How the Guild Wars 2 game art team overcome technical limitations to craft character art with heart

Guild Wars 2 is a game known for its expansive world, captivating lore, and a visual style that gracefully walks the line between stylised fantasy and grounded realism, built on beautiful concept art from Kekai Kotaki, Richard Anderson and Theo Prins, Ruan Jia.

I previously caught up with the game's art director Aaron Coberly, who explained how the game retains it's unique visual identity by focusing on core art theory and traditional art techniques. Now I get to meet the dev's creature and character art team.

Behind every armoured warrior and mythical beasts is a character design team that navigates creative ambition, technical limitations and the game's own artistic legacy with an eye toward one goal: making everything feel handcrafted.

Adam Hogseth is lead character artist at ArenaNet and here shares his insights into how the game's armour, heroes and creatures are crafted; I get a glimpse into the meticulous, collaborative and often scrappy world of creature and armour creation in Guild Wars 2.

Crafter character art that matters

"We’re not using physically based rendering (PBR)," begins Adam, referring to a now-standard lighting and texturing technique in modern games. Instead, Guild Wars 2 leans into a hand-painted art style that has become a hallmark of its aesthetic identity.

That decision has been both a limitation and a source of inspiration. "Aaron Coberly [art director], always likes to say our materials and textures should feel handcrafted, like a piece of metal that was hammered out or leather that was hand-stitched,” Adam says.

To create that feeling, artists often paint in lighting information directly onto textures, giving surfaces a nuanced sense of depth that isn't solely reliant on the game engine’s lighting.

The result is an art style that not only holds up over time – Guild Wars 2 is celebrating its 20 years with a new Anniversary Masterpiece Collection – but allows for more imaginative and expressive visuals. Even if this means taking the long way around.

The pipeline for designing creatures and armour in Guild Wars 2 begins with bold, ambitious concept art. "I want it to hit the extreme," Adam says. "And then we can pull it back during production as we need to."

By aiming for striking visuals right out of the gate, the team ensures they have a strong foundation to iterate from, and in doing so strike a ideal balance between spectacle and feasibility.

That ethos played out with early armour sets like the steampunk-inspired Aetherblade designs. Originally intended to be filled with whirring gadgets and moving parts, the limitations of the time meant the final assets had to be static. "If I had my way, I’d go back and animate some of those pieces," he reflects.

Guild Wars 2 art creation is about team work

As with many large game dev workflows, creature and character design at ArenaNet is not a solitary process. "We’ll review with narrative, with design," says Adam, especially when developing characters for story beats or cinematics.

Adam explains how, whether it's hair, armour, or even the chair a character is sitting in, every element is scrutinised to ensure it communicates the right emotional tone to the player – whether that's menacing, regal, desperate or defiant.

"There’s no pushback," Adam notes. "It doesn’t feel like a burden to get feedback, it feels like a benefit." This collaborative spirit helps ensure that visual design supports storytelling, instead of just serving as pure eye candy.

Creating a single set of armour in Guild Wars 2 is never a one-size-fits-all task. With five main playable races, each with vastly different body types, proportions and anatomical quirks, the game's artists must sculpt, fit, and even sometimes redesign, pieces of armour to work across the whole gambit of fantasy races and character types

"You’re not just making a helmet for a human,” Adam says. "You have to think about how it’s going to work on a Charr [large feline creatures] with horns, a snout, a different neck structure."

This kind of complexity requires problem-solving on a daily basis, often using both new and old tricks. For example, when designing a recent armour set with prominent fur elements, the team turned to an unexpected source for inspiration: Shadow of the Colossus.

Referring to creature designs and models created by artist Alex Gomez-Tyler, Adam tells me how instead of relying on a heavy fur card system or complex physics, they mimicked the layered shelf effect used in that classic game to create the illusion of thick fur with fewer resources. The technique was so effective that it was adapted for use on both armour and creature designs moving forward.

Read more about how Adam and the team turned to Shadow of the Colossus for the game's fur in my other article.

Technically but not artistically restricted

Working on a 12-year-old game engine has its drawbacks. "We don’t have spline-based fur systems or advanced cloth physics," Adam says. "But those limitations push us to be creative."

Whether it’s painting in lighting, developing new material types, or hacking together a workaround with legacy tools, the team is constantly exploring ways to squeeze more visual punch out of the engine. (Read our guide to the best game development software for an idea of what's used these days.)

This ethos of making the most with what they have permeates every part of the pipeline. "Sometimes you’re just grasping for something that’s going to work," says Adam, laughing. The best 3D modelling software like ZBrush, Substance Painter and Maya make up the backbone of the team’s workflow, but creativity and imagination, rather than a reliance on software itself, is what drives the process.

The stylised yet realistic approach gives Guild Wars 2 a timeless quality that continues to resonate with players more than a decade after its release.

Adam credits the game’s longevity not just to its artistic choices, but to the thoughtful details in the game's core design. "We want players to feel like the armour and outfits reflect a story, even if it’s not told directly,” he says.

Whether it's Balthazar's Regalia outfit, inspired by a painting from concept artist Kekai Kotaki, or a humble NPC designed for a cinematic moment, each asset is built to serve the larger narrative and gameplay experience.

Once it’s in the players’ hands, it’s sacred, reflects Adam, which is why it's harder in a game like Guild Wars 2 to make changes on the fly. "We try to avoid tweaking things after release," he says. “Once a player has it, we don’t want to change it on them."

Despite the technical constraints, the team behind Guild Wars 2 continues to find fresh inspiration to keep innovating, refreshing and building on the lore and style of the game. At its heart, Guild Wars 2's characters and creatures have their feet firmly in core art techniques that sit above any new digital tools.

There's a constant process of reflection and revision that Adam refers to as "looking backward to move forward".

In the end, Adam sums up the experience of designing characters and creatures for Guild Wars 2 as a balancing act of vision and pragmatism. "It’s a challenge," he says. "But it’s a fun one. And I think our players can feel the love and care that goes into everything we do."

Inspired by the work of Adam and the Guild Wars 2 art team? Then read our ZBrush tutorials and Procreate tutorials for advice on how to start creating game art.