Isabella - Tempest's Heart

Unlike the Dynasty Shipyard encounter, for this boss fight I really wanted to showcase Isabella's own power without needing to excessively rely on adds and minions. After brainstorming with the team, we also decided to create a unique arena consisting of three inter-connected islands surrounded by corrupted waters that would kill the player if they entered them.

Phase 1 - Isabella Transformed

• Isabella leaves behind her worldly weapons and transforms into a winged monstrosity

• Here she employs several wing swipe and spin attacks as well as energy based magical attacks in the form an energy wave and energy blade (in a nod to her previous rapier)

• Periodically, she will cast the Touch of Corruption curse on a player that inflicts high damage to them over time and snares them. Players who prepared with anti-Corruption tinctures take reduced damage and can temporarily clear the effect on consumption

• Lastly she can summon four Fissures which snake away from here and lightly track toward players in front of them

Phase 2 - Wings of Death

• Isabella now adds two flight abilities to her attack list: a repeated swoop as well as a powerful divebomb slam

• The swoop telegraphs the intended victim using a similar icon used in the Neishatun boss fight but players in the path of the swoop may also get clipped, demanding that players have good positional awareness and use well timed dodges

• The divebomb slam acts like a teleport where she launches into the sky, teleports to her victim and places a tell ring on the ground, then slams down for a moderate sized AOE. This attack provided a great way to apply pressure even to far away ranged players during the fight

Phase 3 - Spreading Corruption

• This last phase sees Isabella periodically summon as many as three Corruption Pylons in the arena, both empowering her and creating an area denial on each of the three islands in the arena.

• The pylons themselves apply a huge DoT area when spawn that covers the island they are on for ~10 seconds, followed by a persistent rain of meteors that randomly strike different points on the island

• Players must engage in a moderate length Azoth Staff interaction with the pylon to destroy it, leaving them exposed to damage from falling meteors as well as attacks from Isabella herself

Phase 4 - Finale

• Isabella flies herself over to the Corruption portal, attempting to draw power to save herself and win the fight. Players must quickly run to her and perform an Azoth Staff interaction to create a feedback pulse in the energy flow and dispatch Isabella

Character Transformation

• I really wanted to showcase Isabella's final transformation into her monstrous, winged, corrupted form, but we had not attempted such a thing in game, nor did we really have tech specifically designed to achieve this.

• What we did have, and what I did ultimately use to achieve the effect, is the ability to turn on and off meshes on the character skeleton. What was novel here was that I was swapping the entire character mesh. This was possible because the core skeletons were compatible. The wings and any addition submeshes were in addition to that core body skeleton

• Having done similar things in past games, I directed the art team to have burst of movement and vfx for the transformation moment to help hide the swap (you can hide a lot in quick movement) and to have her floating off the ground so that when I scaled her up, there wouldn't be noticeable foot-sliding or position issues

• The end result I think looks great and the method was reused later on several characters

Character "Flight"

• I identified early on that I wanted to lean in to Isabella's wings for some of her attack kit. However, New World only had 2D navmeshes, we had not attempted such a character yet, and melee weapons still needed to be a valid option versus her.

• I took three strategies for this: 1) hover for movement 2) swoop style charge attacks, and 3) teleporting dive-bomb attacks. Each of these gave moments and impressions of flight without an actual 3D flight implementation as well as making her flight always return her to the ground so melee players could get their hits in

• For hovering, we created a new animation set of her slightly lifting off the ground but staying largely upright to zoom across large distances but be able to quickly transition back to the ground to execute attacks

• For the Swoop attack, the core setup wasn't drastically different from a running change attack but I hide the transition between targets with a back-and-forth flutter animation after completing each pass at her target. I also reused the target icon from the Neishatun fight to indicate her target, giving players a better idea of where she was heading

• For the Divebomb, I opted to have her fly straight up out of sight, then teleport to her destination before slamming down to the ground. This let me hide her positional change (which would have a variable distance) as well as make the attack more suspenseful and dramatic since players would lose sight of her for a moment.

Boss Interaction (Ending)

• Since Isabella was our final boss (at the time) we needed to send her off in a more dramatic way that her just falling over dead on the last hit. At the time, we did not have group cinematic tech (nor did we have the time to make a full fledge cinematic) so we opted for an in-fight interactive moment to sell her final demise.

• I developed a structure to it whereby after reaching 1 health, Isabella would divebomb/teleport to a specific location to trigger the finale animation, then enter a waiting loop with a player interact activated in close proximity.

• In this way, I was able to reliably frame the finale in the best possible position in the arena and require that players gather near her to see her final death. Additionally it gave a small time threat to players where if they didn't quickly stop her, she would perform a team wipe, having become recharged by the corrupted portal

Giving players a multitude of threats and jobs is a great thing

• Certainly wasn't a new revelation to this fight but more a reinforcement that its a really good thing in a multiplayer game to have players collaborate to deal with different threats at the same time.

• Pylons, the touch of corruption, fissures, the wave attack, and Isabella could all be actively threatening different players at the same time, forcing them to adjust their playstyles on the fly

• Moreover, encouraging players to designate someone to deal with pylons created a layered role meta for the fight beyond simple tank, dps, healer.

Unique arenas come at a cost

• Again, not a huge surprise but the unique structure of this arena posed fairly significant development challenges

• Building pools of corruption in the center an exterior meant that the landscape as a whole needed to be sloped, resulting in some attacks having challenges in connecting due to height differential (for example the wave attack)

• Additionally, determining the optimal height of the islands and the total vertical range of the arena took several iterations to lock down which had cascading effects on things like the intro and end animation positioning. Initial versions had as much as 3 meters of vertical difference between the top of the island to the waters edge which was way too much for our combat

• While I do still think the arena's design was successful, the lessons learned in making this absolutely helped inform how we would design future arenas to reduce development cost (make it as flat as possible unless there is a reason for height, lockdown early so animation team doesn't need to rework things, save intro/outro work for the end of development)

Areas to improve

• Meteor Around Pylons - I was never quite happy with how this presented to the player. Due to its random nature, it would sometimes be a great experience, sometimes be overly punishing, and other times be completely ignorable. A better solution would have been to implement a more consistent threat in addition to the randomized meteors; for example at a regular cadance, drop a meteor right near where the player is in addition to the randomized spawns

• Make the final interact a group interact - It would have been so much a better experience to have everyone on the team be able to join in on performing the finale interaction. Unfortunately, the technology at the time limited us to either a single player or a fixed number of players, and since I couldn't guarantee that a specific number would live to that final interaction, I made the choice to go with a single player performing the interact.