Concept Art Roundup: Iron Man 3, League of Legends, Darksiders II, and More

You’d better limber up because this roundup is going to be a bit of a stretch. First off, one of the artists I’ve got here doesn’t necessarily work on games nor is his work actually concept art. Secondly, another artist primarily works on 3D art pieces, so he’s not actually in the eponymous arena either. It kind of makes me want to rename this feature, but we’ve made it this far so let’s keep going! When we make mistakes, it’s a lot easier to ignore it and just plow ahead, right?

Or something like that.

Anyways, let’s start off with Josh Herman. He currently works as a character artist at Marvel. If you check out his IMDB page, you can see he’s done a lot of damage in Hollywood for such a young fellow. Herman here has worked on Iron Man 3, Total Recall, Real Steel, and a whole bunch of other Marvel movies, mostly as a digital sculptor. He’s also done art for Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception and pre-production work on the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy.

He also tweets in rather sporadic but rapid clumps and just started a blog about learning to draw.

Next up is Joshua Brian Smith, a bona fide concept artist at Riot Games. Riot, if you weren’t aware, develops the incredibly popular League of Legends game, the MOBA that people can’t stop playing. He graduated pretty much a year ago from the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and made the seven-mile drive up to Santa Monica soon after to work with Riot.

While his work there at the studio is impressive, some of his school stuff is also quite good, though also quite different. League of Legends has pretty much locked him in a fantasy world, but I would love to see him branch out. It’s very obvious he has a wide range of influences and passions that would benefit from his grand-scale vision and raw take on lighting scenes.

Tohan Kim works at Crytek’s Austin studio in Texas, though if you’re familiar with the fallout of the THQ bankruptcy, you’ll know that this used to be Vigil Games. Vigil was the studio behind the Darksiders series, a critically well-received but commercially disappointing franchise of games about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse dealing with said worldwide annihilation, and were in the process of making Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium.

Dark Millennium, however, is still under wraps seeing as how its future is mostly undecided after the THQ dismantling, but Kim’s Darksiders work is all the way out there, as are some Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning pieces. Jeez, I can’t believe how long Mythic Entertainment has been making MMOs.

Lastly we have some concept art from Herman Ng for Rift: Storm Legion. Storm Legion is an expansion from late last year for Rift, an MMO from Trion Worlds. If you’re wondering where else you may have heard that name, it’s probably from the inescapable advertising of the Defiance tie-in MMO also being developed by Trion.

Ng, though, has a bunch of cool art up from Storm Legion. He’s really good at giving his drawings a sense of life to where it looks like he actually captured these creatures and people in the middle of some action.

What Video Games Do

I wake up each day knowing that a certain portion of my time will go to just reading. Well, that may not be accurate. Consuming is more like it as sometimes it’s a video or a song or an infographic, but the point is that doing so is pretty much a guarantee. Each day, my Twitter feed will overflow with links and pictures and YouTube clips of things I never knew existed. My Facebook feed with become inundated with photos from the previous night’s outing and videos of an embarrassingly drunk karaoke night. It’s pretty easy to just glaze over with the incessant deluge of information and stimuli.

At this point, I usually only perk up when I see links from particular people or, more often, when I see the same link multiple times. As was the case yesterday, this Tumblr post made the rounds on multiple tweets and Facebook updates (yes, despite being over a month old in its original Tumblr form). It’s a series of GIFs that depict a bit from Irish stand-up comedian Dara Ó Briain‘s 2010 This is the Show DVD. Here’s the text if you’re clicking-averse (and here’s an extended clip from his Live at the Apollo set):

Video games do a thing that no other industry does. You cannot be bad at watching a movie. You cannot be bad at listening to an album. But you can be bad at playing a video game, and the video game will punish you and deny you access to the rest of the video game. No other art form does this! You’ve never been reading a book and three chapters in the book has gone, “what are the major themes of the book so far?” And you’ve gone, “well…I don’t know…,” and boom. “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” You’ve never been listening to an album and after four songs, the album has gone, “dance! Dance! Show me your dancing is good enough to merit this!” And you go, “is this good enough?” And the album goes, “no,” and stops.

Perhaps a bit overly dramatic, but he certainly gets the point across. Video games is one of the few (perhaps the only) art form where you can actually be bad at it and be commensurately punished for it. Regardless of your ability to critically analyze a song or dissect the scenes of a film, you can experience the product in its entirety on your first go-round. Even art in the form of paintings and statues and whatnot can be seen without lapse even if you have zero knowledge of abstract or modern styles. You may not be able to appreciate any of these things on a deeper level and wring meaning from where there may be none, but being a shoddy art critic never stops you from looking at the whole of the Mona Lisa.

Playing a video game, however, is a wholly gated experience. Each nugget of pleasure and pain must be forcibly mined with your own hands. Even exploratory titles which push the boundaries of the definition of “interactive” (such as Dear Esther and Datura) are dependent on your ability to navigate an open environment. Stumble on that block and you might as well not even play.

And that is necessarily true. Anything less in the realm of player-game response and you no longer have a video game; you have an animated movie. Video games are an interactive art form, and failing to interact with it is a failing as a player. This doesn’t make you bad at video games because you can’t complete it but instead makes you bad at it because you can’t do the one thing intrinsic to the art form. Watching a movie requires you to watch and listening to a song requires you to listen, so it’s not much of a stretch to say playing a game requires you to actually play.

Which, I guess, invites the question: do you need to play the entire game to appreciate it? Or, perhaps, what parts of a game are appreciable?

A game is made up of many different elements and is perhaps most similar to movies in this regard. A song is a song and a painting is a painting, but films—just like games—are comprised of songs and art and actors. Games, however, go beyond that and include gameplay mechanics, implements of computer science and artificial intelligence, and so much more. Each piece can be praised and derided separately (this is a good song, this voice actor is terrible, etc.), but only their gestalt can be the final product. The sum total is paramount.

It’s an interesting thought, to be sure, because then not only is tangible progress within the game restricted but also appreciation outside of the game. Your failing as a player extends to your failing as someone who can apply critical thought to the product and the art form as a whole. So video games are not just unique in that you can be bad at playing them but also bad at appraising their overall worth. Whether you understand a Terrence Malick film or can see past the swirling colors of a Pablo Picasso, your evaluation of either are comprehensive in your current state. Given guidance or some choice literature on the topics, you can expand your understanding, but that adds to your worth as a film and art critic.

There is no such shortcut in video games. You cannot intuit the overall value of a game from reading about it or from watching it. The interactivity—the literal motion of you pressing a button or moving a joystick—is integral to your understanding of it. It’s how the choices you are forced to make and actions you have to take in The Walking Dead shape up the story, predetermined or otherwise, in your hands that personalizes your experience. It’s how having the tangible execution of story beats in Spec Ops: The Line makes the hard turns in the late story hit all that much harder in the end.

It’s what makes games so difficult to penetrate, but also makes it so worthwhile.

Revisitation Hours: Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

Tomorrow, it will have been two years since Enslaved: Odyssey to the West was first put out on store shelves. Just two short years and yet it feels like ages ago. 2010 was littered with AAA sequels like Fallout: New Vegas, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, and Rock Band 3 bumbling about the freshly Kinect-laden November, but standout new IPs were easy to come by in the AA and indie arenas. You could find gems like Vanquish and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and Darksiders among the Call of Duty: Black Opses and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnames.

October was also overloaded with a Diablo III-heavy BlizzCon and shortly followed in February by the Japanese release of the Nintendo 3DS (North America saw the new handheld in March). And then throughout 2011, we saw even more landmark originals like Magicka, Bulletstorm, DC Universe Online, L.A. Noire, and so on and so forth—and all of those were by the end of June! The 2011 holidays were even more packed than before (one word: Skyrim), and then we still have to go through 2012.

What I’m saying is that a lot has happened since Enslaved first came out. So much, in fact, that I felt it necessary to revisit the underappreciated Ninja Theory title to prepare for the two year anniversary. I recall genuinely loving the game the first time I played it. The question is: does it hold up?

Right off the bat, from the moment the game starts, I’m reminded of why I was drawn to it in the first place: the visuals. Just stellar art all around. The post-apocalyptic urban jungle takeover look has been done so many times (see: Crysis 2) but never has it felt so…right. The buildings feel empty but everything around it feels alive, a key aspect missing from most other titles utilizing this milieu. Human constructs have decayed in a believable way, but it’s perhaps most disturbing how it feels like the most monolithic and impersonal bits have held up the best.

This gives way, though, to allow the cleansing, inspiring, soothing greens and reds to creep up and overtake the industrial slabs. I can feel the painful, wistful longing from the artist for a place that never existed, that place where he’d escape to whenever he got bored in class or couldn’t stand looking at the overcast, rainy skies any longer. It’s that conflation of those idyllic meadows he yearned for and the oppressive urban framework he was escaping.

You can even see it in his concept art. Ninja Theory’s visual art director Alessandro Taini has a blog where he puts up most of his art from their projects, so you can see old stuff from Heavenly Sword and Enslaved but also catch a few glimpses of the upcoming Devil May Cry reboot. Though completely different mediums and of wholly incomparable fidelities, both the in-game art and this original concept art are evocative in similar ways.

I’ve already told you I’m all but dead inside, but the way Enslaved‘s art can make me feel like I’m being wrapped up in the infinite future’s lush, vibrant embrace in the face of a cold and uncaring reality is still unbelievable to me. There are some spanning vistas in the game as well as in Taini’s art that can quite literally give me goosebumps as something deep and untapped within me bubbles up with vague sensations of immense possibilities. There are glowing wisps all around me and I’m trying to reach out and grab them all, but they pass through my fingers as if they were just air.

I know there’s something, though, something worth searching for, and Enslaved can make me feel like I’ve found it.

The actual gameplay, if I recall, was fairly divisive. Some people thought it was bland, others serviceable, but I found it quite fun if simplistic. Combat was basic crowd management of groups never greater than three or four active opponents; stealth was a light mix of pattern recognition and risk mitigation; and traversal was straightforward point-and-jump. Nothing special but also accomplished with aplomb. Enslaved never second-guessed itself in how it played, refreshing given how often it feels like some games are unsure of how to handle themselves.

It’s all ancillary, though, to the story of the game. An early concession made is that since Trip isn’t as climbing-capable as Monkey and he can’t leave her unprotected for too long, he carries her on his back for a good portion of the game. It’s a bit similar to how you hold hands with Yorda in Ico, but also totally different. In Ico, it’s more of an active process of guiding Yorda around and it’s your responsibility to lead her around as you explore her world. It’s not that you have to protect her; it’s that you want to.

In Enslaved, flip that around and you’ve got the right idea. At least, that’s how it starts. You don’t want to protect her but you definitely have to. Her life is your life. Keeping her alive means you are keeping yourself alive, so what better way to guarantee that than to just keep her with you at all times? I mean, if she’s on your back and you fall off a building, so what? You’re both dead. If she dies on her own, though, god dammit that’s her fault.

But around the midway point, things…change. The situation turns from a not-want-but-need to a want-and-need. Trip is no longer my warden but instead the other half of my being. She becomes indispensable in simply moving around the world. She does everything Monkey cannot. She can hack doors, create decoys, explore narrow openings, and warn me of landmines and enemies. Trip is not my captor but my partner. The fact is that even if she were to die and Monkey was not wearing that enslaving headband, he might as well be dead. He simply cannot accomplish the same things as when Trip is by his side. She has become a physical necessity to him, and by extension, to me.

With the art clawing away at something deep in my brain—a wall cordoning off all those fantastical, imprecise flights of fancy—and a relationship as powerful as I’ve ever seen in a video game, it’s hard not to admit that maybe I do have a few soft spots left in me. I mean, if Enslaved can break down my impenetrable fortress of stone cold manliness, just imagine what it will do to the rest of you emotional rubes (just kidding, I love you all very much). Take the ending as you will—I found it interesting—but Enslaved is an odyssey always worth taking.

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Hopefully you’ve played Enslaved: Odyssey to the West by now. If you haven’t, then what’s wrong with you?! Probably nothing too severe, I hope, but you really should play it. Has this convinced you or do you now think I’m just a pretentious jerkwad? And if you have played it, do you agree or do you also think I’m a pretentious jerkwad? By all means, have at me!