Yonzo never said make it look futuristic, he said make it look modern, which is actually how it's already depicted ingame.
Clean white walls with some dark bricked walls in some areas, clean white tiles, the computers don't have a tower (which there are already computers like that irl), and the rest of the tech is pretty standard modern stuff. Honestly, touch pads wouldn't fit ingame at all.
All I can think of is giving the brick like walls a more glossy appearance with little glows specking of them, which would be a nice touch and throwing some props like maybe a tipped tank or a busted pipe sticking out of the wall spraying smoke or water would also be a nice touch, but there is no other way to make it look modern. The tunnels have a dark gritty appearence to differ it from the rest of the game. Making it clean like the rest of the game would just ruin the point of making it a different zone.
Aethryx wrote:Yeah, I like to make my models detailed. The problem there though would be that modelling every little gear and cog would make for a high polygon count, which could affect performance on some machines.
In that case, just do some cogs and gears in the front and just put a decent quality texture of gears somewhere in there.
Here's a little example/placeholder I wipped up in a couple minute: