Malyck Portrait Painting

“Malyck is no one. He comes from nowhere. On one hand, I am sorry for him. He has no roots. On the other, I am envious. He can become whatever he chooses. I hope he chooses well.” - Amaranda the Lonesome, from The Nightmare Harbinger

In the excitement leading up to HoT's launch, I completely forgot to upload this painting of Malyck to DA! I was quite afraid to find out what fate awaited him in HoT, but don't worry, I'm going to keep this post spoiler-free. Please try to keep any comments spoiler-free, as well, since many have not completed the story yet. :)

My main attention in HoT during the launch week was not over the story, but on those gorgeous, gigantic new maps. Such artistry! The art direction for vanilla GW2 blew my mind when I first experienced it, and I think they have surpassed that initial sense of wonder and awe with HoT. It has this lovely experience of being like you're walking around in a concept art painting - the maps are expansive enough that they evoked that sense of an open world like when playing the older Zelda games for the first time. And the ambient animation! I tried taking some screenshots, but they do not do the beauty crafted in these maps justice. And the music! The first time I walked into Auric Basin, hearing that exquisitely composed string arrangement, while viewing these golden cities, just breathtaking! Serious kudos to the art & sound team at ArenaNet, fantastic, fantastic environment work.

Incidentally, I did finish the story last night, mainly because I was starting to become concerned I would accidentally stumble across a spoiler, haha. I have many thoughts about the story, but I'll save them for a future post and clearly mark that there will be spoilers in the description. I don't think I will do any artwork that feature spoilers, though. All the ideas I want to do now have almost nothing to do with how the story ended up turning out, haha.

I only wish I had more time to experience more of all the detail packed into this expansion, I've barely gotten through the second and third maps, and have not had a chance to check out the fourth map aside from the snippet instances the story leads you through. November is looking to be very busy, but I'm glad I was able to schedule time to experience some of the excitement during launch week. :) Think that's the first time I've had the opportunity to do that! Much hype and fun! And now too many ideas I want to paint, I need to find time to do them all. D:

Here's this painting posted on tumblr here