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Magna Vitae

Near the south border between City 17 and City 16 is Magna Vitae. Similar to Nova Prospekt, it was once a high security prison that was converted to a processing plant where prisoners are turned into Stalkers or Combine Soldiers. The place was taken over soon after the Seven Hour War concluded and established communications between itself, Nova Prospekt and other Depot's. Apart from that, not much is known about the Combine's operations within and for a very good reason.

The prison is located near a remote section of the Wasteland simply called "The Cliff" where the land suddenly dropped off as if near the edge of a mountain. It acts as a natural barrier where anyone that falls into it is doomed, and the Combine can focus on securing other areas. No one knows why it's there, what created it and what lies at the bottom. However some reports say they first spotted it during the Seven Hour War, heavily suspecting the Combine to be the reason. Even if someone did escape, the nearest settlement is 160km away, securing their doom.

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I'm a huge fan of Raising The Bar: Redux and their new Division updates got me feeling a bit spicy lately, especially the Depot maps. It got me curious, inspired even and I looked back at the Wasteland and Depot maps from the leak to first gather my references. Unlike other leak-inspired maps that I have made, I wanted this to be less restricting. As in, I didn't want to pigeon hold myself into the leak aesthetic like I did with Erie Canal and Protodel. I wanted to implement retail ideas into this map as well to have that nice balance of ideas between leak and retail.

This was a very strange map to work on for a multitude of reasons. I knew that this had to be a large map with a huge focus on verticality, as many previous maps of mines were sorely lacking that. But since I had never done anything of this scale before, I decided to adopt a mixed approach of the layout. I first sketched the base floor using Inkscape while interiors and more higher up areas I left to improvisation which resulted in this really strange layout. This resulted in me spending 5 days in total of the 11 days on blockout. The map was horrifyingly long to compile at 6 minutes in total, and I had to cut the custom interior soundscape since it was causing issues.

Despite that, I still enjoyed it. Way more than Cinematic Air Exchange that's for sure.


Valve - textures and models
Slartibarty's Slammin' Source Tools [knockout.chat]
Jacob Robbins' Skybox [jacobdeanr.github.io]