Elias Final Encounter (Diablo 4)

As part of my time at Blizzard Entertainment, I worked in several fields of design to better understand different disciplines.  I worked on level design, world design, and encounter design.  While I had a hand in crafting the Whispers of the Dead experience, which functioned as a post-game bounty system for players looking to build their characters, I was most proud of the Elias Final Fight boss, which leveraged all my knowledge building encounters, and also actually shipped with the game.

While I was an experienced systems designer at this point, I had little experience in encounters, and learned all I could from my peers. I worked heavily with the animation team to learn timing of attacks, I built many scripts to effectively control creature behavior, and I learned pacing of encounters through a process of feedback and iteration.

Elias’ first fight with the player had already been completed, so I took the opportunity to learn from the designer of that encounter.  Elias is a summoner boss; in the first encounter with him, he summons cultists for defense and low-level demons to attack, and he previously gained narrative protection from an immortality spell.

The changes I made for the final fight were centered around the player’s story progression up until that point.  Elias no longer has access to his protection spell and has been pushed into a corner.  Under that premise, I felt that he would expend much more energy to attack the player and become something of a glass cannon as a result.

I started by adding a very powerful AoE that would become harder to escape as the fight went on. This attack had an animation that would cause Elias to appear drained and tired when completed.  The defensive cultists were removed and replaced with escalating demon summons; first low-level, then much tougher demon enemies would be summoned at specific intervals during the fight.

The final adjustment was his default attack. I found a way to scale his 3-projectile attack to upwards of 60 projectiles in a stream.  While this was absurd to start off with, I built the LUA script to increase the projectile count as he took more and more damage. At the end, I believe he shoots off up to 20 projectiles in a stream, requiring the player to move around quite a bit to avoid all the hazards, between the demons, projectiles, and AoE.

I’m proud of my work here, as encounter design was still fairly new to me, but I felt that I did a good job with great support and feedback.

Fight Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkfyujTV9JU