Hi everyone, I’m Jeff “LCDRMiller” Miller, an environment artist working on our big Stronghold expansion. I’m excited to give you a small glimpse into the making of the Stronghold structures you and your guild will be able to construct throughout your Stronghold experience.

I want to start out by introducing you to the other environment team members that worked on creating the new amazing Stronghold structures. Mark Hernandez, Jason Marquez and Patrick Poage did an amazing job collaborating and bring you an amazing new set or props and structures to your stronghold experience.

Stronghold Village Components

We’ll start with the new kit creation. The team first decided we wanted to do a new fresh take on our village building kit, so we took this chance to get started in that direction. The team took the time to create an entire new set of components and new materials that would be the back bone of the new building kit going forward. This kit included components such as walls, roofs, windows, wood beams, etc. New materials include wood, stone, plaster and shingles to name a few. In the image above, you can see some of these components and materials.

Stronghold Structures

In your guilds stronghold map you will come together to build many types of structures that will benefit your guild in PvE and PvP. The feature of guild building structures required the environment team to come up with different states for each plot type. I won’t dive deep into plot types and types of structures in this blog, be on the lookout for that blog in the future. These states include overgrown, cleared, construction and built. In the gif above you will see each state leading up to the completion of the Mine structure.

There was some technical limitation we had to overcome when setting up the structures for the new tech used for the Stronghold experience. I mentioned in the above paragraph the idea of Plot Type. There are multiple plot types throughout the Stronghold map. These signified the boundaries we could use to create the structures in. The environment team had to get creative with how the final structures were built and how they used the space within a plot type. We also had to take into account that players have a limited choice on where they can build the structures they want so each structure had to fit within any setting seen throughout the Stronghold map.

The environment team did an amazing job creating this new building kit. Going forward this new kit will allow for future stronghold expansion structures to be built quick and with ease, no matter what structure type we may come up with in the future. We are really excited to see what you all do when laying out your Stronghold structures throughout the map.

Before I say farewell, here are a couple structures you will be able to build when your guild gets in and starts to make its very own mark in Faerûn.

(Wizards Workshop)

(Lumber Yard)

Jeff “LCDRMiller” Miller

Environment Artist

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