Dantes editor and dlc explained!

Next month, Electronic Arts and Visceral Games will launch another chunk of “premium downloadable content” (PDLC) for Dante’s Inferno called Trials of St. Lucia. While most other Xbox 360 games offering PDLC that mostly mirrors what came in the retail game—and Dante’s started off with something like that with a $5 Dark Forest add-on two weeks ago—St. Lucia will go in a different direction.

St. Lucia is set up to provide Dante’s Inferno players with a slew of online trials to play. The gameplay will be similar to what you played in the main game, but the trials will be comprised of a series of locations and objectives to overcome, and each one will have a score based on how much you’ll need to do to complete the trial and the difficulty setting. Think of it as the gamemakers’ attempt at “Dante’s Inferno Arcade.”

As odd as it is to compare it this way, St. Lucia is something like the GamerNet Challenges that were introduced in the Tiger Woods PGA Tour series a couple of years ago. There, you get a list of challenges—long-drive distance, replicating specific shots, scoring under a certain number for a round, etc.—and for each one you complete, you get a score added to your overall GamerNet score. Of course, your GamerNet score and the associatd leaderboards are a bragging point for how into the game you are.





St. Lucia is not much different. If you complete a trial, you’ll rack up the score that the trial has on it. If you do the same one again, you won’t score the same number of points, but if you complete it on certain multiples (5x, 10x, 20x and 35x), you’ll receive a big bonus score. This, according to Greg Rizzer, the game’s XXX at Visceral, is what they’re calling a “compulsion loop,” as an incentive for people to play the trials they like—or at least the ones on which they’d like to get a better completion time.

It’s also an incentive for players to make better St. Lucia trials. Yes, the St. Lucia DLC will come with a trials editor that you can use—again, much like Tiger Woods PGA Tour’s GamerNet—to create your own trials to post online for others to play. In fact, most of the trials that you’ll have available to you will come from other players (though EA/Visceral will start things off with with a number of trials supplied by in-house designers…and even some from members of the game press who tried it out, including the potential of a brutal TeamXbox trial created by yours truly).

The creation process is very simple, and anything that might not be clear is explained to you along the way. You start out picking an arena from 12 different locations within the game. A trial can consist of up to six arenas, which are somewhat enclosed areas for the trials to take place within. Then you add “waves” to the arena, with up to 25 waves per arena—so you can create some immense trials.
A wave is made up of one game type from the ten that are being offered: Kill ’em All, which requires elimination of all enemies; Kill ’em Quickly, which is Kill ’em All with a time limit; Melee Combat Required, where you have to take out foes using melee attacks; Take No Damage, which will fail you if you take even one hit; Don’t Kill the Prisoner, which has one foe marked that you have to keep alive while you kill all others (a mode that likely restricts your use of area-damage weapons); Kill the Summoner Quickly, which ends as soon as you can take out the Summoner character, though, being a Summoner, he keeps a steady flow of enemies coming until he’s dead; Marked for Death, where the round ends when all of the marked enemies are eliminated; Health Drain, where your health bar constantly drains (though you can add to it through kills or health-refilling fountains); and Explosives Only, which forces you to kill all enemies by causing marked enemies to explode or slinging them at other foes.

The complex part of trial creation is in tuning all of the variables. EA/Visceral has opened up the tool box for you, so you can set what enemies will spawn on a wave, how many enemies, how long their health bar is, what health and mana are released when an enemy is killed, etc. Some of the selections will be restricted by a “budget” limit, which guarantees that you won’t have a wave that slows down the game engine. For example, if you have enough enemies to tap out your budget, you might not be able to also add traps or player-benefitting fountains.





As you go through the trial creation, the program raises or lowers trial’s score based on a number of criteria: the number of enemies, the difficulty level chosen, the number of waves and arenas, whether it’s intended for one player or two players, etc. The higher the score, the harder your trial is deemed to be; plus there’s a medal level—bronze, silver, gold and platinum—as the challenge goes higher.

The trial editor also has a full menu for testing purposes, where you can test out the wave you’re creating, all of the waves in a specific arena you’ve created or the whole trial. You can break out at any time to tweak the settings and then jump back in if you’d like. When you’re done with the creation/editing process or you need to stop, you can save the trial to your HD for later tweaking or reload. If you’re satisfied with a trial and want to offer it for others to play, it’s just one button press to upload the trial to EA/Visceral’s servers. You’ll be able to upload up to 100 trials.

When it comes to playing trials, you can choose between Dante or a new character, Lucy. Her main skill is that she can take to the air and glide, which comes in handy in some wave situations or gameplay modes (such as Take No Damage). St. Lucia also offers some new enemies to the mix.

While we don’t know the final cost for the St. Lucia DLC, but we do know that EA/Visceral plan to make it available on April 29. If you’re a fan of Dante’s Inferno, you’ll want to circle this on your calendar. Hell, why not put nine circles around it…?