“We knew we wanted him to be the first monster that would ever be revealed, and the first monster that players would have access to, and the first one the media would see,” says Turtle Rock Studios head Chris Ashton. “So we wanted it to be recognizable and not too weird.”
The Goliath is their jack-of-all trades, a bipedal powerhouse who crouches into a simian sprint and maintains his balance with a spiked tail. Even in his smallest form, he’s intimidating; at stage one he’s about 10 feet tall, and he only gets taller with each of this three evolutionary forms. “If he stood fully up, he’d be in the 30s,” says character modeler Brandon Yanez. “He’s really big.”
Even though he does have a recognizable form factor, you probably won’t be looking at his back for a zipper. “We didn’t want him to feel like a dude in a costume, we wanted him to feel as believable as possible, and that transcends into a lot of our theory,” says Yanez. “We exaggerate stuff as long as it feels believable.
“It’s not like a Silent Hill kind of horror, but it’s more of a James Cameron, Aliens style, where it just looks cool.”
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