Devin Kaas Games

Middle Earth: Shadow of War

 

Shadow of War is a third-person action role-playing game set in an open world environment and sequel to 2015 game of the year Shadow of Mordor. 

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My Role

On Shadow of War I worked as a level and missions designer. I was responsible for the design of a number of story missions from concept through to ship.

Over the last 2 years I was responsible for the original designs for how the missions would look and flow and personally designed and constructed a number of main and side story missions. This included scripting enemy encounters, and level construction.

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Some of the examples of my work of which I am most proud include the nazgul Helm Hammerhand's boss battles. Below is a brief rundown of my design process for said levels.

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Nazgul Helm Hammerhand's Boss Fights

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Design Notes

Mission Design

Part 1: The Scourge

Originally the first half of the Helm Hammerhand fight was originally supposed to only be a hoard of beasts sieging the castle that were sent by Helm. This was supposed to give the player incentive to hunt down Helm in the following level and defeat him. After testing my design I decided to move Helm into this siege level as well as the following one. It became obvious fairly quickly that while the beasts can have interesting game play 1-on-1, once they become a part of a group the player is quickly mobbed and combat becomes somewhat of a slog. They did however work quite well when placed as an environmental hazard with the focus of the mission shifted to the nazgul. While fixing the issue with the beast game play this also allowed me a space to introduce Helm's abilities to the player one at a time so that when they faced him in the final fight we could jump much more quickly to his final set of attacks for a more epic feeling fight.

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Part 2: Fire and Fury

 In this level the player ends up facing Helm Hammerhand along with two of his drakes for the final battle. Because the player may or may not have taken the time to do extensive combat with the Drakes in the sandbox I wanted to make sure that they had an opportunity to get a feel for that type of gameplay before throwing them in. Leading up to Helms fight I had the player face a drake 1-on-1 and then a set of two drakes at the same time. This gave the player first a sense of how the drakes mechanics worked in general and then a feel for how two could play off each other without also having to worry about dealing with Helm's attacks. I then led the player to the final ice lake arena for the final fight with Helm. We can see they drakes being used again as more of an environmental hazard in combination with the ghuls to play off of Helm's ability to move the player around the map. 

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System Design

Not only was I in charge of the mission design for the Helm Hammerhand fights I also worked with our game play programmer to design his combat move set. We wanted Helm as a character to have a connection to the games beasts, so we decided to reflect that in his combat. All of his up close moves are feral and melee based. And while the other nazgul have melee attacks as well, his feel

much more ferocious, mirroring the rage that we see in his flashback cinematic. I also worked with the game play team to design a set of more passive attacks. The pull move and the ghul swarm summon. These work to both reinforce the aspects of his character that we wanted to shine through, and to flow into his other attacks smoothly to set up a one two punch scenario.

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Helm is a melee character, the player however has access to a number of formidable ranged attacks. Allowing the player to simply step back and slowly chip at helm from a distance completely diffused the tension of the fight and just giving Helm a bow or some kind of magical ranged attack felt like a disservice to the persona we were trying to give this character as well as a missed opportunity for some more interesting game play. To solve this problem the ghul summon ability and, my favorite, the pull ability were implemented.

 

Helm's ghuls work to keep the player from staying in wraith vision for to long without having to stop and deal with them. This gave Helm time to close the distance to the player and also encouraged the player to utilize more of the environmental combat ops to dispatch the ghuls all at once. While this helped the problem it was the pull ability that, in my opinion, brought it all together as it managed to enhance combat in a number of ways. First also it kept the player from getting to many hits in without Helm being able to attack as well. But where the ghuls simply provided a distraction for the player, the pull brought them back face to face with their enemy and forced them to deal with his melee attacks for a time. It also flowed well into the other attacks. It made the player feel like Helm as thinking tactically and purposefully pulling the player into the ghul swarm or through a drakes fire ball. On the flip side it also occasionally would work in the players favor and pull them out of the middle of a ghul swarm or the path of an incoming fireball. This allowed the player to feel like they had one upped their enemy for a second and give them a second wind in combat. Both of these outcomes were fun for the player and since neither out shined the other and both led back into combat with Helm it never felt to punishing.