Five days ago, in an unexpected terrorist attack, the entire shipment of liquid-soap for Europe was hijacked - hundreds of lorries diverted towards Paris and their contents spilled over French capital. The scenes were horrifying - millions of Frenchmen who hadn't washed in decades screaming as they were forcibly cleansed.

That Videogame Blog points out that concept artist Ben Mauro recently put up a nice collection of concept images for a "proposed sequel to BioShock."

Mauro told the site that these are just personal images he created for an art class he was taking. The assignment, he says, was to design a sequel for a video game or movie.

Too bad, because it's some pretty amazing stuff. I liked it so much I sent a link to Ken Levine to see what he thought. Haven't heard back yet.

It almost looks as if Mauro was thinking prequel when he did this art. Perhaps this shows the making of Rapture? Check out the link for images of his tram system.

Mid-Term Update... [Perpetual Motion, via That Videogame Blog]

Next comes the Disciples of Kaine, an evil class that combines the close-up, dagger style of the classic rogue with the dark rites of Kaine, stealing their foes essence and offering it to their god in exchange for power. Sort of a mage thief, from the information provided. Sounds absolutely splendid.

Then we have the High Elven land of Ellyrion.

The vast, rolling plains and mild climate of Ellyrion make this inner kingdom the perfect breeding ground for the finest Elven steeds in all of Ulthuan. Great herds of these amazingly swift and graceful creatures roam the grasslands throughout the year, and are prized among the noble lords of the Phoenix King's court for their magnificent quality and majestic beauty.

And a look at the various taverns serving as home bases across the lands in the game...

Realm versus realm keeps factor heavily into the gigantic, ongoing RVR combat that the game hopes will draw in PVP players in droves.

And finally a quick trio of renders from the next cinematic trailer, coming soon to video game website near you, doubtlessly joined by another several dozen bits of concept art.

There's even more out there! Do a Google search for Iron Man and you'll find thousands of pieces of Iron Man 'concept art.' Was this really necessary, Sega PR people? Just tell us that Iron Man will be fighting tanks and we'll fill in the rest in our heads. If you'd have sent this out as Iron Man Desktop Wallpaper I would have been much more forgiving.

On a related note, check out Superhero Hype! for a write-up of the preview trailer for the Iron Man movie shown at Comic Con yesterday. Much more exciting than crouching in front of tanks.

The Cult of Rapture has posted a small gallery of level sketches and concept art that eventually became the beautiful and tragic locales of BioShock. Ranging from pencil sketches to fully realized paintings, the six images are a great look for anyone interested in the artistic side of this "beyond your typical FPS" game.

BioShock Level Art Design [The Cult of Rapture

"We went to E3 with our most neutral environment, which was only meant to be neutral. We didn't have our lighting working right...the characters blended into the background, so we quickly learned our lesson on that and everything we've done is about making the characters come forward. " -Evan Hirsch, Art Director, FASA Studios

When I visited FASA a few months ago for an early look at Shadowrun, I talked for a long time to Art Director Evan Hirsch about E3—and more specifically the royal spanking that the game's graphics design had received at the event. He was clearly humbled by the situation—not just the negative response from fans—but from his own peers in the business.

At the time, Hirsch was retooling characters while testers played a game full of trolls running around in red and blue footie pajamas. Given my long infatuation with footie pajamas, I just had to see how this story turned out. So I set a date to talk more around the game's release. Hirsch and I, along with FASA Studio Head Mitch Gitelman, talked for nearly 45 minutes as I baked in a hot car under Texas sun (a necessity for a quiet interview on the road). Still, I enjoyed the conversation and Hirsch's blunt explanation of Shadowrun's art design.

In other words, yes, this article is long as hell. Yes, Hirsch said a lot of interesting stuff. Yes, there are lots of pretty pictures for those too lazy to read.

Characters In Differing Environments: Making them Shootable

"Our characters are effectively a studied signal to noise...The problem is, the more realistic you make [them], if you go with, say, Gears of War, the signal to noise is really hard. That works in a Gears space but it doesn't work in a wicked-fast, twitchy space," Hirsch explained. "We didn't want to make them cartoony, because we know how people thought about that... For me it was about finding that balance point - how do you make it very different and very visible?"

Easy: Profiles, Color Pallet and Lighting (I may have been given the answers.)

Racial profiling may be frowned upon in real life, but it's essential in Shadowrun. Knowing a troll from a dwarf is relatively simple to design, but what about knowing an RNA (corporate) troll from a Lineage (native) troll—just from their profiles? A solution was found through symmetry. The RNA is symmetrical, from the characters to their monolithic environments. Meanwhile, the Lineage assets are equally asymmetrical, breaking the corporate mold, so to speak.

Color Pallets are organized in a similar fashion, with cold tones (blues) denoting RNA and warm tones (reds) denoting Lineage.

"Why'd we go with blue [for RNA]? If we went with green then it's the military in the Tom Clancy games...Why don't we go with brown? Then it's Smokey and the Bandit and the forest service," Hirsch said. "But we had to explore all this, because we wanted them to look like mercenaries. Blue is really the only color that made them look like mercenaries without being the army."

Using lighting, Hirsch and his team solidified the color palletes of both the characters and the maps. Since these environments (in essence) match either red or blue color palletes, lighting clarifies any potential blending issues that may crop, and allow fine tweaking on the "moving target" factor. Note: I just made that term up and have no clue why I put it in quotes.

Ultimately, these decisions combine to a relatively unconscious gaming experience in which a player simply feels like their character does or does not belong on a certain map or alongside a certain team, adding a sense of story and identity to a game that technically has no story other than that in the manual.

Or as Gitelman put it, "whether or not anyone reads the story or not, they know that one's there."

Creating Drama on a Budget

"The biggest challenge of Shadowrun for me - as an art director - was I had 16 characters on screen that could, at any given time, each spawn three characters. Each one of our characters is carrying roughly 65 bones," said Hirsch. "That means I've got 3,072 collision detection calculations potentially in every frame...And I've got 30 bullets a second per character."

So disagreements can become petty slap fights easily.

"John (lead designer) and I had many screaming matches over whether or not I could have weeds in hallways," said Hirsch. "Because if I draw weeds, is that gonna cost him bullets and frames? Everything on that screen costs you something."

Hirsch also gave me the example of rails on stairways. He needed them to invoke a sense of speed, but those working on gameplay could use those resources for any number of other things. In very few cases designers had to compromise hugely to squeeze them in: like by omitting collision detection.

Another price of the online game environment was that the entire map had to be loaded into the 512MB of RAM at all times, since buffering simply isn't an option when you can teleport indoors to outdoors or up 5 stories of a building in a manner of seconds.

To make the game work, Hirsch had to "rob" the RNA level's development time to give the team a longer window to make the complex Lineage and slum levels possible. And by choosing International Style Architecture for the RNA, the art team was able to create a look that wouldn't require painstaking technical compromises at every turn.

"They're a simple form, but they actually, to your eye, don't look like simple extrusions like they normally would in a hallway shooter because these buildings have been around for hundreds of years, you understand that style of architecture...We just add texture and color and lighting to mess with your eye, but that was it."

And Hirsch is right: the ultra-sterile RNA maps are simple without making you feel cheated. The non-RNA levels, as we talked about before, fall back on the property of asymmetry to create identity and tension.

"One of the big goals for me and John was that in the slums maps, you always feel like you're being closed in on, you always feel like you're in a Alfred Hitchcock film."

"All the angles are odd angles, nothing is perfectly linear, everything is off. All The buildings if you look up are coming in over your head more than they're going away. And we do all that on purpose to make you feel more anxious and uncomfortable," Hirsch said. "In the corporate spaces they're much more ordered, and actually you have a different problem that in some cases they're so symmetrical that you get lost."

So What's Missing?
Every developer has things they wanted in a game but just couldn't make happen. Here are Evan Hirsch's top three:

More Effects/Shaders
"The look we came up for the magic like teleport, smoke and resurrect, all had this wonderful unique look. What I wish I could have done more was getting more of a tech look to work on the tech effects... we hired in a new guy who comes from the film industry and wrote his own shaders, and it wasn't until the last month of the project that he figured out how to work it within our engine. The shaders he wrote for something like the minion are just stunning. The minion's hot shit... I really wish we had gotten our head around it much earlier."

Female Elves
"The biggest compromise was the female elves. We had a whole set of female elves that we just loved, but...we agreed that to bring females in we'd need to have them move differently, and we just didn't have the time to get that done. We had the models built and the skeleton built and we just couldn't get it in on our date."

Various 3D Atmospherics
"The last one is, and this was a conscious decision, we had to cut a lot of the real 3D atmospherics that we had in. If you see in the intro video there's a waterfall. That waterfall was actually in the game. It was the waterfall or the minions - guess who won."

Too bad...that waterfall was "hot shit".

The image is of the Annacostia Naval Yard in DC, only slightly destroyed. I've always found there to be something chilling about recognizable landscapes rendered destroyed through art or cinema, ever since Charlton Heston found the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes. "You Maniacs! You blew it up!" Michael Fahey

Official Fallout Website [Bethesda Softworks]

I love armored priests. One of the main things I think EQ does better than WoW is allow their healers to wear plate mail instead of confining them to frilly dresses. Warhammer not only allows plate mail and skirts, Warrior Priests can dual wield hammers. Hell. Yeah. Michael Fahey

They go on to offer the following:

Having said this, we realize that our choice of anthropomorphic characters (ie humanoid animals) is likely to attract a fair number of furries. We're ok with that, and if there are enough furries, we'll consider creating a dedicated furry server. We will not, however, be ok with public sex, and won't be providing any sexual animations or content, furry or otherwise.

Cause you know all furries are hella into some hot public sex action. I guess Earth Eternal isn't the high-tech furry haven we all hoped for. Guess it's back to waiting for Furcadia to go next-gen. Michael Fahey

Earth Eternal Website

No new news from Lionhead yet about Fable 2, but they did just release these two new bits of concept art. Pipe-smoking FTW. Brian Crecente

Over at ConceptArt.org, one of their posters has published a huge amount of really amazing Guild Wars: Factions concept art. Some of it is really just Cthulhu cool. Of course, the actual game looks nothing like this, but there's scarce a picture in the bunch that wouldn't make a great wallpaper. Florian Eckhardt

Guild Wars Factions - Concept Art [Conceptart.org]

1up reports that art firm Massive Black is pursuing legal action against the head and a former employee of its Shanghai devision, James Xi Zhang and Jenny Chen, respectively.

A job at Massive Black is a student illustrator's wet dream; they handle art for high-profile games and movies, and their roster of character and environmental artists is second to none. I go to their forums and stare at the threads crammed with 16-year-old Corel Painter prodigies whenever I really want to feel like shit about my own drawing ability. The image at right is by Massive Black boss Jason Manley.

But enough about my trembling self-loathing, let's see what those crazy Massive Black peeps are up to:

Massive Black Inc. vs. James Xi Zhang is a civil complaint for injunction and damages. The complaint outlines 11 claims alleged against Zhang and his co-conspirator, Jenny Chen. The other named defendant in the case is "Studio Takeover" — a term the court instituted to indicate the studio Zhang and Chen planned to form from Massive Black Inc.'s clientele. The case also names Does 1-50, preparing for the inclusion of other conspirators, if the ongoing investigation yields more than just Zhang and Yiqiong behind the alleged plot. Among the claims: Fraud, Unlawful Access to Computer Network/Tresspass, Interference with Contract, Breach of Contract and Interference With Prospective Business Advantage.

To sum up, Zhang and Chen skimmed money via "expenses accounts", secretly accepted clients personally that had contacted the company itself, and hired their own artists to work on the sniped properties, using Massive Black's own studios and equipment. Now THAT is ninja'ing most foul. Eliza Gauger

Read the entire article here [1up]

Earlier today, Ashcraft mentioned how much he enjoyed looking at concept art, following a game from raw, feverish inspiration to a more polished finished product. I'm similar and I was delighted to find that I could recognize almost every area in Gareth's sketches. If you're a fond ex-Rickenbacker, check it out.FLORIAN ECKHARDT

System Shock 2 Concept Art [Gareth Hinds]

Over at the Concept Art Forums, there's a load of Gears of War and Unreal Tournament 2007 conceptual stuff up. Personally, I find this kind of stuff fascinating and ground-level look at what makes a game tick. Hit the jump for more images. Brian Ashcraft

More Here [Concept Art] Thanks, Dan!