Greetings brave Knights!

With the return of Unbound Realm around the corner, we wanted to share some insights on how the event got made. Get comfy and ready away with a nice beverage, be it hot, cold, or... electric? Maybe not that last one...

We knew we wanted to create a new seasonal event. Looking at what we'd done already, this either needed to be Golem or Militia based. The team split up to work on concepts and mechanics for both. An early goal was to celebrate some of Knighthood's status effects, which married well with some of our concepts, with bright colors and magical touches that felt at home with the game's main setting.

After a lot of work (and a good few meetings) the team agreed which way we wanted to go(lem). Elemental enemies made sense to pair with certain status effects. Lost Sands already dealt with damaging debuffs, so we avoided those. And for everyone's sake we didn't want to create an event centred on hitting our brave players with Freeze and Stun all the time - as thematic as that might have been when dealing with ice and lightning!

The event was starting to really take shape with our main enemies planned out. Sorry Militia fans, maybe we'll see those concepts in another article?

But who lead these Golems into battle, and why? A lot of our event enemies are a bit tragic, the victims of corruption in various forms... Dark Ones, horrors beyond the stars, a certain giant seahorse comes to mind... and we wanted to make aim for something more straightforward this time.

Enter Lady Vaul and Apprentice Kano. We decided it'd be fun to make them evil in a slightly cartoonish, "bad because we feel like it" way that really fit a pair of Goblins. They also helped give the event some mechanical identity, using the event's secondary tag for its Portal boss which we'd not done since Kramp Frosthorn in Wintertide. Vaul in particular ended up more of a boss than a leader - her power is strong against all the debuffs the Essence Golems can inflict, but she can't inflict any of them herself. Way to take credit for your minions' work!

Of course, a new event means two new Heroes. Always an exciting chance to help fill some gaps in the roster, we thought this would be our best chance to introduce a Rage generating Hunter, much like we'd created Doceo for Abyssal Mist.

Since the event enemies were so buff and debuff centric, she had to interact with those in some way. A strong heal with cure that was usable in Dark Onslaught seemed like a good fit. We wanted her Rage to hit hard, and ideally bring something new to the table. Dispelling enemy buffs felt very binary - enemy applies buff, you remove buff, enemy buffs again - so we tried introducing a new way to punish heavily buffed enemies (including rival Knights in the Arena). Making Freya strong versus various buffs made her damage scale against certain enemies and builds. We figured if she's not the best in every situation, she can still do unmatched damage in her niche!

Our talented artists were also very keen to introduce a Hunter who had a pet of some kind, a classic trope we hadn't leaned into yet. We loved how the duo came out. But what's the little fellow's name?

As for Unique event Heroes, they don't need to be as closely tied to the event or its mechanics. Rafael is all about the damage. Both his powers are strong vs. armour. He gives Fury to the Knight, his star perk increases Mage critical chance. Yes, we also gave him the ability to delay enemy powers on Rage, but that stops your enemies healing off your precious damage, right?

We hope you've enjoyed this window into the creative process. We look forward to seeing you in the next Unbound Realm event!