XCOM: Enemy Unknown Concept Art and Art Design Q&A
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GamesRadar: The game looks super slick what inspired the heavy, armored look of the soldiers?
Greg Foertsch: Thanks! We took our inspiration from modern military armor for the basic armor kits your soldiers start out wearing. With the Carapace Armor and Skeleton Suit, they're based on your early studies of alien tech, but we intentionally made them angular and geometric, in contrast to the repeated organic curves of the alien equipment and armor (actually, the Muton armor provided a lot of direction for the alien look.) The most advanced armor in the game uses a lot of the aliens' own tech, and that shares that organic look of the rest of the alien armor, so you know at a glance that your soldiers have gone past human technology and are now becoming like the aliens.
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GR: The actual XCOM lab has a neat cross-section design, what inspired this look? Were there any other iterations?
GF: We iterated a lot on the design of the base. Early on, it was kind of an isometric view, a bit like the combat angles you see, but it didn't feel right and there were gameplay and visibility problems with it, and nobody was entirely happy with it. Then my lead technical artist, Dave Black, mocked up the current side-on view and showed it at a meeting, and Jake Solomon, the lead designer, and the rest of the team all went (Yes! Perfect!) And it really was. It solved so many problems from a technical and artistic standpoint.
As for Dave Black's inspirations, he said that as a kid he used to love books of cross-sections and cutaways.
