38 Studios Creative Director Blogs on Project Copernicus, Continued
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Here's a sampling:
The first video shows off Jottunhessen, seat of power of the Amaranthine. It was built upon the ruins of the Kollossae floating city of Pelios, which was brought down through the combined efforts of the Dokkalfar, Jottun, and Tyrgash about a hundred years before the start of the MMO. This event would cause the collapse of the Hyperian Empire and usher in the Age of Heroes. The city retains elements of Kollossae architecture, but was deliberately perverted as a way to remind the haughty giants that they were brought low thanks to the manipulation of the dark elves. (How's that for a lorebomb?)
The first video shows the city as it was originally built, but we found that it exceeded our performance budgets and made the client engineers' heads explode. An optimization pass had to be made, which is what the second video captures. This kind of rework is a reality of game design, especially when your engine is still being optimized along with the art. The lessons learned here saved us a lot of time on subsequent cities, such as Valiance.
I wanted to call out one of our philosophies in world design: if you could see a point of interest in the distance, we wanted you to be able to get to it. If you notice the huge spire hanging over Jottunhessen, that was the ruling seat of the dark elves and you could make your way up into that tower for an awesome view of not just the city, but of surrounding zones. You could jump out a window in the spire, and if you lined up your jump correctly, land in the Well of Souls that was positioned below. That was a ton of fun to do!
