00:00Peggy 16
00:02Hi, I'm Matt Kizminski, art director on Dawn of War 3
00:05I'm Tristan Brett, the lead environment artist on Dawn of War 3
00:08Today we're going to take you through some of the environments that we've created for the game
00:12Cyprus Ultima is our medieval world that expresses the sort of way of life or the style of life that
00:21people in the 41st millennium experience
00:24There's also a number of little details that we did as well
00:27There's little nooks and crannies of things and stuff in the non-playable spaces that kind of draw your eye
00:34a little bit
00:35Not too much that it competes with gameplay but enough that you sort of see little corners of the map
00:41that make you go
00:42Oh, that's cool, that's neat, that's, I mean, I want to know more about that, what's going on there
00:47And so that was a big part of making maps that people wanted to come back to over and over
00:54again
00:54The natural rock sets were designed in a way that the artists had a lot of freedom to create some
01:00unique rock formations
01:02The walls and structures were designed in a modular way so they could tile vertically and horizontally
01:08To allow us to create a lot of different unique layouts
01:13Gave the designers a lot of freedom to create a variety of spaces
01:18The whole intent around Cage World was to create something very alien and very disorienting
01:22And also, for me, I wanted to do something that players had never really seen in a Donald Warwick game
01:29before
01:29Something very, very unique
01:31Derived from the idea that you could build a world out of sort of interconnecting blocks of almost living metal,
01:40so to speak
01:40The desire to, like, revisit the worlds was something that was really important to me
01:45And it was something that I put to as a challenge to the environment team
01:50Like, how can we create these worlds so that when I look at them, they still feel very 40K
01:55They feel like an expression of what we've seen in the paintings, what we've seen in the tabletop
02:01What we've seen even in our previous games
02:04But do it in a way that makes the player feel like, hey, I can come back to this place
02:10And there's sort of something appealing about it, there's something intriguing
02:13And then there's a touch of mystery
02:16But that I can also, you know, see the action, I can see the battle taking place
02:22So, Starfort, it's a rather new tile set in the Dawn of War franchise
02:26With some of our technology, you know, with Alpha Terrain
02:29And basically unstrapped us from the ground and let us do something that, you know, in space or in low
02:35orbit
02:35And the architecture is sort of a nod to the gothic kind of grimdark direction
02:41But it's also sort of fresh in that it's a giant space station or a giant war machine that you're
02:47playing on
02:48So just having that sense that, you know, you're fighting on this big battle barge type of map
02:56It was really exciting
02:57The sheer scale of them and the size of the weaponry on display on them
03:03They are the sort of ultimate expression of Imperium technology
03:09From an engineering and design standpoint, you know, how would these structures be built?
03:15How, you know, how thick do the walls need to be to support a 300 foot cathedral, for example
03:22And how all the different pieces of the Starfort need to fit together and feel mechanically convincing
03:27And feel that, yeah, this structure could actually support a whole army on it in space
03:34We're really facilitating gameplay
03:37So the way I look at maps a lot of time is just it's a canvas for the units and
03:41the gameplay
03:43So, you know, the clean areas are really to help frame the units
03:48Where there's no gameplay, that's the area where we sort of do some of our storytelling
03:53Acheron is the most violent world that we have
03:56There's lava spewing everywhere
03:58There's these ever-shifting glaciers of ice that are moving across the surface
04:04And they're perpetually collapsing into the volcanic action beneath it
04:10But we wanted something that had an element of beauty to it
04:14That was, when I look at it, I'm like, wow, that looks really, really cool
04:18I don't want to go on a vacation there
04:20But there's something neat about escaping into that world
04:23And that was part of the challenge
04:25And part of it was creating like this
04:27Those color palettes that would invite you in
04:30And that is a very iterative process
04:32That is constantly going back saying like
04:34Well, right now it looks too friendly and it looks too happy
04:37How can we make that feel a bit darker?
04:39As a player, I find myself trying to parse out the details
04:44And try to parse out what was gameplay
04:47And what was just visual noise
04:50And what was just, you know, decoration in the maps
04:54So a lot of it was like, okay, hold on
04:56Let's think about what we need
04:58What we really need to convey this world
05:02To frame the action
05:04And take people to some place really interesting and cool
05:08So there you have it
05:09Some of the environments you're going to be seeing in Dawn of War 3
05:12Thanks for watching
05:13And I can't wait for you guys to play the game
