Behemoths of Dauntless: Koshai

Today we start a collection celebrating the behemoths of Dauntless – the celebs of the co-op creature-hunting sport which boasts over two million gamers in open beta.

In a really literal sense, the behemoths are the focal factors of the motion; the enemies you circle incessantly, ready for an indication of weak point or bracing for a swipe from an outsized claw. If you’re a Dauntless participant, you’ll have already got spent a major proportion of your time staring into their chilly eyes and gazing hungrily at their armoured flanks – bespoke loot in ready. But how a lot do you actually find out about them?

We’ve talked to the designers and artists who’ve poured a whole bunch of hours into creating these memorable beasts. We’ll kick off proceedings with a really particular behemoth: Koshai, the Sovereign of Thorns. Dauntless’s first main replace drops at the moment, and this magnificent creature is its centrepiece.

“We’ve had the design documentation and some of the concepts for Koshai for quite a while,” behemoth designer Reid Buckmaster tells us. “But when we started to talk about what’s going to be in The Coming Storm and the overall theme, he was a super natural fit for it.”

Describe Koshai in prose and he quickly begins to sound like a creature from mythology. He’s a quadruped, coated in vibrant inexperienced scales, and carried by muscular entrance legs. A fluffy mane surrounds the face of a hawk, topped by a crown of thorns.

“They look like antlers, but they’re made of viney thorns,” artwork director Katie De Sousa tells us. “He’s a really elegant, natural, king of the forest. He’s definitely the most majestic of our roster and I’m super excited about it.”

Koshai isn’t simply an intimidating fighter – he’s an infestation. His insidious affect has unfold by means of Ostia, a former industrial territory in Dauntless’ Shattered Isles – in addition to the man behemoths that cross his path.

“What this means for gameplay is that a lot of the existing encounters are going to have elements of the Koshai encounter incorporated into them now,” advertising and marketing supervisor Nick Clifford says. “Any behemoth that has had a brush with Koshai has essentially fallen under his influence and become more powerful for it, too.”

Koshai himself is a curious prospect within the enviornment. Not terribly cell regardless of his small body, he depends on flowers to get round, driving “crashing wave of vines” concerning the battlefield and diving into the earth solely to pop up some place else. Once relocated, Koshai units up defensive perimeters of brambles and creates patches of thorns to lure gamers and dictate their motion.

“He’s not going to give them a whole lot of face time,” Buckmaster says. “He’s going to move to another part of the arena.”

You’re not often going to really feel in management when battling Koshai. Control is for him to have, and so that you can be positioned below. Like a very pernicious weed, he’s throttling all different life in his setting, plunging the world into shadow.

“We wanted to emphasise that mastery of plant life,” Clifford says. “We gave ourselves a weird challenge, where we said we don’t want him to be super nimble and we don’t want him to move around that much through his own power, but we do want him to reposition on the battlefield.”

The group had already talked about the opportunity of utilizing vines for assaults, to whip gamers from a distance. It was a pure – or you can say natural – leap to utilizing those self same vines for motion.

“Koshai doesn’t run around, he doesn’t chase his prey down, he traps them,” Clifford explains. “So when he needs to move quickly he does that entirely with the vines, using them to propel himself and slingshot around.”

Koshai’s behaviour and animation betrays an nearly haughty air – as if he’s deigning to battle you, quite than pressured to. Dauntless’ behemoths is perhaps beasts, however they’re personalities, too.

“We’ve been trying to play off the Sovereign of Thorns theme,” Buckmaster says. “He focuses on individual slayers rather than a group. He picks his targets. We almost wanted to make him feel grudging. He’s annoyed by your presence but not threatened by it. He’s got a job to do, which is taking over these islands, and the slayers aren’t an existential threat to him. They’re just slowing him down.”