Iki Island Mongol Territories

The Overlook territory was pitched as a way to reinforce the nature of the Eagle Tribe’s domination of Iki Island’s natural resources, through the monkeys added in the DLC.

I made a self-directed stealth challenge within the content, where triggering a cage door within the camp sounds an alarm that can be used as a distraction to create stealth solutions, which required a bespoke scripting solution I put together myself.

One Environmental Storytelling bit here I’m particularly proud of is to find the Monkey’s Keeper - his house is nearby, and you can find his final resting place if you look carefully.

Katayama Market takes up a dominant position in the center of Iki, and depicts the Mongol military machinery at work.

We had hwacha turrets in the main campaign, but we hadn’t used them in open world missions to showcase a fortified position. Given the theme of “despoiled natural resources“, it was an excellent opportunity to create a new kind of problem for players to solve.

Once alerted, the hwachas will start firing on the player until or unless they make it inside the market walls. However, if the player can sneak all the way inside without raising the alarm, they have a powerful set of tools they can turn on their foes!

The River Crossing started from two pitches.

The first: two camps with a shared garrison (and therefore two angles of attack). Each camp was created with a different feel in mind - the north with more palisades and structures to emphasize sneaky approaches, and the south with semi-divided pit arenas, which require a more considered stealth approach to complete.

The second: show a despoiled deer shrine. Since deer are depicted as sacred in the game, the central feature of the despoiled Shrine Tree featured heavily into the sightlines, as well as the toughest area to reach through pure stealth. It created a wonderful contrast on completion, as this war-torn monument was returned to its sanctuary status.

Sentinel’s Peak was conceived as the answer to the question: What happens to the people the Eagle just can’t win over?

As one of the highest points on the island (and right next to the player’s area start), the world artist had the brilliant idea to utilize the whale bone palette to create a foreboding front entrance, along with an area composed primarily of cages.

I worked with the animators here to create a bespoke paired animation for the peak top, where we see an Eagle Tribe Mongol intimidate a peasant into jumping to their doom. I believe it has the longest travel distance of any non-projectile animation in the game.

While it is a sad way to go, it’s entirely possible to save that peasant, provided you can get there before he takes the leap! Creating tension between speed and stealth in this Territory provided interesting player-dependent actions within the open-world context of Territory gameplay.