I set out with the goal of producing something that heavily relied on ZBrush, mainly because I wanted to see how well that workflow would turn out and also to improve on my sculpting. God of War is easily one of the best examples of what a ZBrush-heavy workflow can achieve, so I wanted to take methods and techniques from the environments of this game and apply them to my own.
One of the first things I did was find a concept to work from; concepts provide a solid composition and can even help with lighting setups later on. ArtStation is my usual go-to, there are so many talented and creative artists on there. For this piece, I used one of the artworks by Ilya Nazarov as a base. His concepts are awesome, I hugely recommend checking out his portfolio.
For references, I mainly looked at the God of War environments and other fan-made scenes. I found a lot of cool breakdowns which really help me get an idea of how a scene like this could be put together.
90% of my assets used a very similar workflow which consisted of blocking the mesh out in 3ds Max, sculpting in ZBrush, and either using Decimation Master or 3ds Max to get my low poly. Finally, I textured and baked my assets in Substance Painter. I like to keep the number of software I use to a minimum, as I find it streamlines the process of creating an asset.