The EDZ, by contrast, layers its countryside in Antonov-like fashion – not with alien machinery, but with flora. But it still felt a little bare – the Source engine at the time tending to look a bit cold and stiff whatever you did with it. The mark of the Combine wasn’t so apparent on the countryside. Outside the city, in Episode 2, that yoke was released. He layered its imperial architecture with industrial machinery – just as he did in Dishonored’s Dunwall, and the cancelled Battlecry – that suggested totalitarianism. Viktor Antonov, the celebrated Bulgarian game artist, designed City 17 to recall the “eastern frontier territory” of Ukraine and Russia. If the EDZ is an update of Episode 2, intentionally or not, there’s one place it improves on Valve’s vision. Imposing, curvy objects in the skybox are something of a Bungie speciality, I suppose. A gigantic, cracked Traveler shard does the same for the EDZ. And in the background, lightning arced continuously from the ruined Citadel up into the sky, lending an otherworldly edge to the boulder-strewn countryside. There were tunnels, too – mines, maybe – just like those in the EDZ. Out in the forest, the pines were so tall they dwarfed the Striders. “Ah yes,” you might have thought while picking one up with the Gravity Gun and chucking it at an Antlion. And once you left it, after the events of Episode 1, the cars looked like Trabants. City 17 was situated in Eastern Europe but they never said where. Ultimately, though, those clues don’t conjure a specific country for me so much as a specific game – Half-Life 2: Episode 2. Schnel? Amsel? Perhaps this is what German evolved into – Destiny 2 is set 700 years in the future, after all. Since then, I’ve tried to spell out the scuffed signs outside of what might once have been shops.

Devrim’s church, meanwhile, has a spiky, Cologne-style spire.Īlso: I’m pretty sure, down in the tunnels that span the length and breadth of the Dead Zone, I saw a sign in German.

Those austere, concrete tower blocks say Eastern Europe, yet the brick chimneys suggest mills from a long-abandoned 20th century industrial past – a little like that of my own northern England. I mean, it definitely is Europe: the landscape is dotted with jutting rocks and steep outcrops, but the tall pines and placid lakes belong to a temperate climate.

Half life 2 combine destiny