Bonus Content Disc/Environments: Citadel

The following are transcriptions of the artists' comments for the design gallery "The Environments of Mass Effect: Citadel" found on the bonus content disc of Mass Effect released in 2007.

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Derek Watts: So this is an early production painting for the Citadel. This is the Presidium, this is the main hub in the game. It had a lot of levels in it. A lot of action goes on in here, a lot of communication, people wandering around... This is our really utopian world. Very clean in style. This is what we wanted Mass Effect to really look like; a lot of arcs, clean panel lines, water... Nice vegetation around there. We just looked at influence of Japanese gardens, looked at a lot of Syd Mead stuff, looked at old NASA photos. If you go on the internet, you can find so many different versions of these ring worlds. So this is our main place of the Citadel, this is where you're going to spend a lot of time. Some of the characters were added by Matt Rhodes later on.

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Derek Watts: So, we did a few views of the interior. This is maybe an apartment. We had this large fish tank... Actually there was a joke running along the level where we had to get fish tanks and throughout the Citadel, it was going to be the big thing. We never ended up doing them but this is one of the ideas for those. The cool thing about this one is it looks like a guy is coming home from a hard day's work; he's kissing his wife off to the left and I'm sure he's looking around wondering "what the hell are all these people doing in my room?" So that's supposed to be his car in that little garage off to the left; he flies in, wanders around his apartment... And actually, if you look over to the right, there's two people talking by the window; there's a guy in a long cape, that's one of the concepts that Matt Rhodes ended up painting over for one of our aliens who's thinking about using that as the base. We ended up going with a different one, but that's where he got the idea from.

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Derek Watts: So the Citadel was supposed to have numerous areas. One of the areas was the Wards; this was more of a city area. It was away from the Presidium and the Council Chambers. This was actually out on those long blades that fold up. So, this would be the major city where the average folk kind of hang out. So this concept was actually a tiered look, that they would look out through the glass on the left out to the rest of the city; and those beams were actually supposed to be made from Prothean material. At this point in the game, Prothean material is just a very small part of it. There's just a few structures made out of it, and these beams were some of them. We ended up adding Prothean material everywhere later on in the game.

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Derek Watts: Another concept for the Wards. Pretty well not much to explain here. It's an open ceiling. You see off to the left, there's a car park there, and then those were going to be tunnels with the transportation system through there, maybe a quick way to get you around the level. This one really didn't work too much, it had more of a mall feeling instead of a future world.

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Derek Watts: This is the final concept for the Wards. This one is pretty well the way it looks in the game, we just modified some of the beams. There are the floating cars for transportation. There were supposed to be ones all parked along. Again this kind of tiered system with a lot of plants growing in there, to kind of soften up the look.

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Derek Watts: So after we kind of do a few of the early concepts, we start to work with the designers, the writers... Start to think about areas you actually have to explore in the area. So the Citadel had the Presidium which was the main hub. Quite a few rooms; we had bars, we had areas we had to talk to Council members, we had a lot of different areas to explore. So this is a quick map done up for at this point, areas we thought you would walk around in the game. So we would mark the doors off in red, the orange was the walkable area, blue being the water and then just some simple trees around. This kind of gives us an idea about the size we are looking at; if it is too big, how many bridges we have; if it is getting too large, how we can cut back in size.

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Derek Watts: This is just taking an existing painting of the Citadel and just turning it vertical and showing one of the arms from the ring area where Presidium is just to one of the support areas. That is probably where the Normandy was going to come into a hangar.

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Derek Watts: This area was done for the Marshal's training ground. This was done in SketchUp, so this is actually a model built in that program. Some of the stuff you can see we used; we used the stairs and we used that base board area around there, which were an interesting feature of this SketchUp model.

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Derek Watts: This is a concept done up for the hangar where the Normandy docks into the Citadel. The one thing about hangars is you spend a lot of time building them; it is a big area, you have a lot of detail you try to put in. But when you are actually playing around in the game, you get in these areas and you usually leave pretty fast; you fly in and you want to get to where you are supposed to be going. You want to get down to the Marshal's training grounds or up to the Wards. It is kind of a balancing act; how much time do you want to spend in here because the players aren't going to really look around that much in here. But we ended up really putting a lot of detail into this area and showcasing it in some of our videos.

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Derek Watts: This is another view of the hangar. The nice thing about this is it shows-- If you look in the bottom right, these are the little discs, arms that reach out and grab the ship, support it, suction-cup on there, so the ship has no landing gears at all; these come down, grab onto the ship and that is how it is held in place. So those were actually ended up turning into detail meshes later on. A level artist would send those off to a person, he would detail-mesh that all separately and then texture it with a separate texture.

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Derek Watts: This is a concept for a room that... actually, the only part that really remains is the basic room structure and the control area. When you go up to the Marshal's training ground, you will go up this flight of stairs and you will see this table with all these holograms on it that looks out over this empty room. One of the ideas was to have blocks in these rooms being able to move up and down and the designers can build walls, ramps and so on and stage all these combats in there for you to train up on. We ended up having to cut that because it was a bit ambitious for the amount of time we had left.

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Derek Watts: This is a concept painted over a bit of the block level. The level was actually partially built; we took it in, added some trees. So when you come into the Marshal's training ground, this is that foyer, that opening area with all the offices that go up another 10 or 15 stories.

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Derek Watts: This is the hangar. We are starting to block it in now in Max. This is an early area, probably spent just a couple of weeks-- actually not a couple of weeks, maybe just a couple of days on this. Block it out, take a look at the size... We have an early model of the Normandy off to the left. So we are starting to get a feel for, is it too big or is it too small, will stuff fit in and how much time will be involved to finish this up.

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Derek Watts: This is a block level done up of the Presidium. This is fairly far along, we figured out a lot of stuff. We figured out where you play/walk. Some of the views are starting to get blocked in, the bridges... We will understand where we will have to put detail meshes, where we will have to put time in to put textures. The designers will run around this area. Maybe some of the bridges are unnecessary or maybe we need some more here and there. This is a difficult world. We actually had a problem with-- we started at the early stage to build some of the rooms at a bit of an angle, but this was causing problems with cinematics. So we had to just tear them up and keep the floors flat. It was causing us a bit of a headache.

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Derek Watts: So this is a block level for the hangar, again. This has a bit more detail in here. You can see the arms that are holding on to the ship, we have a rough model put in. That will get the detail mesh done for that and the texture. But this is a basic idea for what we wanted to achieve. And then we just put a few Normandy's in there to make sure we had the size for all the ships in there.

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Derek Watts: This is the model of the Marshal training ground. So the level artist has started to block in some of the areas. We have the tube for the elevator shaft; he started to put some of the textures on. He has a little character down there to show size. So this is probably only about 10 or 15% done, there is still a long ways to go on this.

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Derek Watts: This is a rough model of the Council Chambers. This ended up going through quite a bit of change later on. We had this kind of really curved areas which we started to keep, but we had to modify it a bit, add some staircases and so on. And we ended up changing the color quite a bit in this too.

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Derek Watts: So one thing we did in Mass Effect that we found quite effective was we built these small little areas, put textures on them, lit them, and then used those almost for the concept for the areas. This is one that we did for the Presidium. Some of those are placeable models, a couch, just put a character in there, texture it up, put some vegetation in, and kind of light it to what we want the rest of the Presidium to look like. This helped us out a great deal in trying to tackle such a large area.

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Derek Watts: This is another one of those test areas for the Citadel. He has just got a character in there, got some of the wall textures, how the plants would look, how the shadowing of the trees on the ground would help break it up... These are just some of the things that we were looking for to help us out with the entire area.

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Derek Watts: This is a detail mesh for the door. It's just a test level too. So this is the door you'll see in the Citadel, it's a separate model. Doors were always a pain in games. It's endless amount of bugs for them for some reason. All the games I've worked on, doors have always been a hassle, and this was no different.

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Derek Watts: So, after we built the Normandy, the Normandy looked great. It was an amazing ship. It had a large texture, but even still, we had to build it so big to make it look like it could hold all the people that it-- all the crew that actually flew that. Then when we parked the ship on there and there was a ramp that went up right to the door, the texture just wouldn't hold up. So one thing we decided to do was almost build this structure that would actually lower down and attach to the ship, almost like a modern airport is now. When you fly up and you jet, these structures come out, hook up onto there--I think they're called gateways or something--so this is our version of it. It would keep you far enough away from the ship that you could still see it, but you couldn't get too close to see that the texture wasn't going to be able to hold up to some of the other buildings in the game.

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Derek Watts: This is the actual detail mesh for the structure that holds the ship. This has been textured up, the detail mesh is complete, and this is in the final game. When we went through the levels, we would figure out which ones of these were going to be detail meshes. So these are spread out through all the game. These are actually used throughout the hangars.

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Derek Watts: This is the Council Chambers; this is an early version of it. This is a large kind of football shaped room. This is a lower area. You could run down, have some lights... Kind of loosely based this on a building in Spain. This ended up getting modified quite a bit. This is quite different than what you actually see in the game.

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Derek Watts: This is one of the rooms in the Citadel. This is in the Presidium area. This is a good area for-- the level artist built this, textured it up, gets a good idea about the lighting and how he wants to maybe use some of these elements in different rooms. Since there's so many areas to kind of build, you kind of take some of the elements you like in certain rooms, and make new rooms out of them. Table and chairs are placeables; those are built by somebody else and then placed in there by the designer or the level artist. I think these ones here were placed in by the level artist.

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Derek Watts: So this is an early version of the Council Chambers. The modeling is pretty well final. The trees went through a bit of modification, but we actually changed the lighting in this quite a lot. We found out that this was getting quite washed out, so we ended up darkening it up quite a bit, putting a bit of rose color in the lighting and it ended up looking quite good.

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Derek Watts: Near the end of the game, you get to the outside of the ship. We talked about this a long time ago, when we were first coming up with ideas for the game; we wanted to walk on the outside of the tower and you would see all the city above you. I remember talking about it and hoping that we never actually had to achieve it because it was going to be really tough to do. I was just worried about it. But it actually turned out to be not as difficult as we thought and it turned out to look amazing. I mean, this is a great area. And this is actually... when you get down to the trench, there's the elevator on the left. The original plan was to have the elevator and then all the guests standing on the floor, which would actually look like they were sideways because you're walking up the side of the building. And when you come out, we had all the rubble coming down and the whole city view which looked amazing.

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Derek Watts: This is pretty well close to the final look for the Marshal's area. This is that tube where you take the elevator down. The windows we ended up modifying a bit and then just darkening it up a bit. That was pretty well the final look for that.

Trivia

• The Marshal's training ground having been remade into the C-Sec academy, the combat simulator idea was re-used for the game's second downloadable content, Pinnacle Station. In Mass Effect 3, a combat simulator on the Citadel would become available again: the Armax Arsenal Arena on Silversun Strip, as part of the Mass Effect 3: Citadel downloadable content.