Fort Alazar - New World (Amazon Game Studios)

In the second act of the Main Story Quest, a group of characters forms an alliance known as the Soulwardens to confront the Corrupted. Initially gathering at small camps, Fort Alazar becomes their base of operations. Once an old and abandoned fort, its courtyard, high-altitude vantage point, and makeshift command tent were repurposed into the Soulwardens’ central hub. After a Corrupted assault, Yonas is taken and transformed, culminating in a climactic boss fight inside the Corrupted Cavern. This space underwent major design changes—from an open and sprawling layout to a more linear, cinematic experience. Fort Alazar also served as a testing ground for a new engine tool, allowing support for multiple states of destruction in an MMO context. I collaborated directly with engineers and designers to implement and test this feature, which impacted navigation, collision, and visual states between players.
.
GAME DESCRIPTION: New World: Aeternum (formerly New World) is a third-person MMORPG with a strong emphasis on melee and ranged combat, set in a rich supernatural world. Drawn by legends of a land that grants eternal life, the player finds themselves shipwrecked on Aeternum. But the player is not the first to wash ashore. Aeternum has been the destination of countless settlers throughout history, and its cultures reflect that: from English colonists to Spanish conquistadors, Roman legions, and Japanese samurai, all leaving their mark on the island’s architectural and cultural tapestry. This creates a uniquely multicultural world where the supernatural and historical collide.
.
MY ROLE: At Amazon Games, I initially joined the team as a World Building Environment Artist on New World. When I arrived, the project was still rooted in its original vision as a survival game centered around player-controlled faction conflicts. Following a major shift in direction after an alpha test, the game pivoted to a narrative-driven MMORPG with a structured Main Story Quest (MSQ). My early role focused on recontextualizing areas that were originally designed for survival gameplay by integrating narrative-driven world-building. This included: Set dressing existing POIs to support new story beats, Reworking POI layouts for narrative clarity and flow, and Creating entirely new POIs to support key moments in the MSQ. My contributions to the Main Story Quest span from the starting beaches where the player first washes ashore, all the way to endgame content. Following the successful launch of New World, I was promoted to Terrain Artist, where my focus expanded to shaping the world at a macro level. This included: Terrain sculpting and painting, Foliage modeling and procedural integration, and Set dressing between points of interest to improve spatial cohesion.