Ryse: Son of Rome Multiplayer DLC
Xbox One Launch Title - Crytek
Description
Ryse multiplayer involves two player cooperative game modes. The players can level up, collect gold and purchase new items to improve their gladiator. The player selects a playlist or a map they want to play, once in game they must select one of four gods that grant them different powers. There are two game modes:
Horde, where the player must complete objectives to progress through the map.
Survival mode, where the players must battle increasing difficult waves of AI and trap compositions. Their health slowly drains at first but increases in speed over time. The player can regain health through god powers, killing enemies, reward shrines and equipment.
I was tasked with creating one of the first Survival maps, this involved redesigning Survival mode itself. I also created two survival maps, this involved documentation, paper layouts, whitebox, initial art pass, wave compositions, markup, optimization, balancing and bug fixing.
Role
DLC 2 - Dockyard
The goal with dockyard was to create a map with alternate gameplay from the other two survival maps in DLC 2.
This was achieved by removing any siege weapons from the trap composition and adding lots of ground based traps in their place. The traps are broken up between traps that block movement and thus break up the map and passable but triggered traps.
The map is set around a Roman dockyard, I wanted an atmosphere that reflects the hopeless nature of survival mode, the this end the map has rain & thunder that intensifies as time progresses.
There are several spawn points a central one provides infinite easy enemies to ensure the players can keep their health topped up. The ones around the exterior spawn increasing difficult AI compositions.
The map has several areas where reward tiles come up such as health shrines, Pila racks and Scorpios.
Dockyard focuses on an open middle area with a heavy mix of traps and rewards.
DLC 3 - Island
Island is the most unique of the survival maps, here I decided against using normal siege weapons, instead I use them as an area of denial tool. The target quadrants of the map in initially a clockwise direction.
This forces the player to move around the small space to avoid the simple traps that come up in the middle of the arena, the spawn points around the exterior and the constantly moving rain of arrows.
The player initially enters the arena via a bridge, forced into the centre by siege weapons. Once the player is on the island the entrance retracts and 6 Batista begin targeting quadrants. As the waves progress rewards appear in the corners, more traps appear in the centre and more AI spawns appear around the edge of the island.