Dragon Age/Mass Effect Art Direction Interview

OXM took advantage of a relatively quiet weekend to bring us a three-page interview with BioWare art director Neil Thompson about the artistic vision behind Dragon Age and Mass Effect, how the next generation of consoles will push graphical technology even further, what we should expect from the art direction in Dragon Age III specifically, and more.

How do you explain the artistic vision of Mass Effect to the development team?

The team at Edmonton isn’t vast, and the aesthetic of Mass Effect is pretty much well-known now – a combination of lots of different styles and inspirations from our art director Derek Watts, who is very interested in architecture. You’ll see lots of nods to Frank Lloyd Wright [19th and 20th century American architect], Syd Mead [designer on Blade Runner and Tron] and all those guys.

Each discipline in the team will get together on a weekly basis and review the artwork, and everyone has input. Obviously Derek has final say, but it’s more of a gentle nudging to the end. We have some extremely good concept artists who keep the game firing along and they know the look of the game. It’s much easier to iterate than to create something from scratch.

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Let’s move on to Dragon Age – given the popularity of such fiction, is it difficult to create a fantasy epic that doesn’t look generic and over-familiar?

It’s very challenging when you have a medium such as fantasy that is so well understood – especially now after the Lord of the Rings movies, which really brought it to the attention of everybody. Before that, the films were B-movie stuff. The great thing about Dragon Age is the characters and the story – it’s what differentiates BioWare from everyone else. So you have these characters like Varric who really provide a level of emotional response from the player.

Matthew Goldman is the director on Dragon Age and we have lots of discussions about how we make sure the game holds true to the tenants of what people expect from fantasy – such as epic landscapes – but try not to fall into the trap of the recent TV shows and movies, which have set up a way of how they think fantasy should be – a subdued colour palette and harsh brown feel. Can you make fantasy beautiful in a different style? We think we have something special for Dragon Age III: Inquisition.

So Inquisition is going to be a visual departure from the previous two Dragon Age games?

Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II were both done using BioWare’s own Eclipse engine, and it was starting to creak a little bit when Dragon Age II came out. Inquisition is being done on the Frostbite 2 engine [created by DICE for Battlefield 3] and it is an astonishingly powerful engine. The Dragon Age artists were always slightly disappointed at how their work was visualised in the final product with Eclipse, but with Frostbite, they’ve just done some amazing stuff.

There was a pre-production period where almost on a weekly basis I’d be sitting in the environment reviews and being blown away by what was coming out – it looks stunningly beautiful. So I think when we do start releasing screenshots, people won’t be disappointed.