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The Final Highway; The Road Home -- how many more silly cliches can I throw? Choppin' Maul was my last season with Auto Assault, the literal winter of my time on the project.

As the work on the Fetid Bayou was coming to end, I spent my days working on the initial design of region 3, the Grand Junction. Grand Junction had the name, originally, because it was meant to be the location of a major highway intersection - the confluence of three 12 lane ribbons of concrete and asphalt that had weathered the test of time. There was really only one problem with that - as far as I knew there was no such place in Austin and I'd decided in my work on the mutant history that it was the citizens of Austin that helped the mutants build the Citadel. That left me with a dilemma: Do I stick to Austin's real road layout, or do I play dramatic license and mold the future Austin into what I needed it to be? This is where Google came to my rescue.

Back during the pre-release days, when Scott gave interviews, he would describe a scenario where players would blow up a dam, flooding a level. He would go on to describe how the same players could return to the site of the dam later, to see it destroyed and to adventure in the ruins of the destroyed dam.

Of all the regions we did in the game, The Fetid Bayou is both one of my most despised and best loved regions, all at once. On the one hand, it had the whole "environmental damage" thing that, well to be frank... flat out never worked and then there's all the plans that never made it to fruition, but then again, it is home to some of the best vignettes the mutant's story has to offer: The Bloodfarm, Sanctuary and Slaughter.

The funny thing is, two of those weren't even meant to be part of the Fetid Bayou, originally.

Here's the first bit of trivia for TRNT this week, I wasn't technically the first Human content lead.

When the time came to build the world, I was given the task of creating the mutant section of the content. In a series of meetings and discussions amongst the designers, we'd decided that the mutant territory would be somewhere in the south. Originally, the scope of the game was a LOT larger than it turned out to be - the Citadel was meant to be somewhere in the jungles of South America, in fact. I'd decided, right around that same time, that I didn't want players to start at the Citadel.

I had something special in mind - I wanted players to look forward to seeing the place, to make arriving there something like a reward and something like a right of passage... and something of an eye opening epiphany as to the realities of the world.

Rights of passage played a big part in the mutant story - they were the cornerstone of the central theme and a sort of metaphor for what mutants were, to the human species. The mutants as a whole are something like Humanity's right of passage - if we'd weathered the Right well, I imagine the world would be a brighter place, but of course, in that future, humanity sorta flubbed that little test, didn't we?