I spent a couple of minutes yesterday watching THIS VIDEO about sound effects in GW2 and how some guy had noticed that when guns in the game fire, ANet have actually got lots of randomised soundbites for shell-casings hitting the floor, including different sounds for different surfaces: wood, stone, metal, et cetera. This is brilliant sound design.

In the impromptu stress test this morning, I found myself on a norn guardian (all previous characters having been wiped) heading into the grawl cave to help Ulfred give the grawl something new to worship — like a giant statue of himself carved out of ice!

I noticed a couple of things: firstly the event scaling. There was pretty much nobody around — after all, the stress test was announced literally 10 minutes before it started and only lasted an hour — so I could see how certain elements of the dynamic event, which I’ve done several times before (and still really enjoy!), scale.

Secondly, I noticed a cool graphical touch.

For the Collect magical ice blocks stage of the event chain, Ulfred begins to build his statue out of blocks of ice we’ve pilfered (with extreme prejudice) from the nearby ice elementals. As he starts to build the statue, tiny ice elementals attack:

“Ha! Looks like some of the ice you collected doesn’t want to be fine art,” he says.

As I was dodging around, killing ice elementals and keeping their attention away from Ulfred so he could work, I happened to notice how the block of ice he was working on actually refracted light and images through it. Rather than just being textured, or a see-through mass of polygons, the block actually properly distorts the image of everything behind it.

And, just like the chap in the bullet casings video, I actually stopped and played around with this while Ulfred was carving his statue. It’s the little things that impress you the most.