Hello Travelers, and welcome back for the fourth installment of Making Last Epoch! For today’s look at the world of game development within Eleventh Hour Games, we’re going to be taking a look at World Design and Narrative with our resident Lore Master and Lead Writer: Kyle Melberg. Kyle has made a couple of guest appearances on our weekly Developer streams to answer questions about the lore of Eterra, and today we’ll be talking about what exactly “World and Narrative” is, and the process behind creating the expansive universe in which all the loot, lizards, and groles reside.
World & Narrative vs. World Design
Let’s start off by getting an explanation of what exactly “World and Narrative”, and “World Design” are as concepts in game development, and what separates two aspects of design that come together to help form the player’s experience. Both of these aspects work together to answer the questions in a way that feels satisfying: Where is the player? What are they fighting? Why are they fighting? How is this communicated to the player?
“World and Narrative” is in simple terms, the setting the game takes place in and the story we are telling in this world. In turn, “World Design” is taking the setting and story we want to communicate, and answering the question of how to deliver this experience to the player. It is one thing to have a grand story and world in mind, but it is another thing entirely to express that to the audience.
World Design is the difference between running through a grey plane fighting featureless pill capsule shaped 3D objects vs fighting through the slums of Maj’elka against the Scalebane in order to secure the loyalty of your potential new ally Zerrick.
Creating History
Having covered what these concepts are, and their purpose within game design, lets jump into the process behind creating and implementing these aspects. For this, we’ve picked the recent Harbingers lore as an example, and are covering the process of their creation with Kyle.
The Harbingers began with a design goal. The larger design team identified that we needed a “Pinnacle Boss” encounter in the endgame portion of the game that could act as a clear goal for players that had reached our story campaign’s current endpoint.
From there the questions we had to answer were, “Who/What are we fighting?”, “Why are we fighting them?” and “How do we communicate this to the players?”. We chose the Harbingers initially for two main reasons.
Firstly, we knew that this “Pinnacle Boss” would act as the game’s final boss for an extended period of time, and out of our main enemy factions the Void stands out as the most important and thus most fitting for this role. Orobyss himself as an option was off the table due to reasons involving the yet to be released story chapters, thus we needed a group that could act as Orobyss’s most powerful servants.
Secondly, the Harbingers update was originally proposed as a more “lightweight” update with less resources directed towards it. These high tier Void enemies thus were pitched to be extremely powerful Void Knights serving Orobyss, now known as Harbingers, and would use Sentinel player models with unique armor in order to be efficient with modeling and animation time. It wasn’t long at all before we went with the direction of giving the Harbingers unique models. This increased the scope but it was a decision that ultimately resulted in a far more interesting set of encounters compared to the original plan.
(Aberroth went through a few name changes during development)
Parallel to this was the discussion of who should act as the leader of the Harbingers and thus be our “Pinnacle Boss”. While we were still considering existing and in-development assets as sources of reskins, the Forgotten Knight was one of the candidates. When it was determined that we would be making completely custom models for these new encounters that knocked the Forgotten Knight out of the running for that role (barring some brief considerations of her doing some sort of monstrous transformation before the fight), but her being involved stayed in the conversation.
We had kept the Forgotten Knight in our back pocket for a long time as this mysterious character with a connection to the Void, but were never entirely sure what to do with her once it came time for her to take center stage. In the early versions of the Harbingers storyline where she acted as a twist villain, she was still your guide through your encounters with the Harbingers, and this aspect remained part of the plan.
Now the question became “What is the Forgotten Knight’s role in this? Why is she helping the Traveler?” and from there answers began spinning out that answered other questions, from who our “Pinnacle Boss” is to the question of how and why we learn about the Harbingers from the Forgotten Knight and how this pushes the player further down this storyline. The final shape that coalesced from answering these questions was a story about a knight filled with regret and their redemption in the face of despair.
In short, it all starts with a goal and the questions that spin out from trying to fulfill that goal in an achievable way.
Lore within Limits
When World and Narrative meets World Design, there’s often considerations and concessions that need to be made. Even if you have the most compelling story to tell, you need to make sure it actually fits in with the gameplay flow, and acts to support the game as a whole. The ideas and concepts that come from World and Narrative all have to be filtered through World Design to reach the point where they are something that is communicated to the player rather than an ephemeral idea.
One of the most obvious areas where these sorts of considerations and concessions have to be made are places where the gameplay and expectations of the genre come into conflict with an idea. ARPGs are traditionally fast paced, where time not spent killing monsters and getting loot is at a minimum. An extended sequence in the port city of Thetima trying to broker passage to the nearby Isle of Storms would be something a vast majority of ARPG players blanch at, thus that sequence is kept brief so they can get back to the action as soon as possible.
This comes into play even outside of direct gameplay sequences like the above, and can shape the structure of the story itself. There was at one point a plan to make the gaining of your Mastery Class a much more involved experience, involving going into each character’s backstory in more depth before unlocking their new powers.
However, this sort of content would require five unique mini-chapters that each told a story that could be expressed in the fast, combat heavy ARPG style. Not to mention the question of how to handle multiplayer in these class specific scenarios where a group could consist of wildly different characters. This resulted in us backing away from the idea and in its place we have the current sequence that gets the new character options in the player’s hands quickly so they can return to combat and looting.
Above all, the gameplay that fans of the genre love takes precedence. Narrative and World Design’s goal is to come together to create a player experience that ARPG players enjoy.
Notes from the Loremaster
As part of the process of discussing Narrative and World Design with Kyle, we also asked a couple of questions to get some personal insight, and wanted to quickly share this insight from our resident Loremaster.
What’s your favorite piece of existing lore in Last Epoch?
The Forgotten Knight started as a reference only very early players and devs would get, she was added as a flavor NPC in End of Time around the same time that we scrapped the Knight class and replaced it with the Sentinel. For those unaware, the Knight was one of our female player characters at the time and the Void Knight Mastery was one of our earlier playable classes, one of the three available in our Kickstarter demo. As a tribute to the original Knight class, I added the Forgotten Knight as this Void Knight woman hanging around the End of Time with a cynical yet casual personality.
We had played with ideas on how to give her a larger role multiple times, but when we decided to make her a focal character in the Harbingers storyline I had a great time fleshing her out to be a fully realized person.
Over the course of the Harbinger storyline you get a new conversation with her with each new rank in the associated faction, and it was an exciting challenge to show her journey. From starting out cynical and closed off, to slowly starting to trust again, sliding back, and then finally finding it within herself to fight for her redemption.
How about a lore tease for Season 2: Tombs of the Erased?
As much as I love the Forgotten Knight, “Tombs of the Erased” will introduce a character that I had nearly as much fun writing. A character that has been referenced in some of the existing Weaver’s Will Uniques, and I’m very excited for players to get the opportunity to meet him face to mask.
Closing
We want to give a thank-you to Kyle for providing us with this look behind the scenes while being so busy closing out work for Tombs of the Erased. We hope you enjoyed this look at the Making of Last Epoch, and we’ll see you all again soon! We’re all very excited to start getting into the hype for the upcoming Season 2 of Last Epoch releasing on April 2nd!