What was once a verdant forest around Cyndrum has been transformed into the Asag, a diseased land with rivers of dead fish and deep, oozing scars. Though it may initially seem empty, the Asag is full of diseased, hateful and hungry creatures. It is home to some of the new creatures players will face in Fallen Enchantress.
In this creature feature, we will introduce some of those monsters and give some hints on how to fight them.
These great snakes are known for their inhuman reflexes and deadly poison. They are unlikely to miss when they attack, but players are best to use champions and experienced units if they hope to hit the Naja. Less accurate units will find themselves whittled down by the Naja's venom while Naja deftly dodges their attacks.
Plaguestlker's already considerable speed is augmented during their first action in combat, where they get an increase to movement and attack that allows them to quickly cross the battlefield and close with your units. Your archers won't be safe to sit back and pick plaguestalkers off. You are best to use heavily defended units whose armor will keep the plaguestalkers poisoned teeth and claws from finding flesh.
Said to have once been priests in Cyndrum these men are able to use life and death magic. They can heal their allies by siphoning away their injuries and inflict that pain on their enemies. Though they are cursed by the suffering of the world around them, the creatures of the Asag won't attack them and often come to their defense. When fighting a Haunter players should be careful, a nearly dead Haunter is more dangerous than one that isn't injured at all. If players are going to attack a Haunter, they are best to kill him.
Ritualist's don't want to fight you. They want to summon a Death Demon that will kill you instead. It doesn't matter what else is happening on the battlefield, if plaguestalkers are chewing on your legs, if a Dark Wizard is replacing your peasants with bonfires, if Abeix himself is eating your champions. Your first task should be to kill any Ritualist's on the battlefield or you risk making a bad situation much worse. This is what archer divisions and swarms of fireballs were made for.
At Red Spring 10,000 victims were sacrificed in a ritual to appease Curgen. A spell bound these men to the titan but he ignored the offering. Now they roam the world, trapped between death and eternal service to a titan that no longer exists. They seek to pass on their curse by killing others, in the hope that doing so will end their suffering.
Scrap Golems are relics of ancient battles. They attempt to repair themselves with makeshift parts and continue fighting a war that only they remember and where everyone else is an enemy. Scrap Golems can be dangerous enemies to starting units, but their injuries don't allow them to stand up to stronger attacks. They are also a good source of metal, and players looking to scrape some extra metal together would do well to hunt down rogue Scrap Golems for their parts.
Ignys are less powerful than fire elementals, but still pack a powerful attack. Their fire damage won't be blocked by most armor, and they are immune to fire spells. It is best to outfit your champions with items that protect from fire and weapons that do cold damage. Banishing weapons provide bonuses against elementals and make quick work of minor elementals like the Ignys.
Magic was never evenly distributed across Elemental. In some places it lay thin and worn, and in others it was deep and thick. In these most magical, most sacred, places elementals formed as guardians and grew larger than any elementals summoned by men. These elemental lords are so powerful that they survived the cataclysm and having magic bound into the shards. But their sacred homes are now empty, and the power that fed them for so long has been stripped away. Some have been driven mad by it, others continue to act as guardians, but they all hate the titans that imprisoned the magic of Elemental and the channelers that would make use of it.
Abeix is one of these elemental lords. All but the most powerful should avoid the Bhinadmi Fissure, but if you go to challenge Abeix, bring armies and your highest level champions. Bring weapons that weaken armor to get through Abeix's rocky hide and powerful damage spells. Abeix is unlikely to fall victim to spells he can resist, you cannot blind him or freeze him. But lightning and fire may cause some damage if you bring enough of it.
Sweet, I wanna roll a Haunter. Those look cool.
As a designer my hope was to create creatures that accomplished the following goals:
1. Provided interesting strategic opportunities for combat.
2. Fit the theme of Elemental, that they felt uniquely at home in the world we were creating. Specifically the creatures were flawed or broken in some way.
3. Were creative and interesting.
It is hard to hit all three requirements. Soem score higher in one catefgory than others. And in all cases the team helped really improve the uniqueness and flavor from each one (I love that the art team gave the Butcherman his sacrifical sword and left his feet bound).
There are more monsters coming. And some monsters are going to be removed in FE (I know, sacriledge!). The bland Minor Fire Elemental, for example, is gone and replaced with the Ignys. A few wolves have been cut. Bascially anything that uses a reskinned model went on the block for us to decide if we wanted to make a new model or not. And if we were going to spend time making a new model was that really the creature we wanted to make, or did we want to make something new.
It will be fun. I realized that we are making good progress when I played through some WoM tactical battles to test some OOM issues today and found myself missign the FE tactical battles (it's hard to go back). We will release more information in the coming weeks, stay tuned.
I love this. The character and atmosphere of the monsters and their non-generic nature are great. Moreover, the implications for combat are very exciting: different damages and resistances, with special abilities and correspondingly meaningful tactical choices? Yay! I don't know if there are any plans to make the battlefield itself meaningful or interesting (hint hint), but these are all excellent leaps in the right direction.
Rock on!
Wow! This looks really fun and challenging.
Thanks for taking the time to share the info and the design philosophy behind it.
Big fan of your mods, Derek. Really glad SD was able to work something out with you and I appreciate you taking the time to make posts like these to share your insight. Thanks!
Ooooooo!!! Pretty...
Very nice!
And I thought the next step after spiders and darklings would be spiderlings.
Those look quite impressive, I'm liking it so far.
Some ideas based on this:
You need a variety of elemental critters (I'm going to assume this isn't a complete list)
Some spell ideas, borrowing from a mud I used to play: Elemental weapon enchanting
fire, water, air books : ignite weapon, freeze weapon, charge weapon- gives weapon the appropiate element. Tactical spell and lasts for INT/3 rounds.
This should be around a level 2 spell, if we're keeping spell levels.
Earth book: shape weapon/shape armor: strategic spell.
Shape Weapon: adds accuracy and damage to weapon. Shaped weapons cannot have ignite/freeze/charge effect added.
Shape Armor: enhances armor.
I see this as more of a level 3 or 4 spell, again if spell levels are kept.
like i said it eons ago Kael was going to come and inject fun in elemental. give him time and he will melt the bland and turn it into grand. oh that rhymes lol
Great artwork!
I'm liking the concepts, especially Ignys and that demon behind the ritualist.
Will that be the same type of demon used for the Shadow World spell?
Hell yes. This is what i was hoping for when i heard you joined the team. This is what WoM has been missing.
I hope this is the kind of information we can find in-game in FE when we are playing. Maybe not the stuff about "bring your strongest champions" and so on, but the other things.
Very neat.
Hopefully you don't remove to many monsters. For instance you mentioned wolves. There are alot of reskinned wolves in E:WOM. Instead of simply removing most of them I would prefer it if you simply made them spawn in different areas. It was also mentioned that FE will have tons of new environments. Having unique variations on the basic monsters for some of these environments would be very cool, and really help those places feel unique. You could also add unique abilities. For instance Frost Wolves would spawn only on snow and would have a frost breath attack. If you also ad elemental dmg resistance then new model or no new model it will feel like a completly new monster.
Good instincts. My belief is that re-skinning is a tool that designers use to fool themselves that they are adding content. This would be a great trick if the audience were also fooled, but they aren't... ever.
Honestly, what makes critters like these special: is that they're not as common as bandits or wolves.
You need to make sure you see these guys, but you don't see them all the time. Even the best designed critters become ho-hum eventually if overexposed. See Vampires and Zombies.
Yeah, variety is the spice of life! It also would be cool if monsters stacking together made more sense, such as with their own kind. Bandits hanging out with spiders is just plain weird.
I'll stay tuned.
But don't release too much! (the 'spoiler syndrome')
I read this while I was drinking some coffee and did a near spit-take. I lol'd for a second then I felt bad; like I should go hug everyone working on the game and apologize.
So the 'new dichotomy' to replace good vs. evil is natural vs. magical? Is magic the real villain in the Elemental world? I was hoping to see some benign or even helpful-to-humans creatures left over from the Cataclysm, but I guess they are all just weapons that got out of control...
Nice concept art, but I can remember the last time I was fooled by good concept art. I'll remain hesitant until I see some good in game screens.
What's supposed to come first- the 1.3 beta or the FE beta?
Both sound interesting.
The 'new dichotomy' is to enforce the fact that the world was once beautiful, but has been ruined. This isn't a change in the flavor of the world, only that we are seeking to actually show that flavor in the game. When I write quests I look for ways to bring those themes out, when I design monsters I look for opportunities to show that. The Plaguestalker, Butcherman, Scrap Golem and Haunter are all great examples of ahowing that theme. One of my favorite monster's for that theme is an Elemental Lord that hasn't been shared yet.
The Ritualist, Naja and Ignys don't score high in the "thematic" section. But I know that it would seem odd if all our monsters were 100% on theme (need some variety to make the other stand out). And the Ritualist, Naja and Ignys make for cool battles.
I'm more of a "that sounds like fun, but I want to make sure it is fun" kind of guy (rather than the graphics). But I understand what you are saying. there are some ingame shots on Gamespot's website that have most of these creatures, as well as showing some in action in the Developer Journal. They are worth checking out.
I'm loving the direction here. One of the things I'm excited about here is that I only have to do one thing in this game: Write AI which is what I enjoy doing. I don't have the kind of creative imagination to create such a rich game playing world like this.
Walking around the office and seeing creatures with fire or electritiy bubbling off them and knowing that A) it looks cool and provides an important "UI" mechanics -- I know what type of damage they do and what types of attacks they are immune to is just wonderful to see and not something I would have ever thought of.
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