Jeremy Cranford, Art Director

The Madhi have a special place in my heart. You see, I love playing large, powerful characters in games. I play Reinhardt in Overwatch, a Barbarian in Diablo, and I would play the Heavy in TF2. You can imagine how excited I was when our narrative lead Peter Orullian told me he wanted a massive, thick-skinned, 8ft tall, hulking character in the game.

We started the concept art exploring the shape, and silhouette of what this character would look like. We knew we wanted him to be massive, based on the home planet. We wanted him to have armor, but not too much since this species’ skin was supposed to be super-thick and super-tough. We also knew his main weapon was going to be an arm cannon. Besides that, everything was up in the air. This was the “blue sky” phase where you explore and discover all the possibilities. Here are a few of our early explorations:

Before we were finished with the character designs, Jon Bankard needed the art team to create a splash art image to help promote the game and visualize what would happen during an in-game battle. Here’s an early illustration we created of a Chaos Agents battle with the “work in progress” character designs. See if you can spot all of the races you now know in this image:

When it finally came time to finish the Madhi character design, we knew we wanted atypical body proportions. In particular, the short legs in the middle design were fun—something different and unique. He needed cool tech armor and massive arms. Peter also had some great ideas like making sure he didn’t have a nose and giving him two thumbs on each hand, since he was supposed to be an alien race that evolved on another planet. This is where we finally landed.

The last questions the team had were: “Did we go too far with his scale?”, “Did we make him too massive?” As if that’s possible in Chaos Agents. So, we set up a scene in our game engine and compared him to a Clausius. The answer was; “Nope, he’s not too big. He’s perfect!”.

I hope you enjoy playing the Madhi, and that you all love him as much as we do.