Designing Oppression in the Skies of Half-Life 2

From The Children of Men and The Pianist to Let The Right One In and No Country For Old Men, gray skies have long served cinema when it has aimed to evoke melancholy. Whenever a director has wanted to foreshadow an impending storm or ‒ at the very least  avoid the cheerfulness of a blue sunny day ‒ gray skies have been used to set the mood. The desaturated colors of a sunless day make scenes feel subdued and colder, while the diffused lighting softens shadows to create a muted, even eerie atmosphere ‒ simultaneously conveying a sense of realism and isolation. 

When the late art director Viktor Antonov decided to showcase Half-Life 2's City 17 under the light of a barely visible sun, it could have merely been a case of video games borrowing the visual language of cinema. Antonov, however, was never one to simply lift obvious recipes to construct places ‒ let alone when it came to the masterpiece he was instrumental in shaping. Overcast cinematography must have been an inspiration, yes, but the game certainly looked further than that. 

Antonov perceived cities as characters, and characters come with distinct physiognomies sculpted by obvious and non-obvious elements, the combination of which can make them memorable. Less exotic than his work on urban settings such as Dishonored’s Dunwall, City 17 would be a place of strong sci-fi undertones meant to feel different yet real, and its skies were envisioned as narrative and atmospheric pillars of worldbuilding, there to simultaneously immerse and reinforce themes.

The skybox itself was never a Half-Life 2 innovation. Ever since the 1990s and Doom it had been an important storytelling and artistic tool, crucial in implying worlds much larger than the ones actually rendered. At its simplest, a skybox is a textured cube  ‒ or sphere ‒ simulating the sky or other distant backgrounds surrounding the playspace. It provides the game with a horizon that moves along with the player, and serves as a surface on which far-off scenery is projected.