The developers walk through the remade Siege of Orison mission: the transit platform, Ninetales enemies and Oni-mask refresh, IFF inverters, keycard loot from Elites, and automatic checkpoints. They explain the four-player limit, vehicle section with the IKTI, and a 45-minute "Sweet 45" challenge.
TL;DRThe mission first teaches players to take the shuttle to a transit platform and join an instance, with no reward, and the new instance lets a group of four play a more directed experience without outside interference.
Well, for now we're taking the old shuttle that always has been here, and we're going to go to the transition platform, as at least we've been calling it, where we can call ourselves an instance and get involved, get in the mix. So that's step number one. That's what this mission is going to teach us right now, how to do it. And then after that, anyone who wants to play, they can just rock up to these elevators and get themselves an instance.
And I hope the players aren't expecting a reward for this mission. There is no reward. It says zero.
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LukeEnvironment Art
So yeah, what we are now is the transit platform. This is new compared to the original Siege. We can already kind of see that some stuff has been going on and that Crusader is actually in distress. And then from here, we'll take an elevator and we will go into the instance. It's a new technology that we deployed that allows people to have a more curated experience within the universe, where you go in with your own group of four for this Siege of Orison experience, and then other players can't really obstruct your player experience, so we are able to provide the players with a lot more of a directed experience.
We changed it. Originally, this was like a no man's land that was kind of safe. You join in with Crusader and you'd be safe. And then, I don't know, we just want to kind of throw you into it straight away. You're here to take this back.
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LukeEnvironment Art
Yeah, and I think initially we were also thinking, oh, we want to throw people directly in it. We want to have enemies directly as you get out of the shuttle. And then we actually noticed that we were getting overwhelmed a little bit, because there was no time to kind of position and plan. So we dialed it back a little bit, and it gave you a little bit of room to kind of plan ahead and have that opportunity to jump into the different lanes, as we call it, the different approaches.
Ninetales have nice fluorescent kind of purple armor as well, so they kind of do stand out, but if you were here trying to fight against a different faction, it's going to be so difficult to really lock onto them.
TL;DRThe first island has a theme of a Normandy-style beach landing with immediate, intense uphill fighting, and encounters are designed with peaks and troughs so intensity alternates with moments to regroup.
There definitely was a theme, sort of mixed between gameplay mechanic themes and also telling the story, I suppose, of the Ninetales attack on these platforms. Luke would probably be the best to talk about how he tackled that side of it art-wise.
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LukeEnvironment Art
Yeah, so the theme that we discussed with the creative director Ian, that we really wanted to bring home on this first island, is really this Normandy beach landing experience. You come out of the shoreline. You're there, explosions are happening. The fight is immediately intense. You're trying to push up. We're fighting uphill. We had the mortar section that we just went through. So it's really like, we're here, it's not a stealth approach. You're getting tossed into it straight away. And I think that really defines this first couple of areas. And then we'll see what the next area has entailed for us.
When you're designing encounters and missions, you always want to try for nice, what we call, peaks and troughs, where there's points of high intensity that then chill out. Because if it was constant high intensity, it gives you a different feeling and experience compared to ones where it's like, okay, now we can breathe, we can gather up, we can sort ourselves out.
Well, there are bosses throughout this mission, but there are also some Elites that you'll find. And these Elites will drop a keycard, as we're about to be taught by this first interaction with this objective: when you loot them, you'll get a keycard. That keycard will open a nearby weapons cache.
TL;DRThe four-player limit came from wanting to test a curated, linear mission without outside influence, with bigger parties possible later, while the old Siege, built for fewer players and later upped to around a hundred, was unbalanced.
So it was actually... I've seen a lot of discussion about it online, and I know everybody has their own opinions about it. I think there's drawbacks and benefits to doing it. Simply put, when we decided to remake Siege of Orison, within an instance, we wanted to see whether we could create a curated experience for four players. A linear mission flow that utilised not having any outside influence inside a mission, really for the first time, in Siege. We wanted to see if we could craft that in particular, and see whether we could pull it off: what we have, what we don't have, what we'd like in the future to perhaps make things like this, or things with a bigger party size.
And like I say, we could have made a bigger platform and increased the party size, tried to curate it for that many people. But we settled on four. We wanted to start with a group of four for this. I know it's not very similar to the old Siege.
I mean, the old Siege was completely unbalanced. We had no way of limiting it. So when we had built it originally, it was designed for 30 people. And then they found an issue where... Originally, we used to have two DGSs running on one server, and we found when we did Siege that they were fighting for resources. So instead, we were like, well, let's just have one DGS per Amazon server. So we did that. And then we were like, we can up the player count then. And then obviously that's when Siege came out, and we'd upped the player count to like 100 people. So it was instantly unbalanced on release. So it's nice to finally see it in a balanced form.
Well, honestly, I expect everybody else is way better at the game than us lot. So I would imagine they can probably tackle it two and two. It depends, but it's up to them, really. How difficult they're finding it so far.
And that still happens, clearly. You can still... we let you do this for your mates. You choose. It was completely different when there were people stood outside the shuttle on Solanki Island just grenading each other. I went to a Bar Citizen in France and I met one of them. He was like, "Yeah, I'm one of the guys who stands outside the shuttle and grenade launches everyone."
No, so it is going to be endless respawning, at least with this initial release. We're working on the system, obviously it's the first time trying it, but basically, as you complete each major step, kind of after you get past the objective, every time you go through a med room, completing that next objective, so in this case reach the rooftop, that's going to set our checkpoint to this med room.
Yeah, so what we're trying to do right now is that, at a high level, Crusader got invaded by the Ninetales, and they started to place some of these friend-or-foe machines, which basically means that the Ninetales now disrupt what is considered friend and foe in the airspace around it. So our goal is to disable the friend-or-foe inverters so that the Crusader forces can come in and help us clear the threat.
We just discovered an issue where we need to decide what we load in, and based on that we take the proximity of the size of the location, and the location size is determined by everything that's in the location. What we discovered is that I had that ship fly by, and no one checked what happened at the end of the path it flies. And then we discovered that after it's done, it just keeps flying, it just goes in a straight line and just flies out, so the bounds of the location just...
Yeah, along with this, we did a nice visual refresh of the Ninetales, which includes adding these Oni masks, and there are different versions of them, there are different levels, they're really cool. Ian absolutely loves them, our creative director. We put a lot of effort into them with the rest of the character team to make them look real nice.
TL;DRMax hasn't worked out an optimal route; the level design offers varied cover and engagement ranges for different playstyles, with hand-placed AI inside the instance, praised as the team's good work.
If there is an optimal route, I've not worked it out. I'll let Mr. Kraken make a guide for it, and then I'll know.
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LukeEnvironment Art
Yeah, and that's what we try to think about as well, from an environment and especially from a level design perspective: okay, where are the covers? Are they very close to each other? And then based on that, you kind of get a play space that works very well for shotguns or SMGs, close-range weapons.
But also, it's added challenge, right? If you're always doing shotgun stuff, you just bring a shotgun and do that, but you have to kind of have a bit of variety within the team, make sure you're covering all bases.
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LukeEnvironment Art
Yeah. That's why we create these protected pockets where the AI is really hunkered down, and now it's like, ah, there's a big open area in front of it.
Yeah, and actually, if there's an opportunity to do it, I think the level design team that has worked on this mandate has been so exceptional. We had a lot of work. The AI inside of this instance is actually all hand placed, which is something we don't do anywhere else in the game. We spawn all our AI through spawn closets. Instancing allows us to hand place AI and assign them defend areas, give them all of their settings, hand placed in editor, which is super helpful for development going forward. But once we tried to start doing it, there were a number of problems that arose. They had a lot up against them, and they got it done in record time. They really did an amazing job with this. So shout out to Manuel, John, Marcus. They did an amazing job.
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LukeEnvironment Art
Yeah. We built this together with the team in Germany, and they really smacked it. Level design, the environment, my environment guys in Germany were super proud of how it all came together.
Yeah, this is the opportunity we've had, which we don't get that many of, to use some of the vehicles. We went back and forth about what vehicles to use, actually. We could have used tanks if we wanted. We experimented with the idea once upon a time. But ultimately, we decided to go with the IKTI. That was just an awesome opportunity to use them, jump around. I think it's turned out really, really nice. It's nice to see it inside of a mission.
Yeah. We were debating the time for this, but I think if anybody can complete the entire event... the mission, this entire mission... and send all POVs. I need every player's POVs, no exploits, no cheats. If you can complete the whole event in 45 minutes, if you're the first people to do it, we will commemorate you in the game. So you'll be called the Sweet 45. The Sweet 45 Gang. So once we're live, get yourself a group.
TL;DRThe last section now lets players take a shuttle straight back into the action instead of flying their own ships to the barge, and the barge has a redesigned maze layout and a fully designed boss fight.
Yes. We've skipped the idea, originally in Siege, where you had to fly your own ships up here and try to push your way to the barge. And instead now we let you take the shuttle and get straight back into the action, and there's no chance of anyone being left behind because all the ships have been taken and all this sort of stuff.
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LukeEnvironment Art
What you can do as well is if you come here to the Cutlass on the left, then we can actually see a little bit of the narrative world building that we've done as well: the Ninetales have used this Crusader barge to just Trojan horse their way into Crusader. And we can see that they've used all these containers and that a lot of the stuff came out of it. And that's also why this final boss battle happens at this barge, because this is that stronghold that they flew into. So now we are sieging the fortress.
Yeah, so this barge was actually my pride and joy of the old Siege. This was the thing that I got to make, the old warehouse. If there's any old-school players in the chat, they'll remember it.
Oh, yeah. We made a version of it that had fire in the final area of that thing, but VFX said it was too costly at the time, so sadly, we never got to put out the en fuego version. But we did decide to change the layout of the barge quite considerably, and I think it is significantly, significantly better than what we had before. It's now a sort of maze to find your way over to where you'll find the final boss. And then that final boss room is a completely different thing to what it once was. It's a whole designed boss fight, so hopefully everybody enjoys that, but we'll wait till we get to that bit.