City 17, Dunwall, and now Project C: Viktor Antonov’s “savage land”

“I’m sorry,” Viktor Antonov tells me. He’s apologising for speaking over one of my questions - he knows it’s impolite, but there’s an important point he wants to get across. It’s a manner befitting a rare artist who has managed to sell their individual character across a series of triple-A productions - a scale that more often tends to dilute personality and erase authorial flourishes. The point the acclaimed art director is making is this: he’s trying to get back to the situation that produced the worlds of Half-Life 2 and Dishonored. When Viktor Antonov designed City 17, clamping the totalitarian vice of the Combine quite literally around the austere, beige buildings of an Eastern European metropolis and giving them a squeeze, it was as part of a team of no more than 30 at Valve. The situation was much the same at Arkane, where he first adapted the tall chimney stacks and wide walls of old Edinburgh for Dunwall. Pre-production ran for an unheard-of three years before the studio swelled to the orchestral size of contemporary triple-A.

from PCGamesN http://bit.ly/2AUzW2L