Let's Talk about Design!

Hello, Slayers!

1.6.3 is here and we’re all excited that you’re out there punching the Chronovore on the Paradox Breaks, but let’s take a look back at Elder and Primal Behemoth encounters. We had a lot of conceptual designs with these encounters, and we learned a lot during the course of their development. We think this is a valuable opportunity to explore our design with you.

Join us as we take a look back at our initial intents and the lessons we learned along the way.

Primal Behemoths

Our Design Intent

We wanted to explore diversifying our combat gameplay with both Primal and Elder encounters. The initial idea was to have three unique timelines: past, present, and future. The goal behind these was to create Behemoth modifiers that would meaningfully change the combat experience. We wanted players to focus on the core fundamentals of each Behemoth, adding a layer of strategy to each encounter. The modifiers were our way of ushering players into new strategies.

For Primals specifically, we asked ourselves how we could make a modifier that provided the player with choice, while stopping the usual stun-lock cycle. An attempt was made to build an encounter that gave players more choice about how to tackle the encounter. Players were meant to assess the individual Behemoth and take down the pillars that applied to that fight. Our intent was to allow the player to choose how many pillars they wanted to knock down, based on their confidence and assessment of the situation. We believed that this would add more agency to each encounter.

We also planned to launch this content inside Portals. This would have added a layer of intent to each encounter What this means is that players would know exactly what they were about to get into before opting into the encounter. Players would get to enter into these encounters willingly in an enclosed arena. Unfortunately, performance work took precedent, and we were forced to delay Portals to a future date. Turns out adding numerous instances to an island is tricky business!

The Final Product and What We Learned

Over the course of development, a few things changed.

As mentioned before, Portals were delayed, so we opted to place Primal encounters directly on the islands in the Hunting Grounds. We found that our super high-skill players understood and enjoyed the encounters, but the public nature of the Hunting Grounds worked against them. If these encounters had been inside their own bespoke areas — ones that players could opt into — they probably would have been more enjoyable. The level of complexity here was just too much for a public area. The pillars blocked healing, made your arsenal obsolete in some cases, and if you lacked dodging skills, they were far too difficult. This showed us the max difficulty that public areas can handle.

Another aspect that added friction was the spawn rate of Primal encounters. They were very frequent, and if players didn’t enjoy them, they were unavoidable. Once again, having Primal Behemoths isolated to specific areas would have helped.

So with all this in mind, we made some changes. We decreased the number of pillars from four to one to reduce confusion and margin of error. We also tuned Primal spawn rates a little bit.

Going forward, we plan to put more work into making these encounters more variable (e.g. variable pillars, rewards). This way, we can tune Primals and put them behind portals in the future, letting our more experienced players play this content in a more controlled environment.

Elder Behemoths

Our Design Intent

The thinking behind Elder Behemoths was a lot simpler compared to Primals. We wanted players to consider windows of opportunity for attacking. We wanted them to ask, “Where do I aim my next hit and when?” It was another way to challenge the traditional stun-lock tactics used by advanced players. Basically: If parts are intermittently blocked, it's harder to chain stuns and part breaks..

Behemoth speed was also reduced to make their movement more deliberate. This was to give players moments of opportunity and allow them to study Elder Behemoth patterns. We also wanted players to think about their full offensive toolset. Wide, sweeping attacks were less valuable here; players would need to aim their attacks with precision.

We also wanted to inject some lore into the battle. These Behemoths are from the far-flung future where civilization has torn itself apart. Their shields are scraps from battlefields: shields and airship parts held together by psionic energies.

The Final Product and What We Learned

All in all, these encounters feel good, but we wish we'd taken more time to hone and polish the experience. For example, there was a desire to make the shield more adaptive, so it would fit each Behemoth’s unique shape and size. There was also a desire to make encounters like this more variable. Changing up variables like shield shape, size, and speed would have been really neat to see. We also believe we could have done a better job selling the narrative of these shields and Elder Behemoths. We would have loved to see more unique models that really showed the turmoil that the Shattered Isles was facing in the future — think unique shields and Behemoth skins.

The Final, Final Takeaways

It feels good to have more variety, and players were genuinely excited about these encounters at launch. The design intent behind these encounters is still something we want to explore in the future, but the lessons here will impact what we deliver next. Bottom line, we still want to shake up combat encounters by offering variety while disrupting tried and true strategies like stun locking. We want to challenge our players who’ve seen it all.

If we did this again, we would select a few Behemoths and tinker with them instead of trying to make a one-size-fits-all modifier event. This would allow more for more polish alongside a stronger, more focused design.

A few other key takeaways:

• Changing up strategies is good if the modifiers are fair.
• Making a new modifier isn’t always the solution.
• We’ve pushed Behemoth modifier difficulty as far as we’re comfortable with.
• We want to do more with dynamic arenas rather than Behemoth modifiers.
• If we name something ELDER or PRIMAL, we should have correspondingly AWESOME Behemoth variants that work with these bold narrative titles.

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