Overview
When New World initially released, we planned to have the Dynasty Shipyard expedition be a near max level (55 our of 60) experience where the player would come face to face with our ultimate villain, Isabella. So for this we needed something special and unusual compared to our other boss offerings. We also needed the player to not outright defeat her as they would need to later have a proper climactic fight in the Tempest Heart expedition.
What I ended up designing was a fight that leaned in to Isabella's command of her army more than her own outright power. She'd call her army to attack the player and then make a Bond villain-esk exit, leaving the player to deal with her creatures.
Phase 1 - Isabella
Isabella makes a grand entrance then uses her standard ability kit to battle the player as well as summoning simple melee minions
Isabella herself is more agile and evasive than previous bosses, combining dashes, dodges, and teleports with attacks to keep players on their toes
Phase 2 - Cannons and Riflemen
Isabella teleports to a specific spot in the arena, raises her sword, and commands an offshore ship to fire its cannons on the player. After, fighting resumes with Isabella periodically calling these cannons to fire on the players again
She also adds a new minion to the fight in the form of Riflemen which spawn on a nearby docked ship and which fire on players from range
Phase 3 - Corrupted Tigers (Joven and Oro)
Having toyed with players enough, Isabella opens the in-arena cages which contain giant Corrupted Tigers and makes her exit
One tiger has enhanced melee abilities while the other repeatedly spews corrupted flame from its mouth. When in close proximity, the two tigers enhance each other's abilities so players are highly encouraged to separate them
Innovations
Boss Navigation and Facing Control
While we had the ability for out of combat creatures to navigate to a point and execute a specific action, at the time I implemented this fight, we did not have the ability to do this in-combat
I implemented a new methodology for New World to teleport/navigate to one point, then use a secondary point (both defined in the level editor) to home/align toward. This allowed me to consistently hit a mark and facing for the boss to deliver both her initial cannon-fire call as well as her exit from the fight dialog
This method would be subsequently used in all future boss encounters that needed characters to nav-to then face a specific direction mid fight
Firing Cannons on Demand
Though we certainly had the concept of minions, orders, and turrets/projectile spawners in New World, I was the first to attempt combining all three in a boss fight
The cannons themselves were spawned out of the arena within a ship mesh to give the impression that the ship was firing its cannons on the players
Combining this with my Navigation/Facing method, I was able to create a really dramatic phase transition where, so long as players are looking toward Isabella, they will see her raise her sword as she says "FIRE!" and the cannons will fire off behind her and arc down into the play space
Minions Outside the Arena
For this fight I really wanted to add multiple types of minion threats to the player to make them feel like they had walked into an ambush. So in addition to the in-arena melee creatures, I decided to add Riflemen perched outside of the arena playspace that would fire down on the player's position
Simple platform collision was added to another ship mesh's deck spawn targets were placed in this area
The end result being that players were highly encouraged to equip ranged weapons to dispatch the Riflemen or else run for cover
Teleport Attacks
Our tech for teleporting characters was just coming online while I was developing Isabella so my implementation for teleport attacks effectively became best practices for all such characters going forward
Minions in Cages
Unique to this fight are Isabella's two Corrupted Tiger minions which are present in their cages at the start of the fight. Its is only in the final phase that the gates on the cages open and the creatures become active participants in the fight
Implementation of this required carefully crafting the structure of the boss encounter phases with triggers for gates, navigation out of the cages, and closing/blocking off the cages afterward
Lessons Learned
You can have dramatic moments without cinematics if you plan carefully
It was really important to me to have the moment that Isabella first calls down her cannons to be visually impactful to players but at the time we had neither the time nor budget to do a cinematic
I was still able to achieve the desired effect though by carefully positioning Isabella during the phase transition so that players are basically forced to look toward her AND the cannons so that they can see the first volley firing off
Players can deal a lot of damage during dialog moments (Could do better)
As we learned again and again in New World, players were consistently able to find ways to do drastically more damage than we expected or planned for and in this regard, this fight is no exception
Since Isabella is so dialog heavy, she really would have benefited from reducing or eliminating the longer animations and dialog that went with spawning minions and calling for cannon fire.