The most common Bound enemy that you’ll fight in Nightingale is The Bound Minion. They’ll be familiar to both experienced and novice Realmwalkers alike as the first type of Bound creature encountered in the Realms. While these lower-tier enemies are relatively easy to defeat individually, they can quickly overwhelm you in larger numbers. We’ve chosen to focus on these fiendish foes in this edition of our behind-the-scenes blog series, and to give us more insight into their creation, we've invited our Art Director, Neil Thompson, to shed some light on the design and lore behind these devilish grunts.
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How did creating the Bound begin?The Bound Minions were the first enemy type to be created. The original intention was that they would be a ‘popcorn’ fight without much strategic importance or difficulty. We wanted a starting point for future enemy types from a gameplay standpoint and art direction.
The initial design process started with sketches that evoked a type of horde army, with a signature look that would tie (pun intended) all future Bound archetypes together. We went through several rounds of concept designs before we finally hit on a look that we felt satisfied with.
What inspired the lore behind the Bound? When did you know that you had the look for Bound?The original idea for the Bound was, in retrospect, quite horrifying. Human prisoners were captured by the Fae and, through a ‘Binding Ceremony’, compelled to do their bidding. In this case: Kill All Humans. As a Realmwalker, your only defense was to use whatever tool was at hand to kill these poor unfortunates. Conscious and aware but unable to change their fate, it was a tremendously dark conceit that ultimately we moved away from as it didn’t sit well with the overarching tone of adventure that we believe Nightingale to be. So their back story changed so that they are now constructs of the Fae; grown in vats via magical means. You can feel much better about hitting them in the head with an axe now without the moral dilemma.
This image by Casper Konefal was where we knew we now had the main themes for our Bound look. Even though we changed the origin from human to bestial in nature (as a result of the change in origin story), the visual language defined here became the lasting template that we still refer to today when starting any new Bound archetype.
How did the early development of the Bound change their design?The Bound Minions were the first enemy type we playtested with. The core idea of these enemies hasn’t changed much, but the art direction for The Bound took off from this point. We iterated off of some initial in-game models until we got to the Bound Minions that you see today. As development and playtesting continued, we evolved the Bound Minions into different enemy types.
Looking at Nightingale today, the palette of distinct Bound types has now flourished into a diverse set of enemies that can operate independently or as a collaborative group.
What is the object or goal of the Bound design? What story are you trying to tell?The Bound are unified by their aggression and strange ligatures on their skin. The idea behind their evolution is that Minions become Bound Lanterns and other minion types. We wanted The Bound to have a unique bestial quality yet appear capable of metamorphosis into the tougher variants.When we moved away from the initial backstory, we wanted the Bound to signify a soulless appearance, propped up by Fae magic. While these enemies have a physical form, they are an enemy that powerful Fae have created to prevent Realmwalkers from growing in strength.
One thing will always remain true with any Bound archetype: to be Bound is to be in pain, hence the uncomfortable posing and binding of limbs. If it’s not uncomfortable, it’s not Bound.
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Thanks, Neil! That’s all for this behind-the-scenes blog! Stay tuned for more creature features!