a game that sympathetically recreates Akko’s world, bringing the same personalities back that fans will recognize from the anime. Little touches like Akko’s mannerisms and the spells that Akko uses are appropriate and visually it looks stunning. Absolutely everything outside of the flashiest of effects looks hand drawn. Characters, especially, look like they have flown straight off the TV screen and into game. While cut scenes are frequent they do feel appropriate. Even the clips that precede

some of Akko’s most iconic spells, the ones that players will want to use repeatedly, left me with a grin, and that is what Little Witch Academia should do. Little Witch Academia: Chamber of Time is not mechanically revolutionary. Rather than feel shallow this seems to be a considered approach that should make Akko’s adventures open to everyone. Assuming that the story behind Akko’s first summer at Luna Nova Academy is as entertaining as the anime’s first season, then fans of the show will love creeping round the halls of this witching school.

ELEX: How to kill yourself, or not. Your choice! By: Jairone

Review

First, what is ELEX? Elex is the titular element of the new Pyranha Bytes post apocalyptic RPG. For those who might be familiar with Gothic or Risen, you will find some similarities here. Specifically, if you are familiar with the older Gothic games, where going off and facing the wrong foes is a sure way to get yourself killed. Elex offers a variety of difficulties, which will help mitigate that frustration a little for those just looking for the story, and which at the upper end can offer a wonderful challenge sure to drain off your consumables for veterans. As the titular element, Elex plays heavily into the story, and can serve to empower you… at a cost. It poisons the earth, preventing plants from growing, and in the same manner kills emotion. You have choices in the game. You can embrace technology, or reject it. You can fight with magic if you would rather. But first you have to gain the trust of those who can offer such bounty to you. I’ll add right here that this game comes with a language and subject matter warning. If you are going to have problems with cursing, drugs, and other fairly mature subjects this is probably not the game for you. Don’t play it in front of people who you would not want to expose to that either! This is definitely an 18+ game. 84

Okay, so tell me about the game! At the start you lose everything you had, except your looks. If you consider the single character that you can play as having good looks. That’s rather subjective! All you have left is a metal pipe that you can use as a basic weapon, and an implant known as an adjutor. This implant controls all the character functions, serving as a link to your inventory, map, character status, and mission log. Since it is technological it will be frowned upon by those who reject technology. This means you will get yelled at and potentially more seriously accused of crimes using it in the wrong places. Which may or may not impact your choice of where you end up wanting to call home.

draw your weapon. By default that will be ‘1’.

You will have only one path really open to you at this time, so explore around and head down it. There is at least one more place you could go, but it takes some climbing and will result in you getting eaten, most likely. You can find a handful of items throughout the area, and will soon end up facing your first defeatable foe, assuming you didn’t go off and get eaten. So let’s talk combat!

The game will provide hints, but your basic attack is the left mouse button, and your basic parry is the right mouse button. You also have a heavy attack set to ‘E’ by default, and a special attack set to ‘Q’. All the attack styles change based on the weapon you are using, so learning your weapon’s moves for timing can be important. Additionally you can roll away to defend yourself by evading attacks. Blocking attacks will reduce the damage you take, but not negate it, so evasion is your friend. The most important thing to remember is that you are limited by your stamina. You drain it by running, attacking, blocking, dodging, and being hit. Most foes will have attack patterns, but humanoid foes will have a similar stamina system. Figuring out how to deal with each foe is part of the game, and each type has at least one weakness you can exploit. For your first fight, if you hang back enough, you can get your foe to lunge. Strafing will make it miss. This allows you to lay a combo of hits on it, and defeat it. Using this basic tactic is a good starter point for learning to fight some of the creatures in the world.

Combat: There are three styles of attack with most weapons. Some of the options may be locked behind skills with ranged weapons, but for now you only have the melee option anyway. Pressing the assigned hotkey will Review

Once you have ranged weapons your options will vary, but in general holding the right mouse button will aim and the left will fire. Practice with how your weapon fires, and how physics applies. Just remember that these weapons tend to use some form of ammunition, and once it runs out you need something else as a backup!

do. It doesn’t hurt to take your time deciding what you like best, and where you want to call home. Talk to people, gain more experience, and learn new skills until you can face tougher foes!

Talking to people:

Continuing onward: Having beaten your first foe you will approach a building. Dig around inside, and kill any critters or foes you encounter for a little experience. Eventually you will come to the next really important point, the jetpack. The jetpack allows you to engage in limited flight. It refills automatically, so you don’t need to worry about fuel. This is very useful for exploring many areas that you normally could not access. It also can get you in trouble, as falling long distances is quite lethal.

Review

Beyond that, you will continue down your path to exit into the world at large. From here on you will have a lot of choice in where you go and what you

Talking to people has consequences. Not only will certain options change your missions, but the overall story can be affected. Beyond that, your character has an emotional range for how ‘cold’ you are. Cold can be thought of as being emotionless. The different ranges from high to low ‘cold’ offer three different benefits to your combat effectiveness, which can be important to those looking for the most effective combat setup. It is not, however, required. Each dialogue option also may change how a character perceives you, they may like you more, or dislike you more. This can lead to changes in their behavior toward you, whether not wanting to offer you services they provide or even to whether they will join you on an adventure. Thinking about the characters, how they act, and how you want to act, can tell you the likely results.

Many people will also have quests or goods for sale as you talk to them. Goods restock regularly, allowing you to stock things you need in trade for what you do not need. There is a limit, of course, based on everything you have gathered up. However, this ensures that you aren’t constantly having to run off to new places to get more arrows if you use them. You can simply talk to the same handful of people who will be busy replenishing their stock for next time!

How to get started beyond this: The first thing you will do as you head out is meet somebody. You don’t have a lot of choice with the cutscene, but from then on you do. Following them is a great way to get started, and the various settlements around the world will offer you opportunities to grow

Additionally, as you explore, take care to watch out for various clues that an area may be dangerous. If you start catching on fire, freezing, dying of radiation or poison, you should leave. You can come back to such areas once you are stronger, with better gear to survive those harsh environments. There’s loot to be had all over the world, just watch your fingers where people have their own houses. They will defend their property and also may attack you simply for trespassing. Unless you want to fight them, and are strong enough to manage, you should respect their privacy!

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Talking to people is also where the biggest rough spots to the game show up graphically. The mouths tend to have an odd glow around lips at times, and the clothes move oddly with what I assume is meant to be a breeze. Instead it looks like people have some sort of appendage coming out of their chest and wiggling around under their clothes. Some outfits seem more prone to this than others.

stronger. Seek out the opportunities you want, and when you feel you have explored and grown enough, pick one of the various factions to join. Until you do so your armor will be specifically limited, and armor makes a large difference in the damage you take.

Finally, there are no right or wrong choices in a game. Have fun. For more information on the game you can visit http://elexgame.com/

Breathtaking Visuals and Emergent Sound Hallmark The Solus Project By: Benjamin “Foghladha” Foley

A few years ago I stumbled upon a little gem created by a small team of Czech Developers called the Solus Project. As soon as it hit early access I snagged a copy and began playing. Now I’ll be the first to admit, survival games rarely hold my interest for long. About the time I’m punching my 1000th tree for enough wood to make an axe I usually lose interest.

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The Solus Project takes a very different approach on Survival. While you still must eat, drink, and sleep to survive it is not the focus of the game. You won’t spend your days farming materials to craft items to allow you to farm more materials to craft more items. There is no endless treadmill and this is a blessing in my opinion.

Instead, the Solus Project focuses on surviving the dangers of crash landing on a once civilized planet with a harsh ecosystem, strange creatures, and a constant bombardment of meteor showers, tornados, flash freezing, and other spur of the moment run for shelter like your life depends on it events. I can tell you with certainty that there is one thing that will stand out to you the most. The Audio. This game pushes the envelope on creating dramatic situations through music and sound effects. The music can change from calm and peaceful to hauntingly motivational… read that as get your crazy arse to shelter quick or be swallowed by a raging tornado, or maybe become the victim of a meteor hitting you in the face. Many of the game’s queues are tied into the sound. Dangerous situations can be heard before seen. With audio disabled you will likely fall prey to something before you know it.

Now that isn’t to say there isn’t more to love about this game. Think of it a bit like an exploration game ala the Uncharted or Tomb Raider series on a foreign planet, that is constantly trying to kill you. Early along the way you find an Unreal Tournament style translocator that will allow you to teleport a short distance, getting you a way past and over obstacles. There’s a fair amount of hidden secrets in the game, complete with hidden stories of the people who came before you. What happened on this planet? Where did everyone go? Why are there creepy dolls chasing you? These are all major plot points that will drive you forward in the story. You are humanity’s last hope, and before you can succeed in your mission you must assess the situation and figure out what happened to the ancient Egyptian-like alien civilization.

Review

Lastly I’d be a fool to not mention the visuals of this game. The art style is amazing and the skybox is mesmerizing. You can stare at it for hours and just lose track of time. Just a quick peek at the imagery from this game and you’ll see what I mean. Best of all this game was built with VR in mind.

Review

By the time you read this, I will be well on my way through my second playthrough of this game. Even playing it a second time, a year later on the Playstation 4, I’m still finding things I missed the first time I played and am finding myself loving the game even more.

It’s breathtaking, haunting, exciting, and mysterious all in one. It’s scary at times, but not jump scary to a stupid extreme. Just enough to give you shivers up your spine, not enough to be annoying. Overall the visuals tie into the audio flawlessly. The plot and pacing is perfect. For a small team indie game this one’s got all the things to rival AAA blockbusters. I proudly give this one Gaiscioch Magazine’s seal of approval and recommend anyone who likes survival and exploration games to give this one a try. You won’t regret it.

Review

What Makes Fortnite So Addicting?

Review

By: Benjamin “Foghladha” Foley

For a while now I’ve been following the development of Fortnite, a new action RPG filled with tower defense scenarios, loot collecting, and even base building. Fortnite provides a highly entertaining mix of crafting, construction, and termination. Like those old forts you used to build with Lincoln Logs and Legos, Fortnite allows you to construct your own bases and put them to the test against waves of Husks. What is it that keeps us coming back? There is something with this little gem that compels me to login everyday to play a few rounds. It’s not the daily loot rewards as so many other games offer those. Is it the base building that gets me or the wave after wave of carnage? I can’t really put my finger on it but something in Fortnite grabbed me early on and I can’t seem to put it down.

Battle Royale Now this past month they released Battle Royale, their free Person vs Person mode which pits players against 100 foes in an all out Hunger Games format. I miserably suck at Battle Royale, however I keep coming back for more. Like a 10 year old playing his older cousin, I keep rushing back into battle hoping to be the last man standing. Time after time I get sent home before the top 10. To date my best match was one I never did find a weapon. I hid in a teepee I built in the middle of a field and hoped nobody would find me. Someone even came and wacked on it before they were shot. Alas the wall of demise came and I had to make my move. Promptly being sniped from afar before I could get away.

But even though I never win, I keep finding myself longing to give it just one more try. It’s a good formula and the ability to watch or move on to your next match is a huge blessing compared to the Ark: Survival of the Fittest take where you had to sit and watch everyone else until all were dead. This keeps you in the action and keeps you from stepping away and getting distracted with something else. There are many games on the market that follow this 100v1 format, however Fortnite is the only one that has compelled me to keep playing.

Gameplay In the base game you’ll find several PvE battles to be faced. From Survivor rescue missions to launching a satellite van, the missions range in objectives. The first tier of the game gives you just a handful of different situations to get you started. As you advance new missions types are unlocked. In addition new areas are also unlocked giving you more bases, more challenges, and more unique recipes to craft.

Those Poor Llamas Ok I’m as guilty as the next guy. Hitting those pinatas is fun. I don’t know why, they just are. Throughout the game you will gain Pinatas of various sizes which when cracking them open will provide you with schematics, people, and resources for the fight ahead. Occasionally you can hit them and have them turn silver or gold which means you’ll be collecting quite a bit of extra rewards with that lamma. There are mini llamas as well which will give you 3 to 5 rewards.

Foghladha’s Top 5 Fortnite Curiosities #5

What is with the Pianos in the attics? How does it even happen!

I know violence is on TV, but how do TV’s have so many weapons and ammunition in them?

Is there a secret organization of lawn gnomes we should be aware about? They look suspicious.

Is every person buried a superhero? Burial plots yield an unnaturally excessive amount of bullets.

Why is it every toilet only provides you with bacon? They do know where bacon comes from?... Wait, I know where bacon comes from right?

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Building your Fortress One of my favorite parts of the game is doing missions to collect resources to build up your very own fort, which you’ll have to fend off waves of Husks to upgrade. One strategy I found with building bases is to build a giant pyramid over the defense node. At the foot of the pyramid place a circle of floor traps on metal floors. The row after the floor traps, moving away from your pyramid, build vertical wooden walls that are perpendicular to the pyramid as to not impede the flow of enemies. Upon these walls add a ceiling, then add one Shocking Trap to the roof and arrow launchers moving horizontal.

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One thing to remember is that if any wall stands in the path of the Husk, they will begin attacking it instead of walking through your traps. By creating easy lanes for them to walk and be obliterated you will keep them from blowing up your walls and breaking your traps. You will still have to worry about bashers and the gas can tossing heavys. They tend to make short work of your wooden paneling.

Your best bet is to experiment. Try something and see if it works. You never know you might just find the perfect defense.

Weaponry & Crafting There are several types of weapons in the game, sorted into 2 categories, Melee weapons and Ranged weapons. It’s very important that you always keep a melee weapon handy as there will come a time when you run out of ammo and can’t craft anymore. At this point you really don’t want to try to use your crafting pick. You can find or craft these weapons.

New Game Mode Experiments One of the really cool things about Epic Games is that they love to experiment with game modes. You may remember back in the day a game called Unreal Tournament. Their history of making entertaining encounters that keep people coming back goes back to the 90s. They historically have been known to experiment with odd ideas, whether it’s for a temporary

added a skill tree specifically for this game mode allowing players to progress within it. The Survive the Storm mode allowed 4 players to build up their base in a safe area before taking it into battle with them. They begin as a small 3x3 cube with limited resources. As players level up and progress their Horde skill tree they will be granted more resources and units to design in expanding to an eventual 9x9 grid. Now these matches do take quite a while to complete as you will have to survive 10 waves of enemies with a number of different modifiers added to the wave. But in the end this is the only way you earn skill points to upgrade your Survive the Horde bases.

game mode or something new like the Assault maps that were introduced into Unreal Tournament, which were the first of their kind.

I have no doubt this is just the beginning for Fortnite and there will be many additions over the coming months and years. For now I look forward to running across your path. If you play Battle Royale, you might just appear on my stream, viciously murdering me. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ok Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll respawn!

Fortnite is no exception. So far in early access there have been 2 different game modes added to put players skill to the test. In the most recent rendition they even

Review

A New Galactic Adventure Mass Effect Takes Gamers to the Andromeda Galaxy

Review

By: Don Rush

I have played the Mass Effect Trilogy start to finish a number of times and have had great enjoyment following and shaping the story of Commander Shepard (See Gaiscioch Magazine Issue 1). I first found out about Mass Effect 4, now known as Mass Effect: Andromeda, sometime in 2016. I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t find out too much about the game until itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s launch, other than the story would take place in another galaxy and would not be related to the Mass Effect trilogy.

How the Journey Begins The story starts between Mass Effect 2 and 3 with the Ryder family joining an expedition team, known as the Andromeda Initiative that will be journeying to the Andromeda Galaxy. A journey that takes 634 years to complete. The Initiative consists of the 4 Council Races: Turians, Salarians, Asari and Humans, along with Quarians, each sending 20,000 citizens on Arks one way to the Andromeda Galaxy. Each Ark has a Pathfinder team whose purpose is to locate suitable planets and resources for the Initiative to use to begin colonization of the Heleus Cluster of the Andromeda Galaxy.

Upon completing the journey, human ark Hyperion encounters an unknown energy force, later referred to as the Scourge, which caused some damage to the ship. The Hyperion is unable to contact The Nexus, a central command station sent by the Initiative. The Pathfinder makes the decision to head to the planet that was designated for the Humans to colonize. Upon arrival they find the planet may not be suitable for colonization and decide to investigate further. This is where the playerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s journey begins. Depending on the playerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s choice, you are either Sarah or Scott Ryder. Your father is the Pathfinder and you are a member of the Pathfinder team. While on the planet investigating why the planet has become Review

Review

unsuitable, your father is killed and the player assumes the role of Pathfinder. After leaving the planet, the Hyperion arrives at the Nexus to find the station is incomplete and running low on resources. The Pathfinder learns that none of the other Arks have arrived and the director of the Initiative has died. Nothing in the Initiative has gone according to plan. The Scourge has caused numerous issues for the Initiative and it is unknown where it came from. From here the player is given a Pathfinder ship, the Tempest.

Gameplay Similar to the Mass Effect Trilogy, the player begins to put together their own Pathfinder team. In the original trilogy, Commander Shepard was an established character with a backstory based on selections given to the player. In Mass Effect: 98

Andromeda your character Ryder is a rookie and some of the interactions with NPCs show their lack of faith in your character. The conversations with NPCs give you multiple choices, from logical, angry, sarcastic, or emotional responses which will cause the NPC to respond back accordingly. This also creates some funny dialogue. In addition to developing your characterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s personality, you have six classes to choose from to develop your combat style. As you invest your skill points you begin unlocking class profiles and each profile gives you special bonuses. Like the Mass Effect Trilogy, you travel from planet to planet in search of resources, allies, and the missing Arks. The planets you visit are vast and open, requiring the use of the Nomad, a rugged all terrain vehicle. It was pretty fun to drive, especially listening to some of the dialogue from your squadmates as youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re driving.

In Conclusion I did enjoy playing Mass Effect: Andromeda, however the quality of facial animations and dialogue of the game at launch were weaker, compared to the Mass Effect Trilogy. I personally felt the graphical and dialogues were minor and I could overlook them in favor of a pretty enjoyable story. The interactions and personal stories of your squadmates added some great moments that reminded me of the Citadel DLC in the Mass Effect Trilogy. As with the Mass Effect

Trilogy, there were characters I truly enjoyed having around. I also enjoyed seeing space phenomenon such as a Black Hole represented, based on current theories of what they look like. As a fan of Science and Astronomy, I have always enjoyed when developers use current theories in their games. I feel that adds a certain level of realism. Although Mass Effect: Andromeda quality is lower compared to the Mass Effect Trilogy, I still recommend you give Andromeda a try and have some fun exploring a new Galaxy.

Review

The Corniest Game Ever Made is an aMAIZEing Good Time By: That Idiot Foghladha

Review

In the wide open fields of the Steam store, there are few games that really grab my attention like MAIZE has. As a fan of humor-based adventure games like Conker’s Bad Fur Day and Sam & Max, the trailer for MAIZE sold me instantly. I mean who doesn’t want to play a puzzle solving story based game featuring corn, a scary house, and a Russian Teddy Ruxpin with a bad attitude?

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This game is fairly simple in format. You explore, collect, and use the items you find along the way to solve puzzles, and work your way around this old government facility, that doubles as a farm in the middle of nowhere. Who are you? What are you doing on this farm? These are two questions that you’ll be figuring out through the length of the game.

Now while most puzzle solving games, often times, keeps you guessing as to what is needed next and you’re often getting frustrated looking for that 1 pixel to click on to make the game progress, MAIZE makes it easy on you by putting yellow highlights on all the objects you can interact with.

service module updated. There is a ton of humor through the game, and it isn’t even limited to Vladdy’s remarks. The other characters in the game also add to the comedic value and you’ll often find yourself meeting interesting characters that make you wonder just what you’ve stumbled upon.

In addition your trusty companion Vladdy will insult you in the right direction if you get lost. This angry little bear obviously didn’t have his customer

You play a character that is a “Chosen One” among a long line of failed chosen ones. Do you have what it takes to succeed where so many have failed?

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Worth Playing Our Top 5 Picks for Fall 2017

Epic Stories

Gone To Soon

1 Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

Marvel Heroes Omega

2 Middle-Earth: Shadows of War

The Amazing Eternals

3 Assassin’s Creed Origins

Ghost in the Shell: SAC - First Assault

4 Total Warhammer II

Motiga

5 Wolfenstein II

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Master X Master

Worth Watching Top 5 Games to Get Excited About!

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Coming Soon

Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire

Ashes of Creation

Warframe Plains of Eidolon

Ascent: Infinite Realm

Fortnite: Battle Royale

Kingdom Come Deliverance

MU Legend

Ancestors Legacy

Ironsight

Wild West Online

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By: Benjamin “Foghladha” Foley

Through my searching for a way to bridge Gaiscioch. com and Discord I found a serious void of information when it came to Webhooks and PHP. There are a few github resources available that handle the hard stuff like oauth2 authentication and a lot of the pieces you need to run a PHP Discord Bot. However for the novice web programmer who is just looking to post an event, news announcement, or something similar without

the need for a full time bot. This is where Webhooks come in. This is an easy way for entry level PHP programmers to connect their websites to discord to send one way messages to their discord channels. This short tutorial and code sample will allow you to get up and running in no time.

Creating a Webhook To create a webhook simply: 1. Open your Discord. 2. Click on the Gear to the right of the text channel you wish to post to.

Guide

3. Click on “Webhooks” 4. Click “Create Webhook” 5. You can name your webhook and give it a cool icon. 6. Copy and paste your Webhook URL into the code on the next page.

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The PHP Script The first part of this script is a function that will handle posting the data to your discord. <?PHP function discordmsg($msg, $webhook) { if($webhook != “”) { $ch = curl_init($webhook); $msg = “payload_json=” . urlencode(json_encode($msg)).””;

}

if(isset($ch)) { curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, “POST”); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $msg); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); $result = curl_exec($ch); curl_close($ch); return $result; }

The next part is the actual action and message you wish to send.

Guide

<?PHP // URL FROM DISCORD WEBHOOK SETUP $webhook = “https://discordapp.com/api/webhooks/xxxxxxxxx/xxxxxxxx”; $msg = json_decode(‘ { “username”:”BOTNAME”, “content”:”The message the BOTNAME posts.”, “embeds”: [{ “title”:”The Link Title”, “description”:”The Link Description”, “url”:”https://www.thelinkurl.com/”, “color”:DECIMALCOLORCODE, “author”:{ “name”:”Site Name”, “url”:”https://www.sitelink.com/”, “icon_url”:”URLTOIMG” }, “fields”:[ { “name”:”LISTITEM1”, “value”:”LISTVALUE1”, “inline”:true }, { “name”:”LISTITEM2”, “value”:”LISTVALUE2”, “inline”:true }, { “name”:”LISTITEM3”, “value”:”LISTVALUE3”, “inline”:true }] }] } ‘, true); ?>

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Lastly there’s the call to fire the script. <?PHP discordmsg($msg, $webhook); // SENDS MESSAGE TO DISCORD ?>

Trial and Error From here you can play with it. You can omit any part of it, other than the “username” and “content” fields. If you would like to deck out your message with cool colors be sure to visit: http://coloreminder.com/ which will allow you to convert traditional web colors such as #002200 into decimal colors like 8704. Discord uses decimal colors so you’ll need to convert those colors to make it work right. My advice is experiment a lot. You can also find some additional features and formatting options at: https://anidiotsguide.gitbooks. io/discord-js-bot-guide/examples/using-embedsin-messages.html

Getting Fancy There is one last tidbit that I feel you might enjoy. You can also add any Emoji that you have on your server directly into your message. This can be done by: Enable Developer Mode:

Guide

1. Click on the Gear in the bottom left next to your name

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2. Click on “appearance” under App Settings 3. Scroll down to “Advanced” and toggle on “Developer Mode” Creating an Emoji: 1. Click the Emoji button to the right of the text dialog and choose the emoji you’d like to use in your script. 2. You will see a piece of code in the text box like “:smile:”. Take note of that, then press Return. 3. Right click the emoji and click “Copy ID” 4. Next fill the 2 pieces of information into the below tag. <:Emoji:EmojiID>

Example: <:smile:364504524896862220>

This can be done with any Emoji you’ve uploaded to your server. You can simply place that into any of the JSON fields containing text to make the Emoji appear.

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Tune in anytime on Spotify at: http://gsch.info/clubgaiscioch

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Stuffed Red-top Peppers By Robert J. “Jairone” Mann

Stuffed peppers: Yum, stuffed peppers! There’s so many different options and recipes with this idea, but there’s one thing of which I was never a fan. They always seemed messy. The top would be left open with the stuffing pouring out, or they would be in a giant puddle of sauce that went everywhere. So, of course, I once again entered the kitchen with the desire to make a recipe that was quick and tasty. I just had the extra goal of making stuffed peppers look nice and tidy!

Ingredients: • • • •

•

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• • •

1 lb. ground beef* 1/2 cup oats** 1/2 cup rice, dry** 2 cans 10.75 oz tomato soup (or 2 cups homemade tomato soup if you prefer) 1 tablespoon worcestershire sauce 1/2 cup chopped onion 4 nice bell peppers Any extra stuff you like***

Why are there stars by some of those ingredients, you ask? Because I’m giving you more information, of course! Here it is: *= You can use any ground meat you like, I shall simply continue to say beef in the recipe. You could also mix and match meats. Just

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remember that flavors will change when the ingredients do! **= Grains are what is important here. These materials are there to help bind the filling together, absorb juices, and add just a little flavor to the mix. You can use any grains you like as a substitute including quinoa, crushed pasta, bread crumbs, and so on. Feel free to start with the recipe as written and then experiment if you want! ***= There is only one rule here. If your ingredient is wet, you want to reduce the tomato soup you put into the mix.

The recipe: Set aside half of your tomato soup. This is reserved for topping the peppers. Chop your onion and any other vegetables except your peppers into small portions. Similarly, if you are using a larger grain ensure it is going to be sized appropriately to eating. Ideally you will use the Paysanne cut, which is ½ inch x ½ inch x 1/8 inch (1 cm x 1 cm x 3mm.) Slice into the top of each pepper, leaving an inward section at the top of the pepper intact. The cut need not be round, but should rather stay even with the sides of the pepper. A good slice around the

entire top will allow you to twist and pull the core of the pepper out. Clean the insides of seeds and the white flaps that connected to the core. If you wish, you may cut up the extra flesh off the top of the pepper to add to your filling. Mix everything except that reserved soup and the hollow peppers together. Mix well, so that the other ingredients are spread throughout the beef. Stuff the peppers, leaving a small indent on the top. This indent should be no more than finger deep. If you have left-over stuffing, you can freeze it, or add more grains and some egg to make meatballs or meatloaf. With the peppers stuffed, top with the reserved tomato soup. Spread to cover the filling for a neat appearance. Bake at 350 degrees fahrenheit, or 177 degrees celsius, for a minimum of one hour. Baking longer will start to slowly char the peppers, but will also make the peppers more tender. Do not exceed an hour and a half, as your peppers will start burning rather than just charring. Serve. Reheats well in the microwave, so leftovers are a go! Takes about 20 minutes of preparation time, plus shopping. Bon appetit!

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he Gaiscioch Family extends far beyond the game. Our members have a very broad professional background extending from teachers to CEO’s. Our members are involved in the businesses, organizations, and government agencies below. We are very proud of our diverse community and support our members in all of their real life accomplishments. 3M

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