Graven Deep

A Lich that controls an alternate realm and the drowned souls of the past.

A series of unique challenges made Zelvraak a difficult encounter to create. Communication with animators to get flying ghosts to look the best they can, engagement with the Combat team to make sure the Class driven gameplay had weight and was impactful. Many disciplines outside of the team were required for Zelvraak to succeed

While this boss presented many problems along his development cycle, he is still the king of mechanical complexity and strategy.

Coral Aerie

The major hurdle with this encounter was getting multiple large monsters to play well together.

The combat footprint of a Gryphon is large, and adding more than one to a space poses unique challenges. Adding four total involved a lot of unique solutions and assistance from our engineering team.

When I describe this encounter to other people, the first word I think of is frenetic. Its controlled chaos in the best manner possible.

Scrivener’s Hall

I had been wondering for a long time how to reinforce ESOs basic gameplay principles and mechanics, and how to introduce that into an encounter.

The documentation process for this encounter was rigorous and had a lot of assistance from other designers, QA, and most of all our VFX team. Making sure we had visual language that was representative of what we wanted for gameplay was imperative.

Moonhunter Keep
Archivist Ernarde taught me a lot on how to make encounters more inclusive to individuals with color blindness.

The goal was to make sure an encounter involving many colors to denote good and bad was not more difficult for players with different color blindness. Symbols married to a color was a good route we took to help make this fight more fair for all.

March of Sacrifices
An encounter with one of the most impressive vistas the game offers.

The dungeon revolves around the idea of “The Wild Hunt” so the encounter had to do a good job of sticking to Fictions needs.

A lot of collaboration was done between Design, World Building, and Writing to make this fight feel cohesive.

Depths of Malatar

After completing the main story in ESO, one repeated request was getting to revisit the Colored Rooms, Meridias realm.

The last time players encountered this space was purely quest driven so giving them the opportunity to engage in combat inside this realm was a unique development experience.

Frostvault

One of the encounters that went through the most change from start to finish. This fight showed me early how important good, honest, and frequent playtesting was.

Rizzuk went through many stages to get him to where he is.

Lair of Maarselok

Bringing back a beloved character and recreating them always poses challenges.

It was important that when Selene returned, she was reminiscent of her past self but also brought some new tricks to the table.

Unhallowed Grave

This was one of the first opportunities our design team really got to collaborate and work closely with designers from other teams. Utilizing a new gameplay mechanic that the Overland team had created, we wanted to improve upon it.

Engineering helped turn the Grappling Hook into a staple of ESO PvE combat.

Dread Cellar

I learned a lot about how VFX during this boss, particularly how to utilize it to telegraph things more efficiently and accurately.

Every game, and every encounter has to wrestle screen real estate and ensure communication is always clear.

Castle Thorn

While not one of my favorite encounters I’ve created, this boss did teach me a lot of valuable lessons going forward about opportunity cost, mechanic timing, and visual clarity.

There were numerous lessons about system functionality and better ways to handle data that I had not previously been utilizing.