Home of the Lesser Giants and Varanjar Barbarians on Thestra. Located near mountains, in the eastern highlands of Thestra. Described as, "a dozen shop houses, and all of them full of weapons and rum."
Developer Comments[]
Christian Akesson, Senior Artist: The Barbarians live in this area. The architecture, style and race is something that struck close to home for me, being Swedish and the elements being Viking-esque. Most of the architecture was built a long time ago. These people can be very...well....barbaric, but it is conveyed mainly through objects (cages where they keep prisoners, practice areas where they sword fight each other and practice archery etc.). With the terrain, I wanted to convey a breathtaking view and capture a “mighty” feel when going with a sloped layout with pretty much all the buildings being on different levels, building up to a mountain peak. When you walk up to Chieftain’s Hall, a great building that was added in this iteration of the village by David Baldwin, you have quite a spectacular view as you turn around and look out over the landscape. In short, the landscape should look mighty but peaceful and at the same token you should notice that you would not want to mess with these guys.
For the mighty element of this place, I think that the cliff sides of the central village portions paints this picture pretty well. In general it is important for all the elements to work together to get the mood across. A big part of successfully conveying a certain mood is the lighting and weather settings.
The biggest challenge on this one was the time restriction. I had a week to wipe the old village, lay out a new one and make the cliffs, terrain, and all ecosystem painting. I think everyone involved did a great job, and I worked closely with design’s Paul Greshko who populated the area and with Dave Baldwin and Joshua Deeb who made additional buildings and objects. Willie Wat also retextured the place when we were done.
I’m really happy with the result of the vertical cliffs working with the terrain mesh. I also think that the stairs leading up to chieftain’s hall worked out really well, everything looks tightly integrated and that is what we always strive for.
David Baldwin, Artist The overall feeling of Halgarad was created before I got a chance to rework it, and I wanted to keep as much of that as I could. It was a look and feel of a proud race of people just leaving there nomadic lives behind while trying to maintain that culture. The types of materials used for the construction of there structures as well as the decorations used conveys the over all feeling.
The one spot where I had the most work was the chieftain’s hall, where I tried to maintain the look and feel from the smaller buildings, but add a little something to give it that central hub type feel. I was also going for a more fortified structure built on top of the hill with small side windows up along the guard’s walkway inside to aid incase there was attack on the chieftain.