The 1.18 patch contains a new epic mission, bringing the six-chapter Black Flags, Dread Saints story to a conclusion. While the PotBS team has created epic missions before, an undertaking of this scale was a new challenge for most of the designers who worked on it. We had the benefit of mentoring by previous epic mission designers, but there was much for us to learn and improve. We started with a few basic assumptions about what makes a set of missions truly epic. They mostly turned out to be true.

Assumption: For a mission to be epic, it will take several months to develop and involve work from every department. Lots of new assets, tools, and material are required to make this piece of content the best experience it can be. Beyond that, it takes passion, teamwork, and incredible amounts of rigorous testing. Epic missions are a big deal.

Reality: Three months seemed like a long time at the beginning of the project, but as time went on, it became clear that good ideas spawn more good ideas. This is the downside to being surrounded by really creative people. For every cool thing we wanted to do, there were four other things we could imagine to follow it up. I would turn to one designer and say “Let’s do this!” and he would say “Yeah, and then we can do this other thing too!” Then another designer would jump in to say “If we did that, then we could do these other things!” The whole team fed off each others’ enthusiasm. Of course, each idea we ran with needed to be prototyped, implemented, reviewed, tested, tweaked, and polished. And then there’s the time spent staring at the final project, asking, “Is this as awesome as we can make it? Is there more we should do?” It took three months, yes, but also lots of coffee, long nights, and take-out food. Still, if we had three more months there would always be more we could do.

Assumption: An epic mission should have all new enemies! The usual grunts and lieutenants just aren’t going to cut it. Players have slaughtered them in droves on their rise to level 50, so we should get some distance from those tired villains. New, flashy nemeses for all!

Reality: This mantra mostly bore out to be true, with a few exceptions. We made lots of new bad guys for the epic mission, but that sometimes left us feeling too far away from the Dread Saints. When those continuity breaks happened, we had to take a step back and say, “Are these guys Dread Sainty enough? Are they close enough to the pilgrim hat wearing, cross-tabard bedecked, fanatical pirates we’ve come to know, love, and run-through?” We knew why every type of enemy we introduced was there, but it was a difficult line to walk between those who worship the Dread Saint and those who simply sail under his flag. In the end, I think we struck a nice balance between the theme and the new hotness.

Assumption: An epic mission should have all new rooms! Beautiful scenes and grand backdrops are such a signature of PotBS, anything aspiring to the term ‘epic’ should feature never before scene locations and battlegrounds.

Reality: This would normally be the case, but to end a story arc like Black Flags, Dread Saints, we wanted this to hit you where you live. At least, hit you where the Brethren live. By setting the final showdown in Tortuga, we were able to cast familiar stomping grounds in a new light and add a sense of drama to the conflict. It’s not just some evil warlord’s hideout, it’s the Brethren capital! (That’s not saying that Kidd couldn’t be considered a warlord, mind you). You’ll be stomping around the Swamps and the Inferno (two of my favorite environments in the game), but you’ll see plenty of gorgeous new places, like the dangerous sandy shoals that protect the island’s flank and the once beautiful, now vandalized, villa that Captain Kidd calls home.

Assumption: It doesn’t matter how good the idea is, some things are just impossible.

Reality: While there is some truth to this (we are still bound by physics, etc), we’ve found that our team can find solutions to most any problem. More than once, we hit what seemed like an “insurmountable” obstacle. We’d hem and haw, fearing we would have to make a complete retreat back to the drawing board. Then, we’d spend five minutes explaining the problem to one of our brilliant coders, animators, artists, or sound engineers and discover that not only was it possible to overcome that seemingly-huge obstacle, it was easy. Thanks to those folks, we were able to do some truly epic things that we’ve never done before.

All in all, it’s been a fantastic, brutal, engaging, maddening, sublime three months working on this Epic Mission. We’ve put a lot of love into this, and we hope you feel that love when playing it. When you’re battling trappers in the Swamps and brawlers in the Inferno, think of us here at midnight.

You will have a chance to preview the new epic mission during a Testbed event in the very near future. Keep your eye on the front page!