Shadowlands Lore and the Audio Visual Design of Bastion with SAGamer

Shadowlands Geposted 31.05.2020 um 11:10 von Archimtiros

SA GamerShadowlandsWorld of WarcrafthighlyLore Highlights

Spirit Healers are Kyrian Watchers, not Val'kyr as stated in the Chronicles.

The Kyrian bring souls across the veil so they can enter the afterlife and contribute their anima to the Shadowlands.

Players aren't ready to move on to the afterlife, hence Spirit Healers return them to life (a pseudo-explanation of game mechanics).

Covenants are interested both in how players have broken the natural order of things by entering the Shadowlands despite not being dead and besting the supposed inescapable prison of the Maw (hence: Maw Walkers). Likewise, the fact that players characters don't move on when they die, unlike most other souls, is another point of interest.

Anima is the lifeblood and magical essence of Shadowlands, a greater form of the kind found in Pandaria; though both are used to empower constructs and other magical-technology.

The nature of anima, and the cause of the current lack of it in Shadowlands (described as if oxygen were to suddenly became a precious resource), is something which will be explored over the course of the expansion.

“Building a zone where things are very pretty and things are, at least in the beginning, fine and things are not on fire everywhere is definitely a unique challenge for the design team. That was something that drove a lot of our early decisions when putting Bastion together. When we are thinking of how to lead players through the story of sort of paradise, that is what ultimately lead us to creating the Forsworn, the primary antagonists of the zone. Bastion is a soft introduction to problems plaguing Shadowlands, as everything looks pleasant on the surface, but we quickly begin see through the facade."

“Until very recently, anima was incredibly abundant. It wasn’t wasteful because it was so readily accessible and available that it wasn’t even given a second thought. Given the normal circumstances, there would have never been a drought. This drought has been brought on by very specific events and the Jailer and some of his cohorts. We are going to learn how that came to be and also what we had to do to resolve that. From a kyrian perspective and for all of the zones in the Shadowlands, anima was just in the air, it was absolutely everywhere. That is why you saw it infused into so much of their society. It would be as if we used air to power things in the real world. Nobody could see the horrible events that transpired coming, which makes the anima drought so much worse, because they were relying on it for good reason. That is going to be interesting to see play out: how the zones adapt to that drought and the scarcity of anima and how players will resolve that crisis.”

The Kyrian Watcherswrote a bit about the Val'kyrShadowlandsWorld of Warcraft Chronicles

“We have explored little slices of this before, but ultimately the Spirit Healers are kyrian. One of the kyrian roles is called Watchers and we know them as Spirit Healers on Azeroth and their role is to eternally evaluate souls. When you die and you are called to them, they peer into your inner self and evaluate whether you are ready to be dead. If you are, they call one of the other kyrian, called Bearers, to come and get you and bring your soul to the Shadowlands. If you aren’t ready, they return you to life, exactly how you see Spirit Healers work in the game. Players have something different about them: they are never quite ready for the Shadowlands, despite ending up there and that is an interesting thing specifically about some of the races of Azeroth.”

“The role that kyrian play is a very challenging one. Determining if souls are ready to go to the afterlife and bringing them there is both dangerous and a very difficult thing to do. In this very specific challenge that they have to overcome, the kyrian have learnt that they have to be very focused on this goal to do their job fairly. Kyrian willingly give up who they were in life and their past and their burdens and their successes so that they can fulfil their soul’s greater purpose of serving others. So when we see people like Uther, who you will meet in Bastion, that we do go through some of these processes. That is going to be an interesting thing to unravel: how this went down for him, how the timeline was involved, how it affected him and where his character is going. Without going into spoilers, our characters are definitely going to go through the thing that all kyrian do, but it might affect Uther a little bit differently.”

Audio Visual Storytelling

“When Bastion is functioning as intended, it sounds calming and peaceful, providing a soothing environment for meditation and reflection. The sounds of wind through grass, bells from distant rituals, and peaceful wildlife punctuate the zone.

“as players discover that all is not right in Bastion, the soothing, meditative environment becomes increasingly strange; less comforting; vaguely hostile. The natural sounds of wind and animals are replaced with ominous tones signaling corruption and hostility seeping into the land. The Bastion soundscape will subtly change between these states as players help the Kyrian Covenant fend off threats and rebuild.”

It's a subtle change, which a lot of players who don't play with sound on will unfortunately miss, but there's a lot more to storytelling than just what the player sees and does within the game. Principle composer Glenn Stafford (involved in nearly all World of Warcraft soundtracks), describes the use of bells as a audial medium giving way to heavier tones:

“Bells are a critical aesthetic of their world. Woven into the music are bell-like undertones and accents meant to remind the listener this is a sacred and powerful place. The choir is also key to the sound; they are human voices, pure and clear, but also distant and ethereal. The human voices tie into the idea of the vital force of the anima that flows through this land. And when that flow of anima is cut off, doubt creeps in, and the music explores a darker and mysterious direction.”

“Once we knew we wanted bells around the zone, it was my job to figure out what they looked like. I started with a curved bell shape where it flares out at the bottom, but we decided that didn’t fit the shape language of Kyrian architecture, which has a lot of straight lines and tall vertical shapes. The next style I tried is what you see in these concepts: tall, geometric cylinders with horizontal bands. I also added cloth that hangs from the bottom, because cloth is another important part of the Kyrian look, and I knew that having animated cloth blowing in the breeze would add a lot to the zone.”

“They look like bells, but different than what you’ve seen before. We tried with Shadowlands to make sure nothing looked too conventional, so everything feels like another world. It’s a challenging balance to create props that feel familiar enough that you know what they are, yet different enough that you know you’re in the afterlife. They were so fun to figure out and are definitely one of my favorite props I made for Shadowlands.”

“The bells of the kyrian originated as an art piece. That was one of the features of the key art that we based the zone on. As we worked through their culture to put it together, we decided that the kyrians would use them to focus and amplify their thoughts and powers that were already there. You see that play out positively in many cases early on, where the kryians meditate to help cleanse themselves of some of the burdens of life or to help focus themselves for powerful rituals. But you will also see that with the Forsworn. They will use bells to bring out the bad parts of the kyrian, to convert them to their side and force out negative manifestations of energy that the player will have to fight. You will see that play out in a whole bunch of different ways, but the bells having this notion of amplifying power gives us a lot of really cool story hooks.”