What would a city built by Chaos look like? That’s a pretty tough question, just to set the record straight. Building a city is tough enough as it is. It’s one of those game development back-breakers where there is so much work involved and expectations are so high that even creating a more traditional fantasy city causes much gnashing of teeth and lost sleep. Take Altdorf, for example. First off, it rocks! We have a gallows in the town square, a wizard’s tower that belches fire, and a tavern themed after a Mastiff’s buttock. It’s all great, Warhammer IP goodness hand-crafted with love and a lot of polygons.
What about the Inevitable City? What does a city entirely populated by worshippers of the Ruinous powers look like? How does the city work? Where do all the missing socks go? These are all very tough questions, but the artists working on the city were given a get out of jail free card. In WAR we are not making SimChaos-ville. (Although, that could be a fun game design.) The Inevitable City is not a simulation of a real city filled with evil, self-serving, power-hungry brutes and warlocks. Instead, we aim to make freakin’ cool art, and that is our “free-pass”. In other words, we are striving to deliver a sinister, monumental, and wicked city. If we do that, then all the silly questions about the logic behind it all are forgotten, more or less. Sure we try very hard to make the city plausible, but at the end of the day it is a fantasy city, and a Chaos city is about as fantastical as a city can get.
So how do we create an evil city? Well, I’ll speak in broad strokes here and start
off with the blanket statement that it takes a lot of people from many disciplines
in our studio to create something of this magnitude. Creating the Inevitable City
is like making a small game all by itself. It has designers, story writers,
artists, content implementers, testers, and, apparently because I am writing this
to tell you just how cool the city is, its own marketing. Our cities really are
the best you know?
Like a small game world to themselves, the cities have their own set of game design requirements that we set forth beforehand. Some of the requirements are the functional needs of an MMO, such as taverns, banks, and auction houses. Some of them are very specific to WAR, such as great PvE content AND RvR battlegrounds within our cities. Thus, we get an art request list for the Inevitable City that looks something like this:
- Bank
- Library
- Tavern
- Landmark 1
- Landmark 2
- Landmark 3
- Etc, etc.
This is where it gets fun and scary at the same time. Coming up with ideas for landmarks in a city of Chaos is a pretty easy exercise. The Inevitable City has a great Chaos Monolith that is enveloped in foul energies and floats above the urban landscape like some kind of dark god itself. There is the Maw, a huge coliseum on the precipice of the city, where gruesome and cruel death matches are cheered on by the ravenous hordes of Chaos. There are landmarks such as these all over the city and they are all epic and suitably evil. Ah, but those where the easy ones, relatively speaking. What do you do with a Chaos Bank? Do the followers of Chaos deposit their money at the Bank of Tzeentch? What about the taverns? Having a bunch of rowdy, savage, arguably-insane developers ... I mean, followers of Chaos hanging out at the local pub just doesn’t _feel_ right. That is an important word: “feel”. Chaos just has to feel right. You have to look at its architecture and go “Yea. That feels evil”. You have to look at the tumultuous sky of swirling, dark energy and say, “Oohh. This place feels magical and twisted”. You have to wander around with your Zealots, Chosen, and Marauders and feel like this place was meant for your kind. That is how I direct the art for a place like the Inevitable City at a high level. You have to match the visuals of the environment to the themes and character of its inhabitants. It is the entire team’s responsibility to execute on these core themes and support them, for example, via storylines from content or via code that makes our swirling sky work. That collaboration is how you get giant fissures of malevolent energy tearing into the sky and that is how you get Chaos giants chained to the wall to be unleashed in the fight pits of the Maw.
Back to the city creation process, once we have all of the design requirements sorted out, we can start sketching maps out on paper or in a paint program. This is essentially pre-production for the city where we iterate on the map until everyone who has buy-in from the various teams is satisfied. The next step is to do a combination of rough concepts and polygonal grey-box prototypes. This is where we can start to test run-times and we get our first feedback on how the city flows. The goal is to have the basic footprint and lay of the land firmly established before we go to final concepts and modeling. While the artists are churning away on great looking buildings and landmarks, the content team is writing storylines and dialog to bring all the art to life and give the city a voice. It’s a gianormous task given the complexity of our cities, which brings me to the point of visual diversity.
Large environments need diversity to avoid being boring. They also need landmarks and points of visual distinction so players can navigate around. This is true for the game world and it is also true for cities. For Inevitable City we needed to break the play-space up into areas that pursued varying themes while still maintaining a overall cohesive artistic vision for the city. The landmarks serve as an anchor to each of these themes. The Maw is the central element to the rougher, wilder district of the Inevitable City where marauders and vagabonds camp out in a massive tent-city around the coliseum. It’s the equivalent to Altdorf’s slums. The Magus Tower is another major landmark in the city that defines its surrounding area. His dark, spire-topped tower floats above the chaotic abyss, silhouetted against the distant chaos portal pulsing in the sky above. His section of the city has all but disintegrated into the chaotic void as if being so close to the realms of Chaos is consuming the city itself. Finally, we have some great visual diversity in the RvR section of the city where bastions to the other Ruinous powers such as Khorne and Slaanesh meet.
Throughout all of this diversity, consistency is maintained through the repetition of a few key visual design elements. Chaos architecture is foundationally heavy and strong. Most of the buildings are made of large, rough hewn blocks. Atop this rock foundation is clad lots of detailed ironwork. In its simplest forms, this cladding is not much more than thick runners of metal adorned with spikes and studs. Along the tops of the city’s many towers, the cladding becomes detailed, sculpted effigies of the raven god, Tzeentch, leering down upon the cities inhabitants. Chaos stars and floating eyeballs we call the Watchers, decorate the city as do various magical fires, fissures, and other foul magics. In the end, Inevitable City is the most epic representation of Chaos ever done for the Warhammer IP, and we are still packing it with more Chaotic joy even as I write this. It is the overarching goal of the city team to make the Inevitable City feel great, look great, and play great. As I think about the wonders of the Inevitable City (and the cool dungeons hidden beneath it of which I am purposely being teasingly vague), I get a warm feeling in my belly knowing that sharing this greatness with the world is but a few months away.
