So far art direction has had a fairly Western feel to it (all amazing). Will we see more non-western influence, such as Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern, etc. in upcoming locations?asked by Akio Kahoshi

So... I'll take a first stab at that. I think that "Dan" [Elwin] will take the second part of that.The short answer is going to be yes. The way that we're approaching the planets right now... through a lot of our sci-fi influences - and we're talking more desolate planets from Star Wars, Luke's home planet to Hoth. But we're also looking at components like Blade Runner. Basically we're drawing from all of our experiences and a lot of those are going to not just feed back into the persistent universe but we're going to have to continue to build out the persistent universe - the styles, the structures, the environments. Because you do want to show a cultural influence and how it has impacted planets.That said, the way that we've been approaching a lot of these things is through as much modern reason as we can. Which is, 100 years from now what happens to human space exploration. Well, we colonize the Moon. We colonize Mars. 200 years from now, what does it look like... okay now we've jumped out to maybe Ganymede or somewhere else. 200 years after that, we've gone out to maybe the edge of the solar system.What happens with planets like Mars is the next wave of construction. So the traditional cultural influences are really going to be determined by whoever is providing the finances to that location. But, I think more importantly, they will be building on top of the structures that have been put there. If you look at a base on the Moon or a base on Mars say in the next 100 years, you are going to find it's very modular... very container-style setup. It's more akin to Cowboy Bebop in a lot of ways or the movie Moon than almost anything else. But then say, 200 years from now you don't just scrap those structures... you now start building on top of it with something a little more modern.The art director who is driving that, Mark Skelton, and Corentin at the Montreal studio. - they are spending a lot of time focus on what those rings are and what happens when the humans leave our system and move out to the next system and that first system they move out to is a terraformed planet. Now you've got jump capabilities. That planet is now a complete overhaul of something that we've seen before, so it might not have any of the flavour that you're used to... but it may take suggestions from Dubai or a couple of other ultra-modern cities. But a lot of those things are being explored and the art direction that we've got from that so far suggests that we're going to be taking nods from all of those components but it won't be exact.A good way of looking at that would be something like Naboo. Naboo had, you know, kind of a renaissance style architecture to it. At the same time it had, you know, a lot modern day Star Wars techie stuff as well. So, it depends on the lens that you're looking at the environment from but...Short answer: Yes.Long answer: It's a little more complicated but it's going to take nods from a little bit of everything.

We have several locations on Earth, so we will probably draw directly from the cultures at those locations. We have landing zones in Russia, China... I would expect that those are influenced by those cultures. So... yeah, definitely.