NIGHTHAVEN
With Season 10: Nighthaven, players explore a new realm hidden from Aeternum for generations to uncover new stories and face threats born from darkness itself. Between a mysterious new zone, evolving endgame systems, and a 10-player raid, this season massively expands on the journey so far.
Nighthaven is New World: Aeternum's most recent expansion, including an all new zone with new creatures and game modes. I contributed by managing many major areas:
- Our newest 10-player raid, Isle of Night, in collaboration with our Virtuos collaborators in France.
- An all new procedural dungeon game mode, "Catacombs".
- About 30 new creatures introduced to the open world.
- Main Story Quests for the new zone including 9 boss encounters.
ISLE OF NIGHT
Isle of Night is a new 10-person endgame raid. The raid is set in a once magnificent kingdom whose inhabitants have now fallen Lost. Similar in length and format to Hive of Gorgons, this raid features three new bosses and multiple new enemy types, light puzzles, and set piece encounters. This raid is some of the hardest content in Season 10, demanding players gear-up and coordinate to succeed.
My duties on Isle of Night included managing boss development, guiding our Codevelopment partners at Virtuos through our process and tracking progress. My biggest challenge was seeing it to releasable quality through approvals and bugfixes. Around three months out from our deadline, our burndowns were not projecting to completion in time. I put together reports to show what we needed to accomplish in the following weeks and also prepared our internal team with updates on progress in case we needed to work together with the codeveloper. I also coordinated with our Design Lead and Software Development Manager to ensure the highest priority bugs got focus and deprioritized those we didn't need. In the end, we hit our bug goal and shipped on time.
CATACOMBS
Power lies deep in the catacombs and ruins of this land to those who are bold and brave enough to venture there. Discover the secrets hidden in the shadows of these ancient halls, and use them to confront the threats endangering not only the people of Nighthaven, but the whole of Aeternum as well.
Catacombs is a new game mode in which up to three players explore the depths of a procedurally generated dungeon, battling a wide variety of enemies and bosses, gaining unique mode-specific powerups, collecting cursed resources and currency, and racing to successfully exit and cleanse their treasures before time runs out.
While the difficulty of Catacombs is moderate at the start of a session, the challenge (and reward) is increased significantly each time a boss is defeated. To counter this, players are able to acquire in-mode power-ups that enhance their stats and abilities. With each boss defeated, players must decide between pushing further into the Catacombs for even greater rewards or safely making their exit before time runs out. Failure to make a safe exit results in loss of the vast majority of the treasures collected, but only one player needs to safely exit to avoid this.
Tasked with developing an entirely new game mode.
This was expanded from an internal game jam that we won.
Started with backlogging certain key elements of the mode that we wanted to explore, then assigning those to teammates.
When our entry was approved for ship, I guided cost estimates. This model included significant complexity for planning. Technical challenges included the procedural layout and spawn limits on top of the creative challenge of making the mode fun on its own and rewarding for players choosing to invest time here.
The planning process included breaking down those technical challenges into complexity estimates translated into dev time. Creatively, I guided prioritization discussion of priorization; which elements were nice to have vs critical to the core gameplay. The trickiest was how many players to allow per group which involved overlap between fun and technical restraints -- and whether to support separate difficulties which had significant cost/benefit implications. When discussion on this because fraught, we identified gameplay elements needed to complete to answer the question of whether it would be beneficial and a point in the schedule where the decision would need to be final.
UPYRS, INQUISITORS, & WEREBEASTS
In the new Nighthaven zone, players face threats born from darkness itself.
Our AI & Creatures team introduced three new sub-families; the vampiric upyrs, the corrupted inquisitors, and fearsome werebeasts. We also developed quest bosses for these families, namely Wolf Lord Asena, Feral Morgaine, The Valkyries, and Aleksey the Dracul. These developments came with numerous challenges.
The biggest challenges stemmed from delivery this large scope with limited capacity. Our AI team consisted of 4 designers and supporting engineers. Our scope was further constrained by Animation, VFX, and Audio capacity -- especially Animators which only had a couple of animators for everything we had committed for Season 10. When we were doing out long-term planning for Season 10, the numbers didn't add up with the scope our directors and leads wanted -- understandable with the passion and excitement of this development team. We all wanted it to be great, so looking all the red capacity in our planning was disheartening. It was difficult to get leads to come to grips with the reality and make cuts. Instead, I made another proposal; challenge our designers with resourcefulness. We were able to stretch VFX capacity from other areas and deliver on most of the original asks. We demoted two of our lower priority bosses to elite enemies in side quests while maintaining the most critical areas.
The second challenge was tracking and maintaining the course we'd set. There were several delays, namely with the animation constraints as those resources became unexpectedly reduced mid-development and we have to shift and shuffle schedules. I again focused on maintaining critical path for high priority features like Dracula while preparing Design and VFX to make cuts if needed. We cut one minor ability from one of the open world enemies while managing to deliver on all the quest bosses on time with their full promised scope.