One of my most challenging bosses to-date, both for players and to develop. She was a common fan request of people wanting to fight her, as she was an NPC in the base game that you couldn’t fight. For the Swamps of Corsus DLC, she was the premier boss fight, and designed to provide some serious challenge for returning players to butt up against if they chose to fight her after she warns you many times to not press your luck. Given the uniquely high difficulty, we had to really nail the clarity for players to be motivated to stick it out and beat the fight.

The fight was designed with 2 major phases:

• Phase 1 is her “commander” phase, where she uses her magic and her insect army to fight the player from range, while she’s heavily armored and mostly immobile
  • This is her more “mechanical” phase where players need to learn certain moves and how to handle them
• Phase 2 is her “screw it I’ll kill you myself” phase, where she sheds her armored carapace, manifests a massive scythe blade out of her staff, and fights you herself
  • This is her more “soulslike” phase where the thing to learn is animation timing, patience, spacing, and attack windows.
  • This was also a sort of “proof” of how we could accomplish a soulslike fight in Remnant without running into the “but the player just ends up kiting the whole fight” issue, balancing out her up-close aggression with ranged attacks and mobility.
  • This phase also featured 3 sub-phases that she flows between of fighting you with ranged attacks, melee attacks, and flying attacks

All in all, this breakdown video is better than me explaining the moves in text.

One little side-note, the “exploding beetle on the arm” was a technical design challenge for me, where I ultimately did some custom networking in Blueprint to make the explosion “favor the client” on iframe timing when it comes to multiplayer, to be fair to higher-latency connections. I also gave her custom logic in target selection in phase 2 so she could gracefully switch targets mid-evade. Both of these pieces of logic were used for other bosses afterwards, like Unclean One’s alt kill slam re-using the “favor the client” as it had similarly fierce timing demands.

She really tested the extremes of what we could make, especially with relying on devs to put time aside to playtest her (only ~3 people internally could beat her, and it took a lot of effort, much like the most difficult Souls bosses). In the end, while some players certainly got frustrated with her high difficulty, she was my best-received Remnant boss, getting many posts dedicated to her and comments like “A legendary boss fight that I’ll think back to when playing other games”