Alberto Petronio

Just a cathartic moment, I guess.

Whose catharsis, Alberto? And what are you trying to get out?

No, just to describe a moment of power.

I remember when I first saw that picture in a meeting, I went straight to Alberto's desk and I was like, can I have that right now? And it's now my desktop background, because it's just so sick. I remember when you first showed it to me, I came over to your desk, and I think you talked about how it was kind of hiding in the asteroid belt and then it would pop out. And we talked a little bit about how in the Arctic you see these really large ships that are icebreaker ships. And it's just insane. That's a great picture for it.

And I think that's one of the core things with the concept art as a whole. There's obviously things that we want to show to really show the details of the ship and what that ship's functionality and loadout and everything else is. But then there's also pieces that we want to do that just set the scene and set the atmosphere, and give an idea of the dream of what we're trying to achieve. So, yes, some of these pieces might be more art pieces than... I remember me and you had a big conversation about this. I'm not going to say it was a heated conversation, because it wasn't, but there's things that we wanted to show that really put this in our universe, and then there's things that we wanted to show that were kind of like a little love letter to concept vehicles as a whole, because this being almost the end of an era with concept vehicles, a lot of work went into it. And from a concept artist point of view, delivering those really cinematic shots at the end of a long period of working on it is kind of part of the payoff.

Yeah, this is Levski. It was the best way to communicate the scale of the thing, as the diameter of the hole, I think, is five kilometers, and the length of this ship is 150 meters, so it gives a better idea of what you could see and where, when this will come out.

We thought that was such a big hole when we built it. And then we put an Odin in there and it's like, oh.

It is still a big hole. Odin's just a very big ship. I think, to build on what you said about the key art and how it's almost a love letter in some ways to all the insane work that we've seen: from an artist's perspective, the team's grown so much over the last few years, and it's these pieces of concept key art that appear on Google Images, on the YouTube videos where the backers are talking about how excited they are, and even internally, when you're about to start the project and you get presented with 'this is the ship you're going to be making', and you know that's going to be your world for five months, or whatever. It could be months, and in the large ships' cases, even longer. Those moments are what motivates you as a game developer. When you go into that first call with Ben and John and they're like, okay, here's the kickoff for this, this is what it's all about, and you see the pictures and you're like, yeah, we're going to make that. It's so exciting.

It's about setting the vision. So obviously the concept doesn't cover every single area, but it gives everyone an idea of what the vision is for this vehicle. So when you're making that decision about what do we do with this space, what do we do with this bulkhead, we know what the intention was. So sure, they may not be realistic about everything that will happen in our engine, but it gets across the vision and the narrative of what we want the vehicle's identity to be.

Although it looks like it's an entire room, what you're actually seeing there is the walkway that you saw at the top of the hangar. That's the sort of scale we're talking. Like I mentioned, at the bottom of the hangar, there's basically a conveyor belt that connects to the torpedo control at the top. So behind what you're seeing in that image there is the cargo grid, and what you're seeing to the left there, closest to us, is an actual constantly rotating conveyor belt. So if you want to load torpedoes, you take them from the cargo grid and put them on there, and they'll then make their way to the actual torpedo control room where the tube bays actually are, to be taken off and then loaded into the tubes to be fired. So on either side there's a constant rotating thing, so if you need more torpedoes you can just take them straight off the grid, straight onto there, and it goes up to then be manually loaded.

We've mentioned this is a multi-crew ship.

It's definitely a multi-crew ship. If you want this thing to be efficient, then you will need it. Can you do this by yourself? Yes, you'll get a good workout running around the ship.

You'll get 20 shots out of the torpedo tubes, and that's it, instead of it being ready to go again as soon as it's fired. Because at the end of the day, as long as there's someone there feeding it, it can just keep going.

More multi-crew roles than just sitting in a turret, although we do have a lot of turrets.

We have a lot of people just sitting in turrets. We have 23.

Well, me and Alberto were counting them before. We had to keep recounting to make sure we had the right ones.

It turned out we're not good at math.

No, we're terrible at it. We're absolutely atrocious, and we made the damn thing. It was 15 manned and eight remote, and that's just turrets, not to mention all the other things people can do across the ship.

But those remote turrets still have to be operated.

Yeah, they are remote turrets. There's an entire room dedicated to that.

Plus 2,000 just for the elevator.

All right, so there's 6,000 in the hold, and then the elevator, if you want to leave cargo on the elevator, that's another 2,000.

Yeah, and that's an elevator that goes down and up between the medium hangar, at the back of the medium hangar.

Do we have an image of that? Because right now you're telling me there's an elevator that holds as much cargo as the Ironclad.

The elevator is this part with the straps.

So see the chevrons at the back? That's the elevator that goes up and down at the very back of the hangar.

Is that red light at the top the ATC thing you were talking about?

Yes.

See, that's the scale, right? We showed that side shot and it looked like it was an entire room. It's not an entire room. It's literally the catwalk that you're seeing on the left and right.

And when we went into this and got the initial brief, it came out that we were doing an Anvil ship, and it's like, yeah, cool. And then we got the brief and it's like, okay, this we can work with. And then through each point of decision we made, we were always looking at it like, this is our ultimate ship for this purpose. This is what I would class as our end game. Obviously, we need to make it. Obviously, we need to deliver it. So there's got to be compromises somewhere. But we did our best to always look at it and think, right, how do we make the best we can? And this is what we tried to do. And when we get into production, we get to see whether or not we can achieve it. But we put a lot of discussions and decisions into trying to get this thing to be something that we can be proud of.

So I thought that since you're driving a destroyer of worlds, you should be able to dispense it democratically or not. But in some ways, you should be able to communicate to your crew what the plan is.

Yeah, this is the equivalent of our briefing room, but taken to the next level.

It's a bit more lyrical, I guess.

With a ship of this size, it's going to be crewed by a huge group of people. And obviously, people aren't required to be there, because at the end of the day, people are having fun. But it gives orgs and groups a location to meet and gather and discuss what they plan. I think it's safe to say this is an org ship.

This is a ship you leave and you don't come back for a while.

Well, you take your ships to this ship to then go off and play the game.

So we wanted to convey that this was inspired by a battleship. Sadly, in sci-fi there are other ships inspired by battleships, so we had to differentiate from those and not go into the steampunk or World War II aesthetics. We initially tried to group all the guns in the center, like you would do in World War II, like on the USS Iowa, or a famous Japanese one that comes to mind that I will not mention. Instead, with the fact that they all have to operate in a video game, they don't have the [...], we started spreading them, and that aesthetic would no longer be supported. So we decided to look actually at the Zumwalt class, at the littoral combat ships from the US, at the Visby class from Sweden, all the more modern stealth ships, and yet retain the conning tower aesthetic that there was in WWII ships and that got lost after them. We want to hint at that world with a little bit of new.

We've been told a couple of times, more than a couple of times, I'm afraid, to make it less cute, because it was really, really cute. We tried to make it as small as possible, like Sam did, obviously. And we had to make a proper effort to change the aesthetic in order to be less cutesy and more pitbull, and less pug, I guess. His concepts were really cute.

The other one had really big eyes. One had floppy ears and stuff. Not even exaggerating, there were parts of it that looked like there were floppy ears. When Chris first saw it, he just sent me a Minions gif, and I'm like, I don't know how to take this. Is this a good thing or is this a bad thing? And then we got to the bottom of what he was after and adapted it. And I think it turned out great. I think it's amazing. I think it's super Drake. I think one of my favorite bits is just the size of the engine. Engine versus overall dimensions is perfect for it.

One of the keys of the aesthetic that we wanted for the ship was that you're not riding a ship, you're riding an engine.