Oola Steals Dwarf Technology

Throughout the Guild Wars history, and even in the playable periods, civilizations and cultures have risen and fallen like waves, but sometimes we see ripples of one falling wave affect a rising one. Asura meet Stone Summit, Stone Summit... Asura.


Back in November, 2005, ArenaNet gave the free mini-expansion Sorrow's Furnace to existing Guild Wars accounts. The expansion opened up a dungeon controlled by the xenophobic dwarf culture, the Stone Summit. The players had to beat a multitude of quests, revisiting Sorrow's Furnace multiple times, to finally face the end boss, the Iron Forgeman. At the close of the Prophecies campaign and the Sorrow's Furnace arc, the Stone Summit were largely defeated.

Nearly five years later, the Asura - a subterranean refugee race fleeing from the Destroyers - arrived on the surface of Tyria. Most of them took up shelter in the Tarnished Coast, but it seems that quite a few ventured around the other civilizations. Oola, a powerful Golemancer, in particular found herself at some point in the Southern Shiverpeaks where she happened upon the remnants of the Stone Summit's epic Iron Forgeman, or it may be that she stole it from Duncan the Black at Slaver's Exile. It is unclear if she just stole from the information needed to create their monstrosity, or actual pieces of the Forgeman.

Nonetheless, it is apparent that whatever she took was enough to start making smaller replicas of the golem in her own lab. Brave adventurers can seek out replicas of the fallen Forgeman in the Oola's Lab dungeon with the Eye of the North expansion.

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Emily Diehl talks on her job

The wonderful Emily Diehl has written a veritable wall of text on her job at ArenaNet and what it took to get there (and what she believes is important for future game programmers/developers).

The high point for all you dreamers:

I don't think I can really stress just how ridiculously into games I am and have been my entire life. From growing up and falling in love with my Atari, to playing pretty much everything that I could get my hands on since then, to devoting tons of free time to crazy game-related side projects, it's (embarrassingly) obvious how much I live and breathe games. In my interviews, I was completely grilled about all kinds of game related things. Luckily, I can talk animatedly for hours on any game subject you lob at me, so I guess I did OK :)

And the low point:

School gives you some additional tools and (usually) some kick in the pants to apply yourself. If you don't have the passion to drive yourself and make yourself actually do stuff on your free time and work towards your end goal of landing a job in games, you're probably not going to get very far. I know so many people that thought the magic key to success was "getting that degree". Some of those same people are now in totally unrelated fields with huge school bills because they slacked off and managed to squeek through school to get the paper and then realized that they didn't actually have the chops and skills/examples of skills to land that dream job. It's a huge (expensive) bummer for them to get out and have that realization hit after the fact.

There is plenty more at the wiki. [source]

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Nian Render

The wonderful Emily Diehl (hard at work creating the new Guild Wars (2?) website took some time from her busy schedule to post some fantastic renders of the Canthan New Year's NPC - the Nian. The Nian is a one-of-a-kind NPC that can only be killed with consumable items - fireworks.

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