Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire – Making a Boss Fight

A few days back, Obsidian Entertainment brought their pirate-themed CRPG Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. And with Obsidian owned by Microsoft, we now get this post on the official Xbox Wire blog where the studio’s production director Alec Frey talks about a particularly interesting boss fight his team designed for the game’s Forgotten Sanctum DLC.

A few sample paragraphs to get you started:

An encounter that I’m quite proud of is the Memory Hoarder fight in The Forgotten Sanctum DLC. As a producer I get a lot of joy out of seeing all the departments come together to build something and this fight is a great example of that.

John Cotto is the area designer who built the Collections wing of The Forgotten Sanctum. John had this idea of an area of the dungeon where the god Wael housed all their worldly collections. You would later come to find out most of those collections were living beings. In a brainstorming session Dylan Hairston (who did most of the audio design for The Forgotten Sanctum) and John thought of the idea of a giant abomination that was created to pacify everyone who was kept in the Collections. To keep them pacified this creature would scream into a complex system of tubes running through the Collections. Thus, The Memory Hoarder was born.

The design and art teams quickly decided that a creature whose primary function was to scream intelligent beings into a daze would need to possess countless mouths and faces. This creature, being a creation of the God of Dreams, Illusion, and Secrets quickly became a thing of nightmares. Meanwhile, environment art and audio were adding evidence of the tubes running through the dungeon and faint screams coming from them as you traversed it. This created some awesome foreshadowing as everything within the dungeon reminded you that there was something lurking at the bottom.