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Story seems to inform a lot of your decisions, whether you're designing a fully functional ship or a derelict like we just saw. What can you tell us about that?

TL;DRGiving ships and environments a history through small ambient stories makes them feel lived in, and Squadron 42 lets the team do this in ways the persistent universe currently can't.

Nathan DearsleyVehicle Art Director, Foundry 42 UK

It's kind of a double-edged sword. As a vehicle guy, you've got this trait that you want to make things aesthetically pleasing. The shape needs to work and you're making these beautiful ships. You're creating sculptures, right? But a sculpture without history is just a thing. It's just there, in my opinion. And as I touched on in the video, we're all environment artists. I spent a long time being an environment artist. And one of the things that was always a very important thing to get across was some kind of history to put into the environments that you're creating, or if not history, a future. And if you can create this with a background script and tell these little ambient stories of, oh, there was a dude in the vent there, why was he in the vent? It's like when you see Newt in Aliens, and she drops down into where she stayed and she's got all the little toys in the corner and marks on the wall, a photo of her parents. There are all these little things that are so easy to do. And you think about it from the ground up like that, and it's just that extra layer of thought that goes into these things. And I just really like that stuff. And as I said in the video, it's a break for the guys to try and do that, because we can't really do that in the PU, because if I go off and put a photo of his wife on the captain's console on a Javelin bridge, at the moment everyone's going to have a photo of his wife on that thing. There are systems on the horizon to sort that stuff out, but as soon as we get a little nugget where we can tell this little story, it's great. And that's why Squadron is a bit of a relief for that stuff as well. So we've got the Idris on the go, and now it's starting to get all these little personal touches into these spaces that make it feel like it's lived in and not just a sterile box.

Reverse the Verse›2.10 - UK·
Published on this date.21 Oct 2016