With the completion of Shadow of Mordor I was looking to expand my abilities above just mission work. I wanted to be challenged on a new level, something that would be a test of what I know and put me in to new situations I hadn’t experienced. Steve Rhoades talked to me about a new feature that would be explored for the next game, large scale battles. I jumped on to the chance to build it from the ground up because I knew it would need to interact with every other system in the game. So began my work on Fort Assaults.
In pre-production I worked closely with Jon Gramlich to suggest ways to make the large strongholds he was designing keep the battles in mind. He made sure to balance those areas so world art felt that the layout worked, sandbox game play could have interesting opportunities, and we could fit the capture style game play needed for the Assaults. Steve Rhoades lead the way on the destructibles needed for the walls and gate as well as taught me the systems so I could inject Assault elements and provide him an extra pair of hands needed for bug work later in the project.
We were not going to be able to use the previous methods for moving AI around in an open world for large battles. Working with AI engineer Peter Higley we designed new nodes that would be used for capture and pathing through a myriad of environments with a range of AI types. He was also our strength in making it so we could have dozens of enemies in the world at once. Through out the project we were able refine these systems to grow and change as our needs narrowed. Along with moving the AI through the world we needed a way to arrange and spawn a large battle formation that had the flexibility to manage AI of varying sizes. Engineer Keith Zaback took our ideas in to creation and provided the framework so I could build the Assault start in to a prefab that could be easily modified and placed in different worlds. Finally we would need a new way to spawn the huge amount of AI needed to make a battle field and engineer Lance Dyson stepped up to that challenge. Working with him we got the Assault Spawning system and the hooks that we used to develop the composition changes that Fort upgrades could make. These three engineers, as well as everyone else on the engineering team, helped make the blocks that I used to arrange the AI of the Assaults.
The multiple event beats that needed to be displayed to the player came from the mind of Principal artist George Zimmet. He brought his ideas for how cameras should work and what animations would be needed and we worked to get them in and polished. From the initial charge to the balcony success Zimmet kept our cinematic moments impressive and tight. With the Assault we wanted to make sure that everything from the Nemesis and world could be used. Under Mohan Rajagopalan and Chris Hoge‘s tutelage we integrated hierarchy targets in to spawning and protecting control points as well as Fort upgrades using every type of AI that the game has. With many of the upgrades we were able to use unique beast prefabs created for the main story and designer Brian Frantz kept them working. The Fort Defense was able to leverage many of the main systems and prefabs created for Assault, designers Christian Klepac and Ryan Ladeen carried this heavy load across the finish line.
I wrote the script for Assaults in a way that allowed them to be placed easily in multiple worlds and build prefabs that could easily be plugged in to the Assault boiler plate. Taking note to make the system as versatile as possible early we were able to roll it out in to new worlds as they came online without much work. This benefited the Fort Defense designers as well because they were able to take advantage of all the spawner, control point, Nemesis captain, and other game play prefabs without much work. Finally using the delegate system we were able to use the Assault script to run much of the first story line Assault, freeing up story designers to work on more bespoke content. With all of the help from the team members mentioned previously we were able to accomplish the large scale battle feature that Shadow of War became known for.