Guild Wars 2 Honors Late Composer Stan LePard With In-Game Statue And More

Guild Wars 2 is honoring composer Stan LePard, who passed away earlier this year, through an in-game memorial that includes a statue, a new NPC, and more.

As part of the May 11 game update for the MMO, ArenaNet added a memorial statue for LePard in the city of Lion's Arch that players can visit to listen to 10 of his songs that he composed for Guild Wars 2. Additionally, an NPC named "Van Leopard" is now in the game and can be found near the Grothmar Valley concert stage. You can see images of the statue and the NPC in the gallery below.

Gallery

Before working on Guild Wars 2, LePard wrote music for a number of gigantic franchises, including Halo, Destiny, Age of Empires, and Fable. For Guild Wars 2 specifically, LePard either composed or contributed to more than 40 tracks between 2012 and 2021.

He is credited with mixing and mastering the heavy metal Metal Legion concert from Guild Wars 2's Icebrood Saga Prologue back in November 2019. The final work that LePard did for Guild Wars 2 included the Boneskinner theme and The Icebrood Saga announcement trailer theme.

Maclaine Diemer, another composer on Guild Wars 2 and a friend LePard's, is helping to sponsor a scholarship that will give budding composers audio track passes to GDC 2021. You can learn more and apply for the scholarship on the GDC website.

In a statement to GameSpot, Diemer reflected on the time he spent with LePard and how LePard was kind and generous with his time and advice.

"I think the thing that's always stuck with me about my time knowing Stan was how generous he was with his wisdom and experience. Not long after the first time I met him, he invited me to a recording session for a different game so I could see how that process worked. This was before recording live was even a slight possibility for Guild Wars 2," Diemer said. "He helped put me at ease and gave me valuable feedback in the early days after I took over writing the game's music."

"At our first live session, I was so incredibly nervous. That I had wasted everyone's time (and the studio's money), that all the musicians were secretly laughing at how bad my music was, etc. Towards the end of the sessions, Stan said something about one of my pieces after we had gotten a keeper take. He just said, 'That's good writing.' It was such a simple and kind thing to say, and that helped relieve all the stress that had built up in the weeks before the session, that we were there for good reasons and it was all working out well. Having the confidence of someone I admired was huge for me at that point in my career. In talking with people after he passed, it seems like he touched a lot of other people in the same way at the start of their careers."