In this exclusive gallery, Greg Foertsch, XCOM 2's art director, shares the ideas behind XCOM 2's visual themes.
Propaganda Center
"The propaganda, it’s got this beautiful side to it where people come and hang out, but it’s a façade for something deeper. Doing that building was so much more important than doing a gas station. From a thematic point of view, that building in particular I think really encompasses what the city center is. It’s a beacon of light. It’s got these light shafts that reach up to the sky from it. It is that light that thralls the moths." - XCOM 2 Art Director Greg Foertsch
A New World Order
A New World Order
"Is [the alien] helping him up, or is he letting him go? That’s the question, right? Is he looking down with disdain or looking down with concern? That was one of the toughest parts about that image, was to balance load the double speak there. It could go either way, and try to make the gesture read in both directions. From a high level, that was exactly what we were doing, posing both sides of that coin."
The Viper
The Viper
"Snakes are very graceful, but they’ve got a deadly feature to them, and they can kill you if they have venom, or they can bind you up like a python. There’s this beauty, but there’s also this terrifying part. We really wanted to push that elegant, fluid nature. She’s very quick and very smooth. If that was a male snake, that would be a broader and weirder, harder leap. We looked at a lot of snake reference and other characters that have done this, and the feminine part of it really was a natural component of it, and we pushed some of the features to make sure it was not ambiguous. We really wanted to push the feminine nature of her. She’s blended with human DNA, so there’s some weirdness going on, and some transformation that hasn’t finished."
The Sectoid
The Sectoid
"He’s always had a jaw, but he never really had a mouth. A hole. The very early sketches of him, he has a membrane over top of him, like he’s not completely baked. He came out a little too early, and he’s got this filmish stuff over him. That didn’t read real clearly, so we decided to cut a mouth into him and really give him teeth. He’s very unnerving--it’s almost like Two-Face in Batman, where you can see the gum line exposed. It’s a really bizarro semi-smile that you almost get with him. He’s got incomplete ears. He’s sort of making the leap to humanish stuff, but not completely. Even in his animation, when he runs, sometimes he runs upright. Sometimes he glitches out, like a muscle memory thing, and runs on all fours like he did in Enemy Unknown. It’s a really cool animation thing. Every once in a while, he glitches into this. He reverts into his old nature."
City Center
City Center
"The city center--it is one of the the megacities that the aliens have now built to try to pull humanity into, to try to lure them like a moth to a flame. They’re these very sterile but cool-looking environments. We needed buildings in there to specifically try to say, 'Here, humans. This is your utopia. Here’s our version of a car dealership.' Or of a convenience store. It’s beautiful in a unique way, but it’s also a little off-putting because it’s so sterile. There’s something about it that’s a little bit off." - Garth DeAngelis, Lead Producer
The Berserker
The Berserker
"We were really trying to create some contrast between our characters. She’s hunched over. If you straighten her out, she’s probably the size of two humans. She’s enormous. It was the idea that she doesn’t have armor. She’s got this thing where the skin has been manipulated. It has plated up like rhino. It’s like the dark maroon-ish areas of skin are these really thick, calcified parts of flesh. That serves as her armor. The whiter area, the fleshier areas, are a little more vulnerable. She’s got these little ports on her where she may have been injected with stuff to make her so rage-y and bulky. She’s definitely been manipulated at a DNA level as well."
Advent Mech Mk2
Advent Mech Mk2
"The fidelity of everything went up. We wanted to make the textures richer. We still live in the stylized realism world, but Enemy Unknown was based more on action figures, that miniature world where everything was chunkified deliberately. X2 is really the jump from miniatures to actions figures like GI Joes with Kung Fu grip. Everything’s come up. The fidelity has come up. It’s going from miniatures to 3.25-inch figures. With XCOM 2, that was really the intent, raise the fidelity of the geometry, raise the fidelity of the textures, raise the fidelity of the animations and effects. As far as the mech goes, all the Advent stuff deliberately is a very angular feel, whereas a lot of the city center stuff is a little bit more rounded and soft. We were just trying to push the shape designs apart, so that the Advent stuff felt a little bit out of place. That carries through to the vehicles and the characters. There are other places that you’ll see that, where shape language becomes very different."
Guerrilla Warfare
Guerrilla Warfare
"Headgear is really what the player is looking at when they look at their character. There’s a really high value placed on that for us. Trying to have enough stuff to bolt onto the head to give your character enough personality. We’ve got really reflective sunglasses, aviator-style sunglasses in the game, and all sorts of crazy stuff that you can put on. The ranger hood that makes you feel a little more mysterious, stuff that would hide your identity if you were working as a guerrilla organization, infiltrating a city or area. That led us to all the head stuff. Again, that’s where it carried through the body, but it’s all trying to find elements that would work within our customization system, so that nobody really looks the same. It’s like a random dice roll when you get your guys, how they’re outfitted. Your initial characters don’t look at all the same."
Advent Troopers
Advent Troopers
"Star Wars has the Imperial troopers, and you look at the crest of [the Advent captain's] helmet being a bit more Roman, with that ridge we ran down the top of it from the front. Those are what we were looking at with him, to make him feel more elite, more in that realm. The cape is interesting because the cape, it softens him. It’s a different look. It becomes a little less hard, and also it’s a silhouette breaker for us. We’ve got to consider the three-quarter view of the game as well. When [the captain] moves, [the cape] flows behind him, and it’s a way to break him off from, say, a trooper, not only just color-wise, but shape language. A little bit more recognizable from the regular game view. They are actually fairly similar silhouette-wise. We tried to give him more squared-off shoulders, and a higher collar. We’re pulling all of those pretty common design elements that say 'elite military' from various eras, and kind of combined them together."
Advent Checkpoint
Advent Checkpoint
"There are those things that are still recognizable, but they’ve got a twist of future. You still have to retain that DNA that people can connect with so that when you do something that is really out there, it’s not so much of a leap for them. You’ve got to keep that connection."
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