Half-Life 2 art director Viktor Antonov is disappointed in today’s video game landscape, suggesting that there are too many war games, sequels, and games that take place in New York.
Antonov challenges developers to explore science fiction and to create games within fictional landscapes. He believes this requires more creativity and yields a more interesting product. He is also surprised that we are not seeing more expansion into sub-genres.
“There’s a place for thousands of different sub-genres and genres,” notes Antonov. “Imagine the times when you were in the ’40s and there were Westerns in Hollywood cinema: there were so many of them that none will be compared with another one, because there was a genre.”
He believes his new game, “Dishonored,” will help bring artistic integrity back to fictional video game worlds. The world in the game, Dunwall, is molded after London and Edinburgh in the mid-1800s to the 1930s.
“We have gone out of our way to defend the art part of the project, and set a very high standard — unusually high standard, in terms of precision and art production,” explains Antonov. “Part of this was not just doing the drawings, but talking and communicating with the publisher and the game designers and creative directors that that’s really necessary.”
Antonov believes Dunwall will excite players even more than Half-Life 2’s iconic “City 17.”
“We have a pretty good excitement about the project now, but we’ll know once someone has experienced the game, where art meets music meets gameplay meets rhythm — and that creates the thing that has no vocabulary, which is the game experience: these climactic, unforgettable moments that you get in three games in your life and you remember forever,” he says.
Half-Life 2 art director Viktor Antonov is disappointed in today’s video game landscape, suggesting that there are too many war games, sequels, and games that take place in New York.
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