Overview

The Bridge of the Revenant is a Protectorate Stronghold and access point to North Paradise Island. Players on the main quest will be directed to the Bridge in order to gain passage to Vox Relay (the end-region dungeon). Players may recruit nearby forces to siege the Bridge, face the soldiers head-on, talk their way in by delivering bodies to the Warden at the gate, or sneak their way into the control room to lower the bridge undetected.

The Bridge is one of the earliest POIs created for the Outer Worlds 2 and changed hands multiple times throughout development, receiving numerous reworks under the purview of each designer. Upon revisiting Paradise Island later in development, I was given ownership of The Bridge and the Forward Operating Base (just outside the Bridge) during our “Playable” phase of development. While this is typically a phase where we begin locking in the details of the experience in preparation for Alpha, I identified a number of issues with the location’s layout, quest, and general player experience that did not meet expectations. I proposed and was greenlit to execute a series of revisions I’ll elaborate on below.

Bridge of the Revenant

Consideration: The Approach

The Bridge of the Revenant was meant to act as an imposing Protectorate stronghold against the invading faction, Auntie’s Choice. It is the definitive access point to the rest of Paradise Island, but is heavily guarded by Warden Marilyn Weintraut and her guards.
However, once onboarded onto the POI I realized that this intent was not being conveyed or felt by players and changes needed to be made.

The first and largest change was to the exterior of the bridge. When trying to frame a location as intimidating it’s important to use sharp angles, brutalist architecture, numerous obvious fortifications, searchlights, put the player at a lower elevation forcing them to look up, and for the fun of it throw in a classic moat. I collaborated extensively with the artist for The Bridge to ensure that the exterior of the Bridge felt barren, exposed, shelled, and threatening. Around the perimeter I placed razor wire that pushed players towards the main road entrance while still leaving openings for players to attempt to brave the mine field and sneak into the control room. As the player approaches, I scripted the Warden to walk forward to address the player in a threatening manner as floodlights illuminate the main entrance. Dragons teeth line the edge of a dry moat full of an ambient hazard called Zyranium. For players that still didn’t get the hint, signage clearly communicates to the player they are approaching a restricted area.

Consideration: Streaming Bounds Optimization

The Bridge of the Revenant revealed the first instance of a particularly nasty optimization concern for our team as a result of working with UE5’s World Partition. After profiling, our systems team found that the Bridge POI and all its associated actors were being loaded from almost halfway across the Open World map, rather than using HLODs. This was due to the POI’s hard references (encounters and level scripting manager) creating a streaming cluster that forced all associated world partition cells into the second largest grid size, causing it to almost always be loaded. To address this issue, I decentralized almost all scripting with dependencies and relied more heavily on soft refs and dynamically getting actors at the time they are needed. This decentralization effort also helped resolve a large number of inevitable bugs we ended up facing in other POIs that had not taken these steps to optimize streaming bounds. After reducing the cell size to an acceptable level, I continued throughout production to work with other Area Designers to assist them in optimizing our other large-scale POIs and Marquee Dungeons.

Consideration: Multiple Routes

A hallmark of any good RPG game is the number of ways in which players can use their builds to overcome obstacles and have varied experiences based on their approach. Being such a central and vital POI for all players to gain passage through, I made sure there were multiple viable means of lowering the Bridge.

For combat players, they are free to attack the bridge head-on with their companions and fight their way through the front gate. At the proper level the encounter is punishing, but ample cover is provided with chokepoints and long sight-lines within the fortified walls. For players who have chosen to engage with side quests or have leadership skill and took on a task to brave the minefield, they may rally a nearby camp of Aunties Choice soldiers to assault the Bridge for them.

For speech players, Marilyn Weintraut stops them at the threshold and warns that they will not be granted passage unless they deliver two Protectorate Traitors to her to be hung at the gate. Players must use speech to convince Marilyn’s traitorous cousin in the Protectorate town of Westport to turn himself in, either by misleading him as to Marilyn’s intentions, or threatening him. The big change made by myself and my lead was to cut the rest of the traitor finding and convincing (originally more than 2) and pivot to having only the cousin be turned in, while the second traitor at Spire Grove (friend of Marilyn’s) is found dismembered after sacrificing their self for the glory of the Protectorate. This greatly reduced the complexity and tedium found in earlier iterations of the quest while injecting more variety and dark humor by having players return just Ida’s arm to Marilyn.

For stealth players, when I inherited the bridge there was the makings of two stealth entrances to the bridge: A hole in the wall on the west side, and a crouch tunnel entrance on the east. The hole on the west side was given its own exterior path making it feel a bit too obvious and “gamey” with little challenge by way of reaching it, making it the de-facto means of entry for all playstyles. Rather than attempting to design for two stealth approaches, I instead chose to sculpt the terrain around the bridge exterior to create a dry moat with an east & west entrance and a single hole in the wall to gain entry. I then raised the terrain and populated a minefield between the road and moat, thereby pushing more players along the path of least resistance to the entrance. Via the hole in the wall stealth players were able to time patrols to sneak past or systematically dispatch the control building’s guards and lower the bridge.

Consideration: Improved Mine Gameplay

Upon taking over the Bridge, we had landmines we wanted to use scattered around the bridge, but no real standard for the gameplay or their presentation. After working with art to get the terrain raised and flattened surrounding the bridge, I started my effort of integrating and better hiding our illuminated mines in the landscape. I created numerous small indentations in the landscape and a prefab consisting of a dirt pile static mesh, dirt/mud decal, and a mine blueprint actor sunken into it. By filling all of these indentations with these prefab mines, I was able to create far more hidden mines that actually forced players to watch their step and even use Observation skill to spot them, and/or Engineering skill to disarm them.

Consideration: Optional Bridge Assault

A concept we had early on for the Bridge of the Revenant was allowing players to attack it with the help of a nearby AC military camp. However, there was no clear idea of how that would be achieved or presented to our players. After coming into ownership of these two areas, I worked with our narrative team to tie this event into a side quest with the commander in the nearby town of Fairfield, and introduce an alternative skill and item option requiring players to find their cherished drug-filled stuffed animal in the minefield. The Outer Worlds brand is absurdity, dark humor, and caricatures, thus it felt fitting to include some levity amidst the tension and dismembered minefield victims present at this location. Once fulfilling one of these two requirements, Commander Torres will agree to storm the bridge head-on with his troops, fading to black and transitioning the player into a short scene outside the bridge where Torres will give a speech from behind cover to rally his troops before assaulting the bridge. Designing this encounter vs encounter was a tricky balance of not only getting them to path into the bridge while simultaneously using their base combat and cover AI, but also determining just how effective the troops should be. Making them too strong could lead to the player being disappointed they were unable to participate in the assault. Making them too weak could make the pay-off for working for their support feel underwhelming or not worthwhile. I aired on the side of caution by simply creating a custom status effect derived from our “Inspiration” status effect that bolstered their damage and defenses for a limited amount of time. I also overrode the behaviors of a number of the bridge guards to teleport them to different positions and elevations just prior to the attack in order to create better combat angles and drip feed combats from the building rather than creating a surge all at once that could cause combatants to pile up at the gate.