 For the game's story and setting, Arkane wanted to create a new intellectual property (IP) for them to build on.Colantonio brought in Viktor Antonov, an artist that had been working for Valve and had helped Arkane with the Source engine during their development of "Dark Messiah of Might and Magic" (2006).As both Colantonio and Antonov had lived in Paris for some time in their lives, they came upon the idea of a "dystopia-utopia" setting in Paris, where part of the city was a "royal utopia" while the other half had fallen into squalor; this reflected on the different experiences that Colantonio and Antonov had from how they came to live in Paris, and recognizing that Paris itself is a "city of contrasts".