IcarusWhat better way is there to start an action packed act release than with an action packed intro cutscene? One that jumps across from Jupiter to Saturn to Neptune and back again until we (in a more than usual literal sense) graze the Sun. But hold on there, Icarus wasn't always jumping across planets and certainly wasn't completely envisioned this way.
The cutscene (at this time untitled) was originally thought of as a pure battle between Steele and Calder. There was, of course, mention that Calder would be running interference on Steele during Delenda Est, so this would expand on that. Calder hears the Wargods have failed, so he needs to retreat. Sounds simple enough, its one big Battle of Endor, right? Well, the first attempt was... really boring. Everything was set up a little too traditionally at the start. Both sides were fighting in a formation and it might have been neat for an actual mission, but there was very little WOW factor. This needed to change.
A Musical RoadmapIcarus changed it. The music was perfect, meant as a trailer piece for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and like trailer music should be, it crams a lot of action into every note. So there was now a roadmap to build an action packed intro cutscene. Just listening to it you could begin to make out how to divide up the cutscene. It starts off slow, with some establishing and building action. A sudden hit and the music gets faster and louder. Another hit and we're knee-deep in an electronic symphony. As the music goes on, there's some smaller hits. Vocals come in, everything in the background becomes a little bit quieter, but slowly builds up again. Then near the end we have some more sarrowful music before we begin to hit the ending. The trick was to use all of these interesting points, the hits, and the changes in tone or instruments to find good scene transition points and to make sure they are evenly spaced out.
There's a lot that could be said about all the scenes, but I'm just going to talk about a few of them.
So in the first 45 seconds, we've got some nice rising action going on. Things start quiet and get louder. This gets translated visually by starting off in deep space and slowly revealling our battle scape to the viewer. At this point the battle was solely Calder vs Steele, so the combatants were the UEFr Vikrant and UEFr Toreador (both Narayanas) duking it on to the GTCv Juarez (Deimos) and the Seneca (Diomedes). Because its a cutscene and the viewer can't see things like health, we are free to give the ships very high AI levels to maximize fire rates and to make them invulnerable so we can have a nice fire show and have no one get hurt (There might have been some off screen, of course). So the first camera angle was pointed straight 'down' and the camera would pan over the Toreador, filling the entire shot and continue to pan showing its combat with the GTVA corvettes.
Scale in space is hard because there's no ground and no giant shadows. What works best to show scale is to try to fill the frame with a ship, or at least to have part of the ship cut off by the frame's edge. And what also helps is having other smaller ships so you can see just how big these spaceships are! So a little Kent racing across the Toreador's side gives a good sense of just how large these spaceships are (fun fact, a Kent can fit in a Nara's large railgun barrels).
Another problem is having a sense of movement in space. This can be really hard because a static scene is a boring one. Nothing grabs the eye's attention or guides it anywhere. In the 5 or so seconds at the very start, the camera is moving towards the Toreador, but the ship isn't visible yet (unless you've got motion debris on, but I don't, so you don't matter). So its a plain scene then suddenly BAM, Narayana. An easy trick was to give the camera some very slow rotational motion. Not so much to put everything out of shot, just enough to make the stars move and give the sense of movement.
From Jupiter to NeptuneThe cutscene was moving along well enough. It was, at the time, "finished".
You can view this version here. You can see there's some dialog from Calder that was cut because while it did help set the stage so the player knows when this is supposed to take place, it also seemed to detract from the visuals that could speak for themselves. But then we found an "extended" version of the Icarus trailer music. This would later be the track that went on the official Human Revolution soundtrack. It was about a minute longer, and the cutscene was basically done but... What could we do with the extra time? Maybe... maybe show everything. The battle at Saturn, Calder's scuffle with Steele, the Eris feinting at Neptune... The dialogue could be cut, because we can see exactly when everything is taking place. Why, that's crazy. But crazy is our mantra. To make everything flow better, we would need to intercut scenes from other battles into the one already made. But that let us cut out weaker scenes from Jupiter and replace them with more exciting stuff from Saturn or Neptune. Alas we didn't end up using the extended edition anyway, there were enough scenes just to fill in the original trailer's length.
If you compare to two, you can see some scenes just got moved from one battle to another (like the beginning got moved to Saturn, the Marcus Glaive got moved to Neptune) and others just got replaced entirely (nearly all fighter-centric scenes were cut and for good reason. Fighters under their own AI SUCK in cutscenes.) It also gave everything a sense of simultaneous action throughout the Sol theatre that you often hear about, but can't really see. It also gave the mission some real complicated methods to keep everything on track.
Before...
After...
You can see by these pictures that we needed a LOT of ships. To try to keep things running semi-smoothly, we would only keep in game the ships that are in the cutscene. So those ships in the first scene, depart when we get to the second. And the ships in the second scene are cued to arrive one second before we're moving the camera down there. This loading and the game going "hey this is the first time I've seen this ship, I better pause for a tenth of a second" would still cause problems that would throw the carefully done music syncing out the window. So a lot of these ships are just duplicates, sometimes still occupying close to the same space from the last scene it was in to keep some continuity. But that was pretty much abandoned that near the end, the Eris and Serkr corvettes are in very different positions between their two scenes.
Wargods Delenda Est... AgainSo the cutscene had to have parts of Delenda Est recreated. A lot of effort was spent into making sure that everything was exactly from the mission as possible. The Carthage's angle, the position of its escorts (according to their final waypoints), the far distance the Imperieuse arrives from. But some scenes needed a very quick cuts from one point in time to another, and going back to the same point would show the still fresh debris from a ship that was supposed to be destroyed minutes ago. So we just keep moving the scenes around to make sure nothing's in view. (Well, almost, there is a single Saturn scene where you can see the next scene's Imperiuse and doomed Wargods arrive in the distance before the shot is over).
The GTD Impy is now canon, as are its 2 sisters
But of course that all goes out the window with the Carthage just completely removed from some of the final Imperiuse-kills-Karunas scenes. This was mostly done to keep all the viewer's attention to the beams and stuff.
Also fun fact, only a handful of capital ships are actually moving in the cutscene. The warping GTVA ships is pretty much 90% of distance travelled by capital ships! A Toutatis and a Katana have some waypoint orders, but I suspect I could remove them and nothing would change.
