Most online role-playing games allow you to level up a character, collect lots of equipment and items, and learn myriad different skills. It's a rewarding process, but it's one that usually requires a rather large investment of time on your behalf. Guild Wars is an action-heavy online role-playing game that will actually challenge this formula. This innovative new game will offer a much faster pace than a regular online role-playing game. That's because Guild Wars features a blend of intense player-vs-player and player-versus-monster battles with Magic: The Gathering-style abilities. And perhaps one of the most impressive technical aspects of the game is that it will stream off the Internet while you play it (and the streaming does look very impressive). We recently had the chance to grill producer Jeff Strain about the challenges involved in making the look and feel of Guild Wars.

You'll battle both monsters and other players in Guild Wars.

GameSpot: Tell us about where the inspiration for Guild Wars' art style is from. We know that many ArenaNet employees are alumni of Blizzard Entertainment, yet the game clearly looks very different from Blizzard's artwork. Why the difference? Is there a specific "look" that the art team is trying to create with Guild Wars?

Jeff Strain: The fantasy genre is great, because it provides plenty of room to be creative and to explore new artistic styles. And, hey! Big scary monsters are just cool! But the danger of fantasy is that you will either stick firmly to tradition and wind up with yet another Tolkien or D&D setting, or you will go too far in the other direction and create something that is not even recognizably fantasy. Creating an artistic style that expresses the fantasy genre in a fresh way is our primary goal, and I think we are starting to achieve that. We use the phrase "fantastical realism" to describe the style, because, while the setting is fantasy, we want to create a world that is extremely detailed and believable. The Guild Wars story contains fairly mature themes of human struggle and loss, and we wanted the art style to reflect that more mature theme.

As you can see from our screenshots, the art is colorful but is far more moody and dramatic than a traditional fantasy game. For example, many fantasy worlds often include majestic dragons as their icons. In Guild Wars, we've taken the iconic dragon to a more evocative level with our bone dragon, who, while a mere shadow of his former self--what with his gruesome exposed bones, torn flesh, missing hindquarters, and exposed spine--still radiates a sense of enormous power. As soon as you see him, you immediately know that you are in for a difficult battle.

GS: Tell us about the way in which Guild Wars' different environments are being designed. Are areas in the game being based on specific real-world locations, or are they fictitious locations created from scratch? Or is there some inspiration being drawn from locales found in the team's favorite fiction, movies, or TV shows? We've already seen impressive technical accoutrements--like lighting bloom effects and dynamic weather/water effects--but how is the art team using these technical features to bring the environments to life?

JS: The locations you will visit in the world of Tyria are original presentations of natural geographic regions. You will find deserts, jungles, farmlands, marshes, snow-covered peaks, blasted wastelands, and other environments that have a basis in real-world geography. However, each of these regions in Guild Wars has a unique artistic design, drawn from the imagination of our art team and taking full advantage of the rendering technologies provided by our graphics engine. For example, one of the missions you will undertake in the desert actually takes place inside a grain of sand. Our glow technology and material shaders are put to good use in this mission to handle the extreme lighting conditions and reflective effects you would expect to find in such a location.

GS: Tell us about the way in which Guild Wars' monsters are being designed visually. How are you making the game's monsters thematically appropriate to the game's different environments? What sources of inspiration are being used to create them--previous games, comic books, movies, traditional mythology, others?

Beware the mighty bone dragon.

JS: We design our creatures with one primary goal: to should scare the hell out of you! We made the decision early on to use humor sparingly and as a tension reliever--and to not use overt goofiness at all. The world of Guild Wars is a brutal world set in an age when civility and compassion faded away with the fall of the great kingdoms, and the creatures that have inhabited the ruins, swamps, forests, and wastelands of the world are usually methodically seeking your destruction.

Every creature we design is either part of an army or an inhabitant of a specific geographical region. Army creatures are designed together as a set and are the foundation for the political factions that drive the progression of the campaign story. The army of the undead, for example, includes ghouls, hellhounds, phantoms, warlocks, and bone dragons. These creatures are usually found in groups, and they employ very sophisticated tactics and a wide variety of necromantic skills against you. Region-specific creatures are usually only found in one part of the world. The behemoths and river drakes, for example, are found in the swamps and river bottoms of the Kryta kingdom and are designed to be visually consistent with the terrain, vegetation, and architecture of that area.