“With Deus Ex 3 we had to take some difficult aesthetic choices,” he began, “and it was really hard to get it to where it is today.”
Opening by making it clear that working on a new Deus Ex title was a labour of love for him and the team, he reminded the audience that when the project began the Eidos Montreal studio was brand new, with only six staff members.
“There was no team, no engine, no tech, no art bank... and one hell of a game to create,” he laughed. As a result, the team returned to the original Deus Ex (every member on the team has played it from start to finish, he claimed) to try and draw inspiration from its art direction.
“We came to the conclusion that the game itself doesn’t really have an individual art direction,” Jacques-Belletête admitted. “It just sort of borrowed from cyberpunk archetypes.”
The team drew from these archetypes, concentrating on the “core themes” of Deus Ex such as transhumanism, but Jacques-Belletête stated that what was “most important” was the team finding its own “visual voice".
“You can’t create art if you’re just recreating what’s been done before; ‘don’t expect anything from an echo’. There’s a lot of ‘bigger, shinier’ in the industry, but we felt we wouldn’t be truly respecting the license without giving it its own style.”
For Deus Ex 3, the team set 'design distinction' as one of their main values, joined in partnership with “illustration over simulation”.
“We didn’t want to create a representation of reality,” Jacques-Belletête said. “We wanted to make the game look more even, more credible; too often in games there are highly detailed characters standing in front of low-poly backgrounds, and it’s like they don’t exist in the same world; we said, let’s try and illustrate a world in symmetry, make it consistent.”
Deus Ex 3 is to feature “two main metaphors,” he continued, the Icarus myth, and the Renaissance. These two metaphors gave rise to a concept of “cyber-renaissance,” one that caused huge problems when trying to create a consistent visual design.
“Working with a visual analogy you have to infuse it into everything—the character design, environmental design, the presentation. But when mixing eclectic variables like cyberpunk and the Renaissance you work against established talent and visual canons,” said Jaques-Belletête, “and we didn’t know what the final result should be.”
Working with artists including Jim Murray (a 2000 AD veteran who has worked on Slaine and Judge Dredd) Jaques-Belletête found that when it came to character design, key Renaissance-themed design elements such as balloon sleeves, ruff collars and embroidery were “too allegoric to work”.
“Eventually we had to re-establish and clarify what we were trying to create with these costume designs,” he said, emphasising that they found costume designs for workable characters must look “credible, almost wearable today,” while maintaining a cyberpunk aesthetic without becoming too clichéd.
“I don’t think we look at real fashion design enough,” said Jaques-Belletête. “When I started to look at current fashions, I realized we tend to think of design in terms of character design, and rarely think of fashion as a separate thing. I would literally hire a fashion designer now if we had enough money, and ask them to create foundations that our concept artists can work with.”
Based on this realization, Jaques-Belletête began to “tone down” the Renaissance influences to make more contemporary fashions, stopping going “so puffy” on character’s arms and legs, but keeping subtle ruffs and adding geometric patterns rather than ornate, dated embroidery.
However, Adam Jensen, the hero of Deus Ex 3, remained a problem. “We wanted a strong cyberpunk feeling, yet a Renaissance aesthetic for Adam,” said Jaques-Belletête, “we had to be able to properly see his augmented arms—if you attack enemies in hand-to-hand the game switches to third-person—yet we wanted him to look like he could go behind enemy lines and also go out for dinner at the Ritz-Carlton in the same time.”
“One outfit didn’t work,” he continued. “No matter how we did it, the sleeveless look made Adam look like a douche.”
In order to fix this problem, the team agreed to create two outfits for Adam—a classic look, with a renaissance-inspired trench coat (featuring geometric patterns and a high collar) with a more action-orientated look sans sleeves.
The team also came up against issues when designing environments. “We originally tried to infuse almost every architectural feature with a Renaissance feeling,” said Jaques-Belletête. “Big mistake; we ended up with baroque crates!”
The team scaled back on their environment ambitions, instead working on the more cyberpunk-themed concept of contemporary buildings still existing, but with new technology “creeping over everything” - contrasting new, northern European-inspired architecture with aged American architecture.
Concluding, Jaques-Belletête said “it was all about finding a visual constant—creating an handful of original ‘visual filters’ through which all aesthetic aspects of the game must go. This, hopefully, will help the player get into the game’s pseudo-reality—and if at the end the 'cyber-renaissance' hasn’t worked, at least Deus Ex 3 will have its own voice and not be a mere echo.”