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The very core of the Deus Ex series' visual substance is Cyberpunk. From the very beginning, Jonathan Jacques-Belletête [JJB], the Art Director at Eidos Montreal, knew this was something mandatory to the franchise and an obligation for Deus Ex:Human Revolution's [DX:HR] art direction. JJB quickly set-out to identify and analyse the main visual archetypes of the cyberpunk genre. |
That's when things such as futuristic anticipation, intense cluttering, the new creeping over the old, fog and smoke, information overload, corporate branding, cybernetics, transhumanism and many others became staple motifs in DX:HR's design, in order to create a proper cyberpunk feel. |
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Eventually though, any game Art Director has to ask himself the obvious question. Should we 'merely' digitally recreate the look of Blade Runner? How original would this be? What would it say about the studio's capacity for creativity? Of course, with today's consoles, the movie's visuals could be recreated quite faithfully, and the game would be automatically classed as cyberpunk.
"That's where the concept of mixing aesthetics elements from the Renaissance era with cyberpunk came in," explains JJB. "I feel advancements made during this historic period had a lot in common with trans-humanism. If the Renaissance was about studying and understanding the human machine, cyberpunk is about upgrading it.
In order to upgrade a system, you must first understand how it functions. Hence, by visually mixing those two eclectic periods, we created our own flavour, our own cyberpunk vision of the near future. We ended up calling this signature 'Cyber-Renaissance'." |
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Human Revolution is the first Deus Ex to be released in a long time, so the franchise really had to be revived. Eidos and Square Enix understood this very well. They knew this meant giving the artists a generous amount of creative freedom.
"Basically, I think that as long as the game felt like the first Deus Ex, and had a great cyberpunk visual direction, we were allowed to create it without corporate disruptions," explains JJB. "If DX:HR ends up being a great game, it will be due to this unequivocal freedom Eidos and Square Enix entrusted us with.
The core design team was full of industry veterans, mostly from Ubisoft Montréal. "We were all on good projects before moving to Eidos. In fact, we really had no reason to leave other than we seriously wanted to make a new Deus Ex, and start a brand new studio," says Jacques-Belletête.
There were top dogs like Jim Murray, Thierry Doizon (Barontieri), Éric Gagnon, Sébastien Larroudé (Rainart), Brian Dugan (Chippy), Trong-Kim Nguyen, Richard Dumont, Donglu Yu, and François Cannel.
These artists were all chosen for their obvious talent, but also for their capacity for designing things. For their aptitudes for thinking like industrial designers, interior decorators, architects, fashion designers, graphic artists, urban designers and a whole bunch of other design fields.
DX:HR is a highly designed game. Everything in the game has been conceptualized. Every single prop has its own concept art (that's 1,300+ props). Every piece of fashion, of machinery, all the different urban set pieces from traffic lights to park benches have been thought out and conceptualized.
They were then all faithfully recreated in the game with a very homogenous style. All this design-centric approach makes for a very detailed and believable vision of a near future. It generates a coherent world. "At the end of the day, that's why these people were chosen," adds JJB. "We needed to create an entire world from scratch, and I needed artists capable of thinking like designers."
The Metal Gear Solid series was definitely an influence on DeusEx. "I'm a huge fan. Pretty much everything in it has always inspired me," says JJB. "It oozes style and design elegance. Visually speaking, the pseudo-reality it presents to the player is impressively compact and homogeneous.
As opposed to many North American games, the series never aimed for photorealism, but somehow the believability of its visual world is extremely potent and more credible than most 'photorealistic' games. That's what I like in a game, that's the kind of art direction that truly connects with me. Slick, stylized, highly designed, and memorable." |
The Deus Ex series is known for taking players around the world, trying to solve international conspiracies; and 'Human Revolution' is no exception. So the crew had to envision and create a wide array of locations. They never went on location though. What they did was write creative briefs for each real world location and contract a local photographer to take thousands of pictures. This came in handy for the different cities visited during in the game. Sprawling streets heavy with billboards and signs of all sizes and colors; dark alleys with trash everywhere, and rooftops overlooking great city vistas.
No matter the location, what was often important for us was to surprise the player. Too often in games locations are recreated as is. For example, the interior of a bank would look just like any boring bank you've ever walked into. The lobby of an office will also often look just like any cookie cut-out lobbies out there.
In many locations in DX:HR, we tried to counter balance the mundane with things that either look out of place or out of the ordinary. A good example of this is in one of the streets of the Shanghai map. There's a vacant lot between two buildings filled with hundreds of abandoned air conditioning units painted in different colors. Why is it there? Who made this? That's up to the player to decide really. But it definitely creates something different and most probably memorable.
All the textures in the game were created digitally. DX:HR is quite stylized, and in order to get the style running persistently throughout the creation, there had to be a recipe to follow.
JJB wanted the game to be slick, and to have very low frequency textures. "After some exhaustive tests, we got what we were looking for and crunched it into a bunch of rules which were then followed by all the texture and shader artists," he explains.
"I'm quite happy with the results. I wanted an original visual signature for the game, and not using any photographs definitely helped in achieving this. Like our Production Manager Martin Dubeau once said, it's a very 'texture-centric' art direction." |
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