3D urban model of London in Hellgate: London video game

A game released almost 6 months ago, which certainly has passed me by, and features an apocalyptic version of London in 3D is Hellgate: London, developed by Flagship Studios. While it failed to set the world on fire in sales it does offer the interesting alternative of being a Diablo/Counter Strike-clone ... only set in the UK capital, now invaded by demons various other ghoulish creatures (as you would!).

What is even more interesting is the approach the creators of the game used for the urban modelling workpackage. According to Flagship CEO Bill Roper when asked about modelling London, "it was a big challenge. One of the things we do is to have this concept of meta asset sets. There is one massive set that we create for a setting, and from that we make different thematic choices, allowing us to create different kinds of shapes. You might have really wide boulevards or winding back-alleys, and we can move between these and larger outdoor areas like parks. All of those have certain core assets that they would share and there are a lot of unique styles that get thrown into those. We can do lots of things to make them feel distinct and actually play differently from one another, particularly by using props."

"If you take one of the areas that have been procedurally generated, one of the things that will have been decided by the algorithm is whether this is to be, for example, a military stand-off point – so it puts in tanks and overturned vehicles and tattered tents and barricades. Or if it’s a mercenary response area, then we have ambulances and police vehicles. Or if this is more of an urban area, those props get pulled out, and you’ll see normal cars and London buses and things like that. So even thematically, what’s there can be different, and even the placement of those things is randomised as well."

"When quizzed about not opting to painstakingly recreate areas of London accurately, apart from Landmarks, he replies "from the outset we wanted to do something that was divergent from anything we’d done before. Obviously we’d done a high fantasy setting, and we’d done a gothic fantasy setting, both within completely created worlds. We wanted to do a near-future real-world basis for our next game. It would make the artistic challenges more exciting for us. We also really love London – it’s an international city; a lot of people around the world know it; it has great landmarks we could play with; it has a great mystic background. We could get a lot of cool gameplay above and below ground – that was important to us. We wanted somewhere players could recognise."

"One decision in game-design is where you are going to need players to stretch. For us we thought players were going to be stretching in terms of just understanding what the game was. It’s an action-RPG with FPS elements and it’s got this and that. It’s a lot like Diablo in many aspects and Counter-Strike in other ways – that was going to be something we’d have to spend a lot of time on – so a highly recognised city was something people could lay a foundation on. London wasn’t only a fun challenge, it provided a solid anchor point for people. We could go on and do other crazy stuff and they wouldn’t have too much to absorb all at once."