Art Imitates Life

Video Games are considered to be the most immersive of the arts mainly for their interactivity, but that only goes as far as the visual component of the experience. Story based immersive games require believable worlds for the characters to live in and sometimes these are heavily inspired by our real world. Here I have a few processes adopted by studios to bringing their art to live.

New York

From climbing up the Empire State Building in Spiderman to the underground subway in Max Payne, protecting the back alleys in The Division and taking a helicopter ride around the skyline in Grand Theft Auto IV, New York City has been represented since the dawn of video games.

For big locations with plenty of reference material online, it is a little easier for smaller dev teams on a budget to use these settings as the backdrop for their games, but bigger devs like Insomniac Games, often send a scout team out to collect new references as per their requirements. In the case of Grand Theft Auto IV, Rockstar set up a brand new office in New York City making it very easy for the art department to represent the city as it is.

Washington D.C.

Falling of the Capital is a common theme to explore “order in chaos” in popular culture. Naturally, video games have had their fair share of stories exploring broken governments, in my opinion this is best on display in Ubisoft’s Division 2. A different take on this concept is seen in Fallout 3 where the setting is more post apocalyptic and less politically focused. Unlike New York City, the problems in gathering references are getting a security clearance to photograph in the vicinity of government buildings. Fallout 3 Art Director has previously said how his team got into trouble for having thousands of pictures of government building exterior wall closeups. Like the previously mentioned Rockstar, Bethesda Game Studios is situated just on the outskirts of Washington D.C. so getting references was easy for them too.

Assassin’s Creed Series

Unlike the previous cities, the Assassin’s Creed Series has recreated these cities trying to be as accurate as possible to the time periods they were set in. While laser scanning the monuments that are still standing today is step one, the artists have to go back through the decades undo-ing the damages on the real monuments. The art department also had to go through history books and other references that describe these settings to be able to recreate them.

The recent unfortunate fires at the Notre-Dame in Paris, led to it now undergoing restructuring using Assassin’s Creed Unity’s laser scans of the Notre-Dame.

Post Apocalyptic Themes

The Fallout games are best known for taking real life cities, reimagining them in the alternate fifties of the game's lore and adding a layer of post apocalyptic grunge to it all. Washington D.C., Las Vegas, Boston and the Appalachian Mountains are all explored through the years and the art department has to go through references, make technological changes that serve the mythology of the game, and then break it all down almost as if a Nuke was dropped close by. This exciting approach to creating a world makes the experience more engaging as you can identify the skyline/ monuments from the real world but in-game might have a different historical background, for example the Fallout 4 quest, Road To Freedom, has the player find the Railroad faction after walking the Freedom Trail, which is an actual trail through Boston marking significant monuments in the history of the United States.

Linear Story, Big Country

The Last of Us has been one of the last generation’s best stories and worlds. It takes the cliche of a zombie outbreak and grounds it in a way The Walking Dead did for comicsand TV. A trip across the post apocalyptic United States has us see the different parts of the country telling us stories of the aftermath of the outbreak. Big cities, small suburbias, and even just the wilderness, we see it all. The reference for this kind of game is less about accurately reproducing a real world location and more about getting the general feel of the place. As the story is told over the changing seasons, we see these locations change too having the references be accurate to the seasons. A small village in the summer feels VERY different from the same village in winter.

References:

The Last of Us (2014) - America

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The Saboteur (2008) - Paris

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Max Payne (2001) - New York City Subways

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Spiderman (2018) - New York City

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Grand Theft Auto IV (2012) - New York City (ish)

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Division (2015) - New York City

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Division 2 (2019) - Washington D.C.

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Fallout 3 (2006) - Washington D.C.

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Fallout New Vegas (2008) - Las Vegas

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Fallout 4 (2015) - Boston

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Assassin’s Creed Series (2006 - ) - Various

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Max Payne 3 (2012) - Sao Paulo

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