[2021] Frost Escalation and 1.5.3 | AMA

The only change we're making immediately is reducing the health of the tail.

There are no major changes coming to Frostbite right away, beyond some improvements to the functionality of the avatars, and the return of the missing Lantern Power to the Escalation, that should generally ease the experience.

Yeah - we're looking at some options for quick communication using the Quick Chat or something else from within the lobby. Totally!

We're starting to explore what bringing some of the Escalation experience out into the rest of Dauntless looks like.

When is that Urska tail HP getting nerfed?

We will be making it easier to break in a future patch!

The Turret was an early concept that never made it past prototype at the original arrival of repeaters. However, I'm currently working on another playstyle for something similar to an avatar in the future that may use 'gadgets' such as a turret like this, so things like it could show up again.

It'll go down faster if you get stronger!

Haha I kid, I kid. We're watching the win rates and will continue to balance, no immediate changes coming in 1.5.4 though.

We have about 4 devs working on this issue, but it's been tricky and has many different elements. We're rolling out incremental fixes, but would like to have it addressed in spring.

our next Behemoth's code name is Glitter.

This is a weird one -- has a lot to do with our production process and how we organize "seasons." Interestingly enough, internally, the current season is 12B :)

But those kinds of numbers don't mean much to players. So we named it Realm of Ice.

1.6.0 is going to be big, too!

uh...

:D

I know our environment artists wanted to increase the sense of adventure during an escalation run. We did this by adding more breadth to the area itself so it's a bit more of a journey for the player.

Basically, it was to make the destination feel like a real, precarious place.

I've seen this idea before and I passed it on. No plan right now to make capes optional, but who knows. Maybe more variants will come out!

We're working on these. We saw an uptick with 1.5.3 and our team is investigating.

Expect more improvements on this issue in coming patches

You should write into Dauntless support. They can look into this!

https://support.playdauntless.com/

This is something we'd like to do, but time is a constraint. Likely if we added Shock variants, they would land in Hunting Grounds.

Answered above I think, but it really came down to wanting to do three (in terra we got feedback about there only being two) and wanting to make sure we had the space to make some that were very different (Embermane, Skarn).

So we landed on one bronze, one silver, and one gold variant in terms of complexity - to get best of both worlds. As for specific Behemoths, those choices really come down to which Behemoths have strong designs that the designers are excited about.

My day is great! How is yours?

That isn't't the plan right now, but I'll pass this on!

1. Part of the reason is that we saw some feedback about Terra only having two variants, and we wanted to provide more while also being mindful about our team size and constraints. So we decided to go for three and went for a easy, medium, and hard variant in terms of scope.
2. There have been some early conversations about that. When we were building "Frost Wolf" it started to feel a lot like its own behemoth as it became more fleshed out. However, we got early feedback that if it were its own behemoth instead of a variant, it would need its own weapon, armor, etc., as well or it wouldn't resonate well and that was way too much for our team to handle. I can't promise that it'll be its own behemoth in the future, but it has kicked off some interesting conversations about behemoths in Dauntless.

We definitely have a list of islands we plan to go back and revisit from an art perspective. The trouble is balancing that work with making awesome new things for players to enjoy. We'll continue to update the hunting grounds over time!

Embermane, Skarn, Gnasher - gold, silver, bronze.

The numbers on the crafting of Urska's sword has some issues with the crafting numbers. We're going to adjust these in the future to the correct numbers. Sorry for any confusion!

We're also redoing the wings on that armour set and making Urska's tail easier to break.

This is the first I've heard of this! You should still be getting HP XP from HG.

Some issues discussed in another thread - but you can expect to see them in their final, true form in the next patch. The VFX isn't there and functioning properly.

The reason why this Behemoth is a variant is because of time constriction and scope. We simply didn't have the bandwidth to add two full Behemoths with unique sets of armour and weapons.

I guess we shot ourselves in the foot by making it so unique that people now want full sets. Whoops!

We haven't sorted out if/where they go exactly yet, but we did want to keep them unique to Fresca for a little while. I imagine they'll find their way to the colder Hunting Grounds in the future.

It came down to time and some difficulties with tech, but also we shared the concept art which looked dramatically different so that didn't help.

We have heard the feedback that it isn't up to player standards and we're redoing it :)

Yup, this will be fixed for the next patch.

It's interesting, often the trends players find in these things aren't on purpose at all!

For every variant, we choose a Behemoth based on the designers ideas and plan to make an awesome experience. There are some more detailed responses from Anthony, the designer, above.

Frostwulf is a pretty deep change for a variant, yeah! It's not a separate behemoth because we know there's an established pattern with Behemoths having gear, mastery pages etc. And this Behemoth didn't currently have that. There's no reason we can't add gear for variant Behemoths in the future, though!

Deepfrost Gnasher was never originally meant for Frostfall. Kaltauga, the Skraev from that mission with Linnea was though! It was moved into a separate release sometime after the concept, but before any work had been done on it in the game.

The pillar moves were the most complicated part since it has the Behemoth, the player, the environment, and all those pieces working together.

Coming up with Behemoths is a team effort between the combat designer, the artists, and our whole content team. Usually starts with either an idea for an encounter from the designer or with some concepts from the designer -- usually a combination of both.

Eventually we get to a look we like that we can get into the game and start playing with!

Overall, the amp pool is less fleshed out than I might have liked it to be initially. The Avatar system ended up being quite a lift, and ate up time I might normally have spent on new amps. The reduced amp choices tend to happen largely because you are unlucky enough to get the same Linnea boons round over round.

In 1.5.4, our next patch, I have changed this to ensure she can never pick the same Boon two rounds in a row, which should help with the variety of round types, which also should reduce how much you feel like you're getting pushed into the same amps over and over again!

I appreciate the feedback, both positive and negative! I'll continue to tune on this stuff and try to get the amp pools feeling their best.

In short, we thought it would be cool to try something different :) If you take the element of Frost itself as inspiration, you get a different vibe from it than you would with say Shock (Frost I might correlate with survival and stark, vast landscapes, with slowing down, whereas Shock I might correlate with a chaotic, fast passed vibe.) It was a risk for sure, as Escalation is more known as a fast paced gameplay so that can perhaps be a bit polarizing, but we've also gotten some positive feedback from those that like the immersive quality of the level itself.

Yes! We're working on a making of Reforged video first but after that Urska is in my sights!

I'll be sure to get some lore in there for you :D

Naming a Behemoth is always a lively process, but I do use some consistent tools to help narrow things down before presenting name options to the team for feedback. Usually I'll start with a real-world language and work from there. And I gather feedback and ideas from many places within the company, but ultimately I have the responsibility of settling on a name (for better or worse).

For Urska, I looked at some of the same linguistic inspirations I used for the Frostwarden's gear and Skaldeskar itself—Scandanavian languages, Icelandic in particular (shoutout to Husavik!) after I did everything I could with Smilodon but just couldn't make it sound menacing (thanks a lot, paleontologists). While the Behemoth, code-named "Mint," had many feline features, it's also a very beefy and muscular feline, so I started exploring both ursine and feline terms.

I settled on "Urska" for a few particular reasons:
-It's easy to say, spell, and remember. This is always a good idea because it helps all of us who work on it keep track and also helps players do the same.
-Urska is, lore-wise, the oldest Behemoth Slayers have ever faced in terms of physical age. It is, in fact, a singular entity that, like a Lovecraftian Old One, does die but also enters a state of regeneration thanks to the fact that it's surrounded by and immersed in ice/water that's saturated in its own energy and power. What's that got to do with the name? The syllable Ur- also has the meaning of "original," so that's also intended to be a verrrry deep reference to its extreme age.
^^Interesting note about its age—most any other Behemoth that had lived so long might have grown to kaiju proportions, left to feed on aether for a thousand or more years. But the Urska's tendency to be slain and then regenerate (in the starfish, not Time Lord, sense) has also kept it from growing to Brobdingnagian proportions.

-The -ska syllable also had a somewhat Nordic or even Russian sound to it that fit the Skaldish language (such as it is) as well.

-And I mentioned the Smilodon thing right? Seriously, scientists, who thought a saber-toothed cat (they're not technically related to modern cats, they are part of an extinct branch of the Felidae family) should have a name that sounds like what we used to call my cousin Donnie when he was suffering from an extreme reaction to his dairy allergy?

1. Maybe! They may take the shape as rumour rewards, but who knows.
2. We're sticking with the tried and true elements for the foreseeable future.
3. We're doing some work on the pike and wounding soon!
4. Patch fixes are logged and get worked on over various sprints (sprints are two-week windows where we organize our work into chunks). Sometimes bugs take more than one sprint, other times they're easily addressable. It really depends on their complexity.
5. We appreciate YOU!

The "new behemoth" was Urska!

We're working on redefining our Roadmap and will have more information this week! This update will clarify a lot of the items that are currently in limbo :)

No, but soon you'll be able to have more than 1 rumour on the go at once, so this won't be an issue in the next patch!

I'm currently redoing our Roadmap and will have more information this week.

We found that the current format wasn't really working and was hard to parse. Stay tuned for more info :D

I both mean that, and also what if you could have an Escalation like experience over the course of a season, leveling up a talent tree and engaging in challenging content and earning upgrades in the Hunting grounds, leading up to a larger capstone like hunting ground encounter?

No nerfs planned at this time. The intent is for players to play the lower difficulties to upgrade their lantern (and learn the variants) before diving into Urska.

This time, talents matter a lot more, and we think that's a good thing as it stops players from blasting through the content and getting burnt out.

Elite

If you want to get a game design job, I'd recommend building something, anything, and releasing it in some form. The hardest part about design is coming up with something and releasing it. It's easy to create cool ideas, but it's much harder to release something, especially when you have constraints and deadlines.

If you can provide a few examples of that, you'll definitely stand out when applying to design jobs.

1. Radiant is coming! We're currently working on the Behemoth. The big question for us is what form this will take. It may take on a different form than an Escalation...
2. Always optimizing on every platform!

No plans to nerf Frostbite at the moment beyond small tuning changes and fixes, largely to the Avatars, and to some of the talents. Overall, I'm pretty happy with the difficulty Frostbite landed at.

Where I think we missed the mark is in more clearly signposting when Slayers are 'ready' for Hard Escalation. We have built an expectation in the past, even if not one we intended, that Hard escalation is the 'default' and that Slayers should be doing it right away. In reality, and in Frost Escalation more than ever, we really want slayers to learn the new behemoths, the mechanics, and the earn upgrades in Normal Escalation a bit before diving into Hard, but we don't signpost this well, nor is it an expectation we set up well.

Frostbite was built expecting that many slayers would fail their early attempts due to it. It's possible for very high skilled players to overcome it with no talents at all, but it does get easier and more manageable as you go up in Lantern levels. I'll keep watching the data as it comes in, and if big swings are needed, I'll take them, but at the moment, Frostbite is working about as expected, and every day more and more Slayers are completing hard successfully.

No plans right now for gliders or 6 player parties in escalation, sorry! There's a lot of complexity that gets added here, and if anything, we might be thinking more along the lines of how to bring Escalation like content to the places where gliders and 6 players are.

LORE QUESTION LET'S GO: The unseen have been quiet for some time. Perhaps too quiet. All they did was some little nasty tricks for the last halloween, but that was the end of it. It doesn't feel like they are a threat anymore ever since they brought Riftstalker and we were told they worshipped Shrowds.

I expected easter eggs of the Unseen around the Frost Escalation map, but sadly that isn't the case, seems like they weren't around here at all.

What happened? Are they still a threat? Are they scheming something?

The Unseen have turned out to be largely a seasonal threat, taking advantage of the general weirdness (culturally and aetherically) associated with the time period around Dark Harvest to do as much of their mysterious work while remaining, as much as possible, small-u unseen. There are also specific factors to do with the seasonal alignment of the Shattered Isles—factors that make it easier for them to draw on umbral power that lets them summon the dark Behemoths with which they're obsessed. These factors haven't changed even though the new Ramsgate is on the other side of the Ram formation from where it used to be.

In practical, out-of-game terms we need to make the best use of our resources that we can in the time that we have (which I know isn't a novel idea). That means something like perfecting the look and function of the braziers in Frost Escalation will take precedence over adding lore features, even if they'd be cool (pun probably intended, at least subconsciously).

That said, the nice thing about the Dauntless team is that we can also build on existing content and other ideas in the future—so don't write the Unseen off just yet! If we have great gameplay reasons to do something like you suggest, we absolutely will.

SECOND: What is the state of the Maelstorm, currently? It seems like we never really tried to go deeper this thing, and probably for good reasons -- but still, what is there to it right now?

The Maelstrom is definitely still there! The Skyquake was a massive inflation of that storm, a rapid growth spurt that ended up consuming the old regions (the Sheltered Frontier and the Yonder Keys, for example) and leaving the old Ramsgate right on the Maelstrom's doorstep, figuratively speaking.

From the new city's location, there isn't all that much difference. The influence of the Maelstrom can still be felt, even if it's a bit too distant to always be clearly seen in the aetherically charged skies. In fact, many of the higher-level Hunting Grounds islands can be considered to sit either on the "event horizon" of the storm (I tend to picture it as a small black hole or a verrrrry small galaxy, in terms of the physics).

THIRD: This is a very silly and fun question, be warned. What if, for the sake of experiment, we had a Behemoth in captivity (a relatively small and controllable one) and we deprived this one out of aether -- then, we proceed to get Slayers (heavily armed and prepared to fight, of course), feed it aether. The same way we try to tame animals into pets. If things go well, is it possible at all that the Behemoth sees the Slayer as friendly because it's providing it the food source its seeking? Or wouldn't it care and attack the Slayer, taking the aether from him by force?

This third one isn't a really serious question, but it came from a serious concern related to Behemoths emotions. Some of them clearly show emotions and reactions such as laughter (Thrax), or playfulness (Torgadoro). Are those relevant lore-wise? Are they really nothing more than creatures that seek to feed on aether and nothing else? Are they as "soulless" as we think?

Yes, some Behemoth behaviour does imply some intelligence, even sentience, but almost all Behemoths are still essentially very smart living weapons and tools that happen to have been engineered from living aether and released into the world due to a planet-wide catastrophe (the Upheaval).

A few weirdos, like Thrax, may actually be from an aetheric dimension (the Umbral Void) or be a strange evolution of an engineered Behemoth that escaped into the Umbral Void and evolved there for a thousand years before re-emerging. And Thrax therefore has a bit of Muttley to its personality.

But to address the main part of your question, there are a few reasons that this isn't yet something that's commonly done. First and foremost, a near-universal prohibition on any humans controlling, creating, or shepherding Behemoths is one of the most widely shared cultural mores in the Shattered Isles. Behemoths almost destroyed the entire world when that happened. To do anything to risk that cycle starting over again is seen as such an obvious and clear crime against humanity that few would ever risk it without a hugely important reason. What you're describing could fit into that category.

That said, what you're describing could theoretically be possible, at least to attempt. But there are a few reasons it's not often attempted:
-Behemoths reach full size, if not full strength, frighteningly fast. Once they begin to grow from a tiny, almost imperceptible particle of living aetheric DNA (aDNA) a Behemoth can reach their typical size within weeks, even if they take longer to increase to full strength (hence "lesser" Behemoths). It's just not that easy to find a "small" Behehmoth, let along capture one. Even a Behemoth the size of a human being would be a terrible threat to Ramsgate if it was set loose in the town plaza.
-Seeing any human as a parental figure or imprinting on a human is possible, but notoriously difficult to predict. The ability seems to be built into their aDNA, but centuries of accelerated aetheric evolution mean they're just as likely to try to tear you apart as soon as their claws work as they are to sit up and beg for some aetheric kibble.

I had ambition to affect this with a great many more things, but time constraints stopped me from getting too crazy with it. The main ones are molten hearts providing a very small amount of reduction, and the Hot Shot amp creating a safe zone around it until it's been struck.

1. It's been on my mind a bunch lately. So, maybe!
2. I think there are a LOT of things we still want to do with the current elements, but that's a cool idea!
3. Those kinds of changes don't NEED a rework to happen, but it helps because then there's more eyes and brains focused on solving that problem.
4. We are alllllways fixing bugs while we build new features. As a team, we talk a lot to make sure we're prioritizing properly. There's only so much each person can do - so it's a balance between fixing current things and making the new hotness. Occasionally, we set a time as a studio to set everything down and focus only on bugs for an amount of time (we just finished two weeks of that earlier in Feb!)
5. <3

This is an excellent idea and I would love to do it! Unfortunately I don't think it's likely to happen soon—not until we have the resources and a good reason to expend them on new cut scenes beyond me just wanting to write them—but we *are* hoping to get more original VO into the existing escalations so the poor Bosun doesn't need to keep saying the same thing for every Escalation but Frost.

Thank you! We had a lot fun working on this map :)
A lot of the creative direction came in parallel with the development of the Frostwarden people, imagining a place these hardy folks would have come from. There's something very awe-inspiring about polar regions, with giant earth carving icebergs and heavy snow storms.. where very few creatures can survive.

Teeth

Yeah Kaltauga is us dipping our toes into "named" Behemoths. So, it is a Skraev - that's the kind of Behemoth it is. But this one specifically has been causing a ruckus and the people around it have given it a name. At this point, the name and look is really more for flavour and story than anything else.

YES! Next patch.

There are a couple of shortcuts already! Look for the lore items and you'll find them :)

For the last question - yeah absolutely! Having new Behemoths as esca bosses was a way to make them as cool and epic as possible. But we're super aware that some players have found that to mean they don't get to experience them as much as they want.

We're already looking at our next Behemoth and finding ways to make it an Epic Boss Battle, but also something that's more accessible.

That's also going to let us get back to creating more Behemoths more often -- when they're tied to a large environment, new amps, variants, etc we have to bundle everything up all at once.

You can look forward to more Behemoths in more places in the future!!

haha the codenames really don't have anything to do with the mechanics :P

Aw thanks! I sincerely appreciate the lore questions so much.

For that matter, I'd love to do another Lore AMA anytime (cough u/CreatureTech-PHX cough)! We have lots of new stuff to talk about now that Skaldeskar has opened up to regular visitors, as it were.

We’re looking at a few options. Personally I’m looking at those vault coins and I think we can do a lot better there.

I know there are conversations happening about what to do with extra materials, but nothing solid yet.

Hmmm, that sounds like something on our end. I’ll bring it to the team. Thanks!

Thank you very much! The reactions have been varied (and many have mentioned the "bear"-like sound) but I appreciate the chance to dig into my thinking a bit.