Hillock

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Hillock
Profile
Inhabitant	Spider
Quadrant	D3 (World Era 2) F1 (World Era 1)
Connecting Quadrants	C3 D2 D4 E3
Stage Number	12
Seamless Designer	Koji Hasegawa (hw)
Test Stage Designer	New: Koji Hasegawa (hw) Old: Nanako Ohmura (oh)

Hillock is the developer name given to the unused arena of Spider, one of the unused colossi.

Description

Seamless

Textures of Hillock.

The battle location was mostly a dry natural area with no man-made structures present, and an enclosed space with a lake which the colossus emerged from. A pointed hill existed in the southwest of the quadrant, and it can be seen the background of an early picture of Spider, when it still had tentacles.

Test Stage

Two texture segments of Stage 12 (Spider's test stage) remained in the PS3 Data Sheets. Since one of them was named slightly different, it was not replaced.

Textures from Stage 12 (st12a).

The proper stage texture segment, st12a, had common textures that one would expect earlier on in development, as well as water textures, and some unique ones that were present in Spider's body. Both 'sz_hn_moyou_a2' and 'sz_iwa_c3' were textures that were placed on Spider's legs, and the texture 'sz_shadow_a', has alternate versions that only colossi use. This means that parts of Spider's model were likely used for this test stage.

Textures from an alternate version of Stage 12 (st_12a).

The second test stage, st_12a, is harder to discern much information from, as most of the textures no longer exist. According to the names however, it likely had trees of some kind.

These elements would be removed once the arena was placed in the seamless world map, only leaving the hill that the arena gets its name from, as well as the lake.

Location

The location of Hillock in a mockup version of the early map.

The screenshots where Spider is next to the himeji bridge are from the period where the world map was completely flat, and most of the arenas were in different quadrants, with the Forbidden Lands' shape not being set in stone yet. During that time, Hillock was located in the F1 quadrant.

After the height map was created, and the map planning was completely changed, the arena was moved to quadrant D3. The textures from the arena are mostly found in areas surrounding D3, and one of the hill-like mountains in Geyser is very likely to be a remnant of Hillock, as it has similar geometry to the one in the screenshot with the version of Spider with tentacles. The likely scenario is that the 9th colossus got moved from I3 to D3 after Spider got cut, merging both arenas together.

Trivia

Hasegawa's test textures list.

• Koji Hasegawa is one of the many field designers from the game, and a lot of his test stages in the sheets appear to be related to Spider; including the alternate texture segment "st_12a", that mostly lists textures created by Hasegawa.
• A Hillock is a small hill, usually separated from a larger group of hills such as a range.
• Hillock's layer 0 and 1 chip data are full, indicating that the whole quadrant it resided on was modelled.

Gallery

Wakisaka's test textures list compared to Hillock.

The Forbidden Lands World Era 3 World Era 2 Retail Map Beta Map (fan recreation)