Supporter newsletter 57

Issue
This is a copy of Eternal and Diamond Supporter Newsletter #57, published by Grinding Gear Games.

Hello Supporters,

Atziri has now been defeated at least once in all Leagues. Rory supervised the design of this boss, so I thought this week we should have Rory discuss the design, and show some of the early planning. - Carl

Atziri

Hey guys,

Today I’m going to show you my initial planning document that was used to propose and present the Atziri fight to the rest of the development team, and later act as a blueprint for the creation of the area, skills and art. This came after some short discussions with Erik about what he’d like to see, and what we had art assets for.

http://i.imgur.com/aoVHIGl.jpg

It was adjusted based on feedback from the rest of the team, but the design remained relatively intact. The values specified for attacks were just estimates, and many adjustments have been made since then, so don’t take this as a rule sheet for when you run the fight!

Twin Vaal Oversouls

These were added as an easy, thematic introduction to the area - The Vaal Oversouls were the greatest of the Vaal threats players had encountered, so we took what we already knew was a challenging fight from players fighting them in maps, and gave them some new skills to mix things up. They started out just with the Ball Lightning skill in place of the chilled ground attack, but we later decided to change some of their other skills. The theme of this fight was an experience check - If you’re good at fighting the Vaal Oversoul, you should be able to handle this fight.

Three Demons

This fight was implemented as described, but it became clear that adding minions after each boss died wasn’t challenging enough, so Neon suggested adding a death cloud and increasing the power of the surviving Demon. The core mechanic of this fight was tough choices, and the fight acts as a knowledge building block - Until players have done the fight a few times, you won’t know which demon you should be engaging first.

Atziri

From an artistic standpoint, the goal of this fight was to focus on the four arms of Atziri, which became her four primary skills. It was also to revolve around the idea of sacrifice, which was a the core theme for the new content. The fight was designed from the ground up to require more skill than any other fight in the game, with the ability to move to avoid attacks being more important to player survival than gear and mitigation.

The core mechanic of this fight was movement and mobility choices - All through the fight the player must decide when to move and to where. It’s possible to do the fight without taking almost all of the elemental damage, but making the choice of whether to take the damage and keep dealing damage at the expense of using flask charges, or to avoid it and lose valuable time should be something players need to make on the fly frequently, and there shouldn’t be a right answer that is applied every time.

I’ve learnt a lot from this fight, and I’ll be applying these lessons to some other major boss fights throughout the game in future.


 * Rory

Insider Info

To tie into the above article, here is some concept art for the three demons:

http://i.imgur.com/EvDy565.jpg