The standard storytelling is complemented by visual storytelling, which is where Art Director Greg Foertsch comes in. He envisioned the colorful world of Enemy Unknown as a counter to the browns and grays that he felt would be too predictable for an alien war story. In XCOM 2, he's making another turn, portraying an occupying alien government with a sense of eerie perfection.
"I tend to go with what the opposite of what convention would be," Foertsch said. "EU could’ve naturally been a very brown game, so I went very colorful. With this game I could’ve made it very oppressive, but I went the opposite direction again. Everything is clean, to the point that it’s unnatural but still somewhat familiar. We went in a very different direction. We could’ve gone prison camps and District 9 on it, but we didn’t. We wanted to go contrary to the easy answer, so we made these beautiful gleaming white cities where the grass looks fake."
He recalled a funny moment, after showing the game at E3, when he read criticism that the grass didn't look realistic enough. "I was like, 'yeah, that was actually the point,'" he said. "It's supposed to look like turf on a football field, not like real grass. When we should the wilderness levels, that's the real grass."
Foertsch says the juxtaposition between the two is meant to be its own bit of visual storytelling. The aliens aren't forcing people into their pristine cities, they're just offering an appealing option and letting the rest sort itself out. Humanity isn't being conquered so much as coddled, and the result is a relatively small resistance force. Open warfare would logically mean many more citizens taking up arms, but if the aliens appear benevolent, XCOM remains the scrappy underdogs.
"We could've gone very militaristic, but my instinct was to push away from that. So we’re contrasting the unnaturally clean cities that are bright and white and not oppressive visually. They’re hiding the oppression in these dirtier areas that are more human. I looked at Tokyo and Dubai and Seoul. And a lot of Nordic cities, a lot of Scandinavia design. What would it be like if IKEA designed a city?"
Of course, being a game means that all of his work has to fit into the gameplay systems. The procedural maps posed the risk of losing his handcrafted artistry, but he says the end result exceeded his hopes. He says the way the joints connect still "feel really handcrafted and have little narratives."
But, the clean design meant accentuating architectural curves, while the gameplay systems themselves are very grid based. The tactical maps make everything square, so Foertsch said he had to "find ways to trick it."
