New World is pretty spooky with the arrival of Nightveil Hallow in Aeternum. The dev team has a new blog diving into the creation of the event, from 80s horror movie-inspiration, to demon designs, encounters, atmosphere, and more.
With this event, everything is big, colorful and over the top, which is as intended. “Nightveil Hallow was greatly inspired by 80’s horror movies, specifically the awesome creature-flicks and fun-spirited ‘schlocky’ tone of the era,” notes event dev Deric Nunez. In fact, when there’s an event in New World, Nunez and the rest of the team want it to be clear that there’s an event going on in Aeternum.
To make this happen, for this event the art team decorated settlements and created spooky visuals, the team added inspired event shop rewards. And of course, there are monstrous creatures, like otherworldly demon Baalphazu. The Netherworld is full of terrors, only some are smaller? Less threatening looking?
“Baalphazu is one of the Netherworld’s dread captains, eager to carry out the will of his twisted master by spreading fear throughout the island of immortals,” the blog reveals, and also tells how the name came about. “I was fond of the name ‘Belphegor’ while Deric Nunez favored ‘Pazuzu’,” adds Aaron de Orive, narrative designer.
The team also gets a little more serious, but only somewhat, describing their design pillars and goals for the Baalphazu boss fight. The approach they took was that they wanted players to be able to defeat him without having to play particular classes, weapon styles, or composition. Fitting in with the schlocky, over-the-top, fun 80s horror movie inspiration, when you defeat him–spoiler alert–the team loved creating a final death explosion to finish off the encounter.
Of course the rest of the event also features monsters creatures running around Aeternum, including Pumpklins, which are some of those smaller monsters. They’re still over the top and kitschy, which fits Halloween perfectly.
For more on the top to bottom design of Nightveil Hallow, which ends on November 1st, read the devblog at New World.
