Proud Moments: Dark Astoria

Dark Astoria. Things are gonna go downhill before they get better.

Dark Astoria. I smile when I think of the name. We released the revamp for this zone in Issue 22, and it's one of the things I'm most proud of during my time in City of Heroes. Let's get down to the nitty gritty and talk about the development process for the zone! First off, a who's who of the people who worked on the zone:

Design:
Sean McCann - Story, Mission Design, Mission Map Design, Entity Creation (Partial)
Cord Carney - World Design, Supported Story Design
Christopher Behrens - Supported Story Design, Systems Designer - Created all the villain groups for Dark Astoria.

Art
David Kirchmer - Senior/Lead Environment Artist
Addison Delany - Environment
Nathan Choi - Environment
Don Pham - Environment
Jay Doherty - Character Artist
Eric Chyn - Character Artists
William Balzer - Concept Art
Keetsie Braz da Cunha - FX Artist
Leo Braz da Cunha - FX Artist

Forming our party to tackle Dark Astoria!

We started our planning with Dark Astoria with the story. What story were we going to tell? There were several mandates that we had to meet:

1) The zone would be the first solo endgame area.
2) We had to have an endgame trial.
3) We couldn't spend more than 3 months of art time on the zone.
4) It had to be a co-op zone for heroes and villains.
5) Reveal the Letter Writer's identity. This was an enigmatic figure whose true identity players had wanted to know for several issues.

I researched Dark Astoria to see what we could do. The zone was already a favorite of mine from back in the day. The challenge with writing for an 8 year old game is that you don't want to stomp on anything that's been established. I was a big proponent on no retcons to established lore, but instead expanding upon what was created in a manner that made sense. There were a lot of spawns in Dark Astoria that spoke of releasing the sleeper, Mot, beneath the town. I looked up all references to Mot, and the most that was mentioned was that it was banished at one point, the Circle of Thorns wanted to keep it sealed, the Banished Pantheon wanted to awaken it, and the Tsoo wanted to also keep it sealed.

I then looked up what we had in our story bible. The bible was old and outdated at that point, but since we had done so little on the Banished Pantheon, it could be used as a potential source of information. I found out a lot about the Banished Pantheon, and an interesting bit about Mot, which was that a piece of Mot was originally from the Roman time.

When in Rome - deal with a God of Death.

I began to work on the story, running it by several designers as I worked on it, until I got what I wanted. In a nutshell, Mot had risen from his slumber in Dark Astoria due to the vast amount of wars that happened from previous City of Heroes updates. The Circle of Thorns were beaten. However, the Midnight Squad and Tsoo were out in force trying to fight off the Banished Pantheon and the mysterious Knives and Talons of Vengeance. Players would pick up the story by hearing about several people who had vanished. The one thing they all had in common was being from Dark Astoria. We would solve the main plot of the story through solo story arcs, then have a mission that was a connection to the endgame trial. (This mission was later removed due to player feedback.)

We then set to task of working with David Kirchmer to get the environment set up. Several things from the story had to be cut because they would take too much time. We wanted to avoid this 3 months being full out crunch for the environment team. Melissa Bianco, our team lead, was very adamant about that. Crunch time is no fun time and you don't want to bleed the work out of everyone. After some talks, we were able to figure out the best use of environment's resources while also getting the support needed to make missions unique. The environment team would take one part of the zone and revamp that with new assets. These new assets would have smaller  versions of them made so that I could prop them in mission maps. The team would go also go through and re-prop some things in the zone and spruce up some older textures. The size of the new area would be determined by Christopher Behrens, who was working on the endgame trial which would heavily use this area.

Finally, there was character art. Jay Doherty was handling the majority of our art requests. He regretfully had to leave Paragon while we were working on Dark Astoria, but not before he made some awesome characters. Eric Chyn took over, but some character work had to be cut, as it wasn't part of his schedule originally to do this. Chris Behrens took a big lead in this, using the City of Heroes costume creator to make a ton of unique costumes for the Knives of Vengeance, Banished Pantheon, Talons of Vengeance, and Tsoo. Eric Chyn supported Chris with some additional costume pieces. I'm getting ahead of myself though. Concept art!

Art by William Balzer, http://billbalzer.4ormat.com/

William Balzer, Chris Behrens, and myself worked closely on the concept art. Matt Miller, our deisgn lead, helped make sure we were all on the same page. The goal was that Bill's concept would set the tone for environment and character art, so we worked closely to make sure the concept art reflected the story we wanted to tell. Mot's look was very much tied to the story, and this would impact how the Banished Pantheon monsters looked, as well as the new environment.

In the end, we knocked Dark Astoria out of the park. Environment art made the zone amazing. Below are comparative screenshots of the zones.

Before Revamp.

After revamp.

The enemies came out amazingly. Cord Carney, who came on a little later into the project, was a huge help in helping me smooth out story elements and also setting up the world and atmospheric spawns to help sell the story of Dark Astoria.

Lastly, the story was terrific to work on. I worked on making each individual mission map for that series, which totaled to something like 30 maps. It made each mission feel unique, something which City of Heroes had been dinged on in the past. Players traveled from corrupted sewers to the inside of Mot to a burning version of the Roman era. I wanted it to feel like an epic journey where you didn't know where you would end up next, and I feel like we succeeded.

People have asked me a lot what I'm most proud of in City of Heroes. It's a no brainer for me - Dark Astoria. It's not only the story, however, it's how well all of the team worked together to get it done, without any crunch time to boot. (Hopefully I'm right on that and no one crunched without me knowing about it.)