The sun breaks the horizon and spills over the surface of the planet. The earth is so peaceful, hopeful, awe inspiring. A satellite drifts into view and with it come the sounds of news broadcasts painting a different picture. A world where record breaking weather is the new normal. The satellite’s eye watches over the surface of the planet. We peer into it and enter The Network.

A mixture of 3D renders, digital matte painting and licensed NASA footage was comped together to create our opening planetary sequence.

The magnitude of this climate change is visible from space. It is something both beautiful and terrifying to behold. While the fires are burning Europe, storm surges drown other parts of the world.

The juxtaposition of network visualization of the fires with a more realistic image felt powerful. Using high resolution earth textures, real climate change predictions, 3D renders, Houdini sims, and some DMP wizardry, we created these lovely dark depictions of the devastation.

Over a billion people have lost their homes around the world. And with many countries closing their borders, massive camps of non-patriated people begin popping up everywhere. Among these refugees are highly skilled fighters with no country to answer to. These No-Pat fighters offer up their skills to the remaining superpowers as they inch closer and closer to conflict.

At this point in the story, we wanted to illustrate the sheer scale of displaced people. After viewing the riots and the collapse of states, we emerge from news footage back into the wider network. Using faces generated through AI, we created a population of No-Pats, growing in scale and size. We also depicted the flags of nations around the globe, eventually becoming destroyed and glitching to depict the extent of the failing nations.

The satellite drifts towards a massive hurricane just off the east coast of the United States. As it approaches the eye of the storm, the satellite begins to transform, opening its doors to reveal some type of delivery system. A malfunction causes a massive electronic blast to take out our view.

The earth in this sequence was fully 3D with the hurricane being a mixture of Houdini and DMP. More information about the satellite and its nature will most-likely come out in future content releases of the game.

Seventy percent of earth satellites are lost in the matter of minutes. There is a communication blackout and everyone is left guessing as to what has happened. Without eyes on eachother, the United States and Russia start making aggressive moves toward each other. We are on the precipice of a global war that will leave billions of refugees in the crossfire.

Glitching down to black, we return to the network, now offline, represented in the darkness. As the network attempts to come back online, we witness individual voxels flickering and coming back to life, in time with news audio illustrating the scale of the global catastrophe. Moving forward through the darkness ultimately unearths the conflict between the United States and Russia.

The American satellite at the center of the blackout is the smoking gun and it is scheduled to crash into Doha. If the Russians get their hands on it first, it will be everything they need to start the war. Irish and his crew of No-Pats are heading to Doha to recover the satellite before anyone else can.

As the satellite appears in the frame, the video moves to a hologram of a ship, ending with a wide shot of the four protagonists with the warm coloring mirroring the heightened sense of urgency in the plot. We wanted to continued the visual language we established with the voxels, overlaying glitch and interface elements onto their 3D figures.