Olivier Leonardi: The map is called
Aquarium – and it's the first map you discover when you start playing one of the campaigns, be that Resistance or Security. It's a pretty modern and futuristic place, and basically it was part of the very first designs of the Ark. The whole of the architecture on the Ark was really inspired by two architects – one is
Santiago Calatrava, and the other one is
Zaha Hadid. They both have different styles, but they both use these organic shapes.
Ed Stern: As soon as we realised that this was going to be the first map that players were going to see we realised that this has got to be a microcosm of the whole story - and really we're trying to tell several stories here.
We've got to sell the fact that there's this eco future dream, but also one of the big things in this game is hubris, that technology is not going to save us. So here's this beautiful thing, and we wanted to show that when it worked it was wonderful, but that that hasn't been enough, and it hasn't been sustained. Thematically, it's a criticism of these boutique, luxury solutions - if you're rich that's great but how's it going to work for the great unwashed? This tells that story of eco visionary luxury, and then of that sense of decay.
Olivier Leonardi: A lot of the maps in the Ark when you discover them, there's this separation between rich and the poor and the spaces between the two are anti-spaces, because no-one's using them anymore. There's this kind of contrast between completely crowded places like Container City and places like this.
Ed Stern: The principle was front stage/back stage. You'd get to see the thing that the visitor would see and then you'd get to see the back stage, and that's always an interesting contrast. So with this particular area, something we thought of straight away was marketing copy and these bland terms that are actually meaningless. There's a bunch of infomatics and little bits of blurb in this area that the kids have broken into and added their own text.
Olivier Leonardi: There's this layer of vandalism over the existing text.
Ed Stern: I think the literary term is a palimpsest – where it's a single text that's been rewritten again and again, or you've got the traces of the previous writings under it – and that's always been the goal for us. We had this three letter acronym during development called Instant Deep Context, the inspiration for which was the Lord of the Rings films where they designed every detail of costume and everything to an insane degree – I mean some of it was only in shot for three seconds. The more you look the more detail there is, and it's kind of reinforcing.
Olivier Leonardi: There are lots of tiny things we put like fliers on the floor or newspapers that tell the story of the Ark, and even more generally the theme of the map. In this map you're going to find an exhibition that talks about 100 years of underwater photography – because it's 2045 and that date matches up – so it's tiny bits of detail that bring some context.
