Few studios wear their world-building as confidently as Spiders. With GreedFall: The Dying World, the team revisits its 17th-century-inflected fantasy universe set out in the original 2019 game, but flips the lens. This prequel to GreedFall doesn’t chart a voyage of colonial discovery, but is instead focused on rupture, exile and seeing a familiar world from the wrong side of history.
That shift runs through the art direction. Under Creative Director Jehanne Rousseau, the brief distilled down to three words: travel, ancient and baroque, with just enough restraint to stop it tipping into excess. The result is a series of regions that feel lived-in and politically strained, whether it’s a salt-stung port city, a homeland washed in autumn reds, or a capital quietly rotting under the first shadows of plague.
Creative Bloq: Which piece of concept art or environment did you love that ultimately didn’t make it into the game, and why?
Jehanne Rousseau: One of the regions we initially iterated on a bit is the Deutan Empire, with its lands and villages, its creatures, and all the storytelling that went with it. It’s a faction inspired by German Bavaria, and in the game, a region plagued by territorial conflicts and, above all, a civil war. It was intended to bring an even more chivalrous touch to the game, with its environments and characters.
Unfortunately, we were not able to integrate this work into the game, but we think that players would have really enjoyed it.
CB: How did you decide on the game’s visual style?
JR: The main keywords that guided the art direction of GreedFall: The Dying World are travel, ancient, and a touch of baroque.
In the first installment, we embodied a protagonist who had lived on the Old Continent, Gacane, in the city of Sérène, and who left their home to go to the lands of the island of Teer Fradee.
In this new installment, we embody a native of the island of Teer Fradee who is torn from their land and finds themselves on the Old Continent.
This reverse change of scenery is what we kept in mind to convey this feeling of displacement and discovery. Each region must evoke this sense of discovery and travel through the different factions that we get to meet – each having its own culture, architecture, biome, outfits, characters, and bestiary.
CB: Can you talk about how colour and lighting were used to define mood and atmosphere in different locations?
JR: The in-game lighting is strongly linked to the vision of the art direction. Before applying lighting to the different areas of the game, concepts are created to validate the intended atmosphere and the overall feeling we want the player to experience.
Each biome, each location, has its own specificity and unique ambiance.
- For example, for the island of Teer Fradee, the player's starting point in the game, we find autumnal tones with red. The idea was to give a slight feeling of nostalgia, an impression of returning home, a moment of contemplating nature. Yellow and red hues, with heavy blue clouds, were heavily used to establish the desired atmosphere.
- For the biome of Olima, the keyword was "warmth." We wanted the player to be bathed in a warm atmosphere, a sensation of "it feels hot." Consequently, the color grading ranged from ocher to red, including violet for the sunsets.
- For Uxantis, the city of the Nautes, renowned for being excellent navigators, the ocean is their domain. It was therefore necessary to succeed in transcribing all of this through the hues and the overall atmosphere of the area.
To render the wet aspect of the biome, it was necessary to combine the work of lighting with the environment artists to ensure that the shaders used were well-configured, particularly to adjust the roughness according to the impact of the light, etc.
In terms of pure lighting, as Uxantis is a coastal island surrounded by the ocean, we went with bluish, green tones with a lot of contrast. The idea was to reinforce the "humidity in the air" aspect, so that the player could almost taste the salt through the image while exploring the corners of Uxantis. - For Peren, the city is similar to Serene, which we see in the first GreedFall, and therefore had to resonate with the players. In the context of the second opus, we are at the beginning of the Malichor plague; the city is getting worse and is full of pollution.
The goal was to make all of this subtle, so that the decaying elements were almost hidden, forcing the player to notice certain elements that shouldn't be there.
This was achieved through more shimmering, warm, and vivid colors (orange, yellow, green, and blue with heavy skies) – a colour grading that pushes towards contrasts to try to hide a slowly spreading evil. Here, the FX and volumetric fog zones greatly helped to establish a more or less dense pollution depending on the affected districts.
CB: Were there any visual “accidents” or happy mistakes in production that became part of the final design?
JR: One of the game's systems that created the most surprises was the in-game day/night cycle.
It was a heavy and complex system to implement. We had to ensure that every part of the game's levels and the map was well-lit and integrated, both outdoors and indoors, such as in buildings, caves, and dungeons.
The way the lighting and atmospheric effects react depending on whether it's broad daylight or nightfall was a pleasant surprise for us.
We hadn't specifically planned for certain renderings like the sunsets or the shadows, but implementing this system brought some beautiful visual surprises to life.
CB: Did technical limitations shape your art decisions, and if so, how did you turn constraints into creative solutions?
JR: Every game production involves constraints, and it's by working with them that we manage to create something interesting – because you have to know how to work around limitations and adapt to find creative solutions, all while making sure it isn't noticeable in terms of the player experience.
CB: How do environments and props help tell the story without words, what’s your approach to environmental storytelling?
JR: Every location in the game holds a past, a story. This story is told through environmental composition — which includes an area's topology, as well as the objects, elements, and lighting within it—to reinforce the living aspect of the environment.
These environments are conceived as scenes from life. For example, in urban areas where inhabitants live and use objects and furniture, the questions that come to mind to construct them and bring them to life are, "What is this place for? What happened here? How do people live here?" If a place is marked by a past conflict, we might see traces of battle, overturned objects, etc.
All these elements allow the story to be told without having to explicitly narrate or explain it. With a single glance, the player can understand where they are and what has happened. It’s a coherent and natural way to tell a story.
CB: Can you walk us through a piece of concept art from initial sketch to in-game Implementation?
JR: There are several steps that lead to the creation of a piece of concept art. First of all, the work has to be tied to the game's script and lore. Depending on the task (environment, equipment, bestiary, character, props, etc.), we work with the team in charge of that specific element.
At this stage, a first draft of roughs/sketches is created, which is used as a basis for discussion with the concept artists and the art direction.
Once the rough sketch is approved by all the teams, we move on to the final rendering — in color, if possible — with as much information as possible. This is to facilitate the transfer of information to the 3D artists who will base their work on these concepts.
CB: How do you handle contradictions in style, say, when a fantastical element clashes with your realistic textures or architecture?
JR: Spiders' style is to play with semi-realistic elements that are tinged with fantasy. For example, our architecture and our outfits seem historically coherent due to their real-world inspiration, but they are revisited, reworked, and reimagined in a way that transports the player to a fantasy world, inviting them to use their imagination.
Our goal is not to reproduce historical accuracy but to draw inspiration from reality to create our world. This allows us to create a uniqueness specific to our games and universes, which makes it a special touch - our DNA.
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