It takes place on the top of a high tower. A fortress-like final battlefield shrouded in dark clouds. Barricades and tunnels are all over the arena to dodge the light bullets and get closer to the colossus.
The name of this theme in the game files is "Cave", suggesting that it wasn't made for this arena originally.
In the Preview version of the game, another cutscene plays when getting near the stairs that lead to the broken bridge, but with no music.
The quadrant F8 wasn't home to any arena originally, as proven by the PS3 Data Sheets, which include a texture segment of the old F8 quadrant, as well as its chip data which resembles a world border. The 16th colossus, back when it was known as Buddha before it became the final boss, used to live at quadrant I7, in the arena known as Labyrinth.
Sanctuary's seamless models in the E3 Demo are named as "sanctuary_f8_", instead of "sanctuary_sanctuary" like in later versions. This naming scheme is similar to other arenas who had been moved in the past, such as Proto and Kirin's Hill early on in development, as well as Canyon, Canossa, and Geyser late in development. This may indicate that Sanctuary was moved.
Sanctuary had a few unused things found in the PS3 Data Sheets that used its name, which may have been related to a previous unused iteration of it, before it was the home of the 16th colossus; the first were sheets for a boss view collision model named >SANCTUARY_VIEW_COL<, and the others were slow texture segments.
ColObjDefSANCTUARY_VIEW_COL sheet.
A boss view is a type of collision model that is always loaded during a colossus battle. It exists to prevent bosses from detecting the player if they're behind an object or wall. However, the 16th colossus doesn't use a view col, instead opting to use the normal collision model of the arena. The normal collision is divided into 16 pieces in a quadrant, and only the four pieces around Wander get loaded. This means that for colossi that are able to move around, using the normal collision isn't ideal. If the player is far enough from a wall collision, it will unload, and the boss will be able to see the player from behind it. As the 16th colossus is not able to move and is constantly looking down at Wander, this is not an issue.
Unused texture segments with "snctry" textures listed.
Slow models are super low (slow) resolution models created for being seen from a distance, while the high resolution models are unloaded. The texture segment of the first slow model related to Sanctuary is >texseg_slow_sanctuary<, listing two unused textures named 'slow_snctry_wall_mip', and 'slow_snctry_wall2_mip'. The second texture segment related to it is >texseg_tmp<, being some kind of test. It references the 'slow_snctry_wall2_mip' from the previous texseg, as well as the 'slow_sk_rwl_canyon_yelw_a001_mip' - a slow version of the textures used on I2's mountains, and quadrants that used to exist around it.[2]
Walkthrough