You're not supposed to notice it – inside the hidden art of animation and VFX in Guild Wars 2

Game art comes to life when animators and VFX artists combine their skills. In online role-playing game Guild Wars 2, where dragons thunder across the skies and arcane sigils shimmer beneath battle-scarred boots, the magic doesn’t just lie in the fantasy – it’s in the craft.

Behind the painterly beauty and explosive spectacle of the game lies a marriage of animation and visual effects that transforms code into living, breathing art. In this series of features I've spoken to Guild Wars 2 art director Aaron Coberly about the game's defining style, and ArenaNet's Tami Foote who explained how the evocative environments are created.

To discover how VFX and animation bring the game's world, creatures and characters to life, I caught up with Konstantin Skripalsh, senior animator on the game, and Geoffrey Milligan, a visual effects artist, to uncover how these two disciplines intertwine to shape one of the most visually distinctive MMOs that has 20 million players.

New model, improved visuals

The creative direction of Guild Wars 2 has evolved significantly since its launch in 2012. Initially shaped by the 'Living World' model, where content was episodic and ongoing, the team shifted gears to a more structured expansion-based format.

“We actually realised that we were generating content that is not as productive… monetarily, it was not rewarding enough,” Konstantin recalls. “Right now, it’s all expansions, it makes more sense, basically, financially.”

This transition allowed for deeper storytelling and more complex character and boss encounters, giving animation and VFX artists the space to collaborate more closely than ever.

I ask Geoffrey Milligan what VFX brings to the table, and he grins: "We like to think of ourselves as the exclamation mark… You can do this cool like ‘whoosh’ and it’s, you know, just moving your hands. But we add a little magic around it, and all of a sudden you’re like, magic weaving.”

Effects in Guild Wars 2 are more than just visual flair, they are used to tell stories. Some are obvious, like the painterly swirls of fire, while others work subtly. "There’s effects that you see… and then there’s those effects that you feel," says Geoffrey. "A soft glow, tiny particles, they help you feel that magic."

This painterly aesthetic is key to Guild Wars 2’s identity. "We try to mix a little bit of realism… heat distort on fire, water close to water without full fluid sim," explains Geoffrey. "Those hard-edged effects, that painterly stroke, it gives the effect that ‘oomph’."

On the animation side, style is dictated by character type. "We basically divide our content into two separate areas: player animations and creatures," Konstantin explains. Player characters are grounded in realism. "We want to stay true to this high fantasy style, where exaggeration is tamed." But for creatures? "That’s where our creative decisions run wild."

This difference lets animators push boundaries with monsters, like the titanic Eyes of the Abyss boss from Secrets of the Obscure expansion.

"It's a huge creature that looks like a an octopus with tentacles that are undulating constantly, so the size of it presented a challenge of making it look menacing in terms of its action. It’s stuck between pillars, so it can’t move too much, but it still needs to feel threatening," Konstantin says. "And the eyes, usually we use eyes to infuse personality, but design wanted us to restrict that – you had to destroy them during the the the fight – so we had to rely on other things to compensate."

He tells me the animation team needed to find a balance in the pace of the entwined tentacles, that moved, undulated and gripped the pillars as the players try and find gap to attack.

The animation and VFX teams don’t work in silos at ArenaNet, they’re in constant conversation. "We rely on effects a lot, especially in player animation," says Konstantin. "Effects emphasise an action… without them, it’s not a good approach to just work in isolation."

Geoffrey agrees: "It’s fun working with animation, getting really cool animations to emphasise that punch… the impact that we add to it."

This collaboration sometimes even helps mask technical limitations. "We rely on effects to help us hide imperfections," Konstantin admits with a chuckle.

Both artists light up when asked about their most challenging, and beloved, creations. For Geoffrey, it’s the Dark Monarch Skyscale: "My first ultramount. They wanted burnt holes in the wings… with smoke lofting off them. We used a lot of different techniques such as effects cards, but also had to weight them so when the wings folded in, they didn’t crunch or stick out weirdly. It holds a special place in my heart." A new material was even created just for the effect.

Konstantin cites the previously mentioned Eyes of the Abyss boss, for its scale and complexity, saying: "You had to fly your Skyscale to reach it, so players could view it from all angles. We couldn’t animate just to the camera, we had to make it work from everywhere."

One of the unique challenges of working on Guild Wars 2 is balancing stylisation with realism. Geoffrey finds inspiration everywhere, from MMOs he played growing up to Fullmetal Alchemist’s magical rune circles (read our best anime guide). "A lot of time I’ll sit outside and watch how sunlight hits clouds or how rain hits the ground," he says. "Then I ask, 'How would this look if the real world were a video game?'"

For Konstantin, even Ray Harryhausen’s classic stop-motion tentacles came into play (read our guide to the best stop-motion movies). "When I started, I put together a folder of stuff like that… even Disney classics, animal videos, whatever we could use to ground our fantasy in realism."

Animation and VFX are a hidden art

Much of what Geoffrey and Konstantin create is designed to be felt more than seen. "There are a lot of animations and VFX that help build the world’s atmosphere but go unnoticed," Geoffrey says. "You’ll see someone run through with the sword you made, or the mount, and you’re like, 'Hey, I made that!'"

One unexpected hit? The Eldritch Mining Tool – a tentacle-based gathering tool. "It wasn’t the intended purpose, but players found a way to cancel it repeatedly and cause a bunch of tentacles to pop up," Geoffrey laughs. "Just seeing people have fun with that… you feel the impact on the world."

Cutscenes can help highlight the drama of a new boss, but they’re a tricky tool. "Players don’t like cutscenes because they replay content. They don’t want to see the same thing over and over," Konstantin says. Instead, animators use "unlock" animations to give players a moment to absorb what’s happening in real time. But even those moments are short-lived. "Sometimes it’s just not enough."

Technical limitations abound. Players can disable camera shake, for instance, so dramatic stomp animations need other methods to convey power. "In movies, you animate to the camera, we don’t have that luxury," says Konstantin. "Our bosses are viewed from any angle, even above, mid-flight."

The result of this intricate collaboration between animation and VFX is a game world that feels as alive as it looks. From painterly spell effects to hulking tentacled monstrosities, the heart of Guild Wars 2’s art isn’t just in its style, it’s in how it’s brought to life through the seamless blend of action and illusion.

Even 13 years after launch, with new expansions coming regularly, Geoffrey says: “We’re still creating magic."

Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds Concludes with ‘Absolution’ on 3 June. Watch the new trailer on YouTube.