When some of those decisions are made [to change a space from its blockout], I know it's an iterative process, but is it about getting in, reviewing and understanding what the main goals are, and looking at the architecture, the mood and the lighting all coming together?
TL;DRChanges to blockout spaces are driven partly by gameplay not working as hoped and partly by art reference showing a shape isn't believable, and the narrative reacts to how aggressively the player plays.
Yeah, basically. I mean, that's a large combination of it. And in some cases, as I said, it's gameplay driven, and the fact that it's like, oh, well, this doesn't actually work for what we hoped, in which case we'll go in and we'll change it. And in other cases, it's just we've blocked something out, and again, when we're doing it very early on, the art guys have gone in there, and they've obviously got a lot more reference material and stuff. So there'll be some cases where a shape just doesn't quite work for a believable space. And in those cases, we basically say, OK, well, we need to change the layout a little bit to accommodate.
Narratively, we pretty much cater for what the player does as well. So if the player goes in there all guns blazing, then the whole base is going to be on alert. Maybe you get to pick up some bits of information here and there, especially if you're in a crawl space or something like that.