The ZAM staff concludes our "Reinventing Tyria" series with in-depth looks at the Sylvari, voice over artists, and the problem of endgame storytelling. Check it out!

ZAM: So can you tell folks – if they haven’t taken the time to view the trailer – who you have working on the project?

Soesbee: We can’t reveal too many details, but we do have Troy Baker, Felicia Day, Steve Blum…

ZAM: Blum is absolutely phenomenal.

Soesbee: And his voice is like that in person, too. It feels like it shakes the very ground.

Stein: There are also some voices that we haven’t really talked about that appear in our combat trailers, and I’m actually interested to see if people can identify the voices of the elementalists and the various other voices you hear in those trailers.

ZAM: Will we know all of the actors and actresses?

Soesbee: I don’t want this to come across incorrectly, but we do tend to be loyal to people who have done voices with us before, because we know them. We’ve worked with them before and know how wonderful they are to work with. A lot of those actors, if we have roles, they’ll be on the list of people we’d like to see try out.

Stein: The ease of the work is a big factor. If you bring in someone that hasn’t done a lot of voice work before, it is sometimes a bit of a struggle to make them feel the context of what they’re reading the lines for.

Voice actors are amazingly hard working people. The guys and gals that can come in and blast through lines, offering three different reads of each, are phenomenal. I mean, you can get different meanings out of a line simply by how it’s inflected or stressed.

There’s an advantage to working with professionals. They know how to bring out elements that we don’t even know are there.

Soesbee: A good example is Steve Blum. We hadn’t even been in LA a week and people were coming in and reading a role, and we were trying to explain to them what a Charr was like. Big, furry, angry, etc.

Steve Blum walks in and we show him the trailer and who he’s going to play. He instantly says “Rytlock is a badass.” He knows who the Charr are. He knows how to play one of these characters. I don’t have to explain the Charr to him, he just has to know who Rytlock is. If you watch him in the Voices of Tyria trailer, you can notice that he’s snarling while he’s reading Rytlock lines.

ZAM: Let’s switch gears to professions a bit. The elementalists have been in Guild Wars for awhile… are they receiving any changes like what we’ve seen with the new playable races or the new look of Tyria?

Soesbee: They’re mostly staying the same. The biggest tweaks to lore that are affecting professions are the fact that we are including other races that can harness these powers. Suddenly you go from a human-centric world that has myths about magic based on human myths, and suddenly those myths don’t entirely work for the Charr or the Asura.

But we still have to make magic work. So we’ve maintained the storyline so that everything the humans have said is as true as they know it to be. No one has been lied to. The gods came and put humans on the world, but there were other things going on that the gods didn’t know about and the humans didn’t know about that effects how physics works in Tyria.

That said, we’re not changing or altering things at random and pretending that they didn’t exist. We’re going to make it make sense.

But that does end up changing professions, because you have the Elementalists that now have to fit with these other races that are in the world and can utilize their magics. Tweaks, but nothing that breaks the lore.