Oni2:Slaves of War/Settings
This is a list consisting mostly of possible settings for Oni 2 or even Oni 3. Some of these items are not settings at all, but rather sculptures or installations of some function or another, which could serve as inspiration. Some day this can get turned into a gallery of images and video to properly illustrate what I have in mind.
Commonplace
Shoot-out in a greenhouse (juxtaposes beauty with danger)
Parking garage, done right (see CLT)
Anywhere open, like the western U.S. states, where you can see the sun set all the way down to the ground
Abandoned outdoor area/parking lot at night with dry blowing leaves
Night-time level with Daodan-powered night vision
Train tunnel
Cf. local wire cooling tower in fog under bright sun (need a pic)
Open-pit mine
A boat in the ocean; perhaps the Dockwise Vanguard?
Field with an inch of snow on the ground and tall grass poking through, with ground fog from the snow
Courtyard of building at night, with well-lit exterior
Expensive hotel (e.g. the Peninsula Hong Kong)
Artsy dance club (e.g. the Sketch London, actually more of an art gallery/bar/restaurant complex)
A narrow street in an old town (camera would be pulled in and constrained)
A mostly cloudy day, and when the clouds get thin over the sun, the sun shines hazily through the clouds as a sort of golden glow, and the clouds move quickly across the sky
A bunker
A suspension bridge (see Aveyron, France)
Any area laid out below you, wreathed in fog (see Golden Gate bridge, or Dubai fog pic used as Windows 10 backdrop, or jungle mountainside) which you are going to descend into
A cloud forest
Subway construction, e.g. the new NYC projects (East Side Access, No. 7 extension, new Second Avenue)
A forest that you are lost in until you stumble across someone’s backyard, with a banal house in front of you
Something abandoned (see Abandoned mine, r/AbandonedPorn)
Approaching a nuclear power plant in distress, with klaxons going off in the distance…
A dark area where you know an enemy force might be lying in wait, ready to open fire on you from multiple directions; you could take cover but you don’t know when and from where they will fire, and you have to move in that direction
A hotel with a fight on the roof and a pool that you can jump into
The top of a city
For great contemporary Japanese city references, see cat2525jp's YouTube channel
Oni-specific
Abandoned Daodan lab
Navarre’s current lab
Iron Demon factory
The Wilderness (break down into types)
Outdoors under an enormous, expanding mushroom that is filling the sky as it prepares to burst
Mai rides an elevator that runs up the side of a building by holding onto the car from the outside, with the wind whipping her hair as the player can look around with the camera at the city falling below her
Unusual existing
Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel
6 Abandoned Places That Will Make Awesome Supervillain Lairs
Here’s some Mexico City stuff that looks like it has to be from the future
WillAustin.com — A gold mine of architectural pics
Abandoned-places.com
weburbanist.com
AtlasObscura.com
Renwick Hospital, Roosevelt Island (supposedly lit at night)
Skara Brae, Orkney Islands
Therme Vals
Stockwell Garage — those beams are interesting
Yaxchilán
Parador de Ronda
Transfagarasan, Romania — a crazy twisting mountain road through beautiful scenery
Stelvio Pass, Italy — anything crazy the Romanians can do, the Italians can do crazier
Trollstigen, Norway
Khardung La Pass, China
Karakoram Highway, China & Pakistan
Hotel Caesar Augustus
AquaDom, the aquarium elevator in Berlin’s Radisson Blu
Hammetschwand Lift, Switzerland
Falkirk Wheel
Asansor elevator, Izmir, Turkey
New Century Global Center, the world’s largest building
Globen SkyView, Stockholm
Mercedes-Benz Museum elevators
Bailong, Zhangjiajie, Wulingyuan cliffside elevator (world’s tallest?)
3100 Kulmhotel Gornergrat
Rifugio Torre Di Pisa
Roden Crater
Coral Castle, Homestead, FL
Newport Tower
Columbus Lighthouse, Santo Domingo
Elbe Philharmonic, Hamburg
Bahrain World Trade Center
Nanyang Technological University Art School
Museum of Contemporary Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Druzhba Holiday Center, Yalta, Ukraine
Blur Building, Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland
Cybertecture Egg, Mumbai, India
The Church of Hallgrimur, Reykjavik, Iceland
Montreal Biosphere, Montreal, Canada
Bhangarh, India
Tugboat Graveyard, New York
Lier Sykehus, Norway
San Juan Parangaricutiro, Mexico
Skellig Michael, Ireland
Hundseck Hotel, Black Forest
Lehigh Acres, Florida
Racetrack Playa, Death Valley National Park, CA
Oregon Vortex, Gold Hill, OR
Selfridges Birmingham
Melbourne City Link Gateway
Takakonuma Greenland Park
Travertine Pools, Pamukkale, Turkey
White Desert, Egypt
Moeraki Boulders, New Zealand
Burj Khalifa
Eye of the Sahara, Mauritania
Asbyrgi Canyon, Iceland
Matsuo Ghost Mine
Bird Suicide Grounds, Assam, Jatinga
Mayan Hell / Actun Tunichil Muknal
Gunkanjima
San Zhi Resort
Extraterrestrial stuff: Saturn's aurora, Martian landscapes
Mammatus and other weird clouds
Marble Caves, Chile
Lake Retba, Senegal
Great general resource: r/EarthPorn
Architecture site: afasia
Door to Hell, Turkmenistan
The Pantheon’s oculus in the rain
More weird stuff: Strange Buildings
Lastly, a reminder that I need to post some of my own architecture pics at some point
Unusual future
Immersive virtual reality — This is an opportunity to put an unusual twist or meta-commentary on top of the normal gameplay. Also, VR levels can be used for training. A truly immersive VR headset will probably engage the muscle atonia that is used in REM sleep to avoid dreamers physically acting out the movements they are making in their dreams. This means that if someone forcibly places a person in a VR space, without providing a soft exit within the space, they will be trapped. Perhaps at some point Konoko must escape a VR space by figuring out how to crash the level so that the headset shuts down and frees her from the physical restraint.
Weird weather
Shelf cloud — it only looks like the end of the world!
Amazing volcano photo gallery from Chile
Fire rainbow clouds
Cracked article on apocalypses that have already happened (more in comments)
Shutdown of thermohaline circulation — one of the scarier potential effects of global warming
Exploding lakes like Lake Nyos are scary stuff, and Lake Kivu will cause a major disaster if it outgasses too
This exploding dam is pretty cool
You know it must be the end of the world when you get firenadoes
Expanding sinkhole in China
Waterspouts
Eutrophication in response to pollution
Dust devil with fire and tumbleweeds
Reverse-flowing waterfall, Kinder Downfall, Hayfield, England