The Art & Inspiration of Dragon Age: Inquisition

I think we're ready to ready to go so I'm just just a show of hands who's played Dragon Age Inquisition I thought there would be more than that good grief all right I'm just gonna give you a little bit of a flavor and what it's all about with this movie and then we we all go there should be sad there should be stand shall I pause it and start again good she never Bank and a big intro right I'm sorry you can't hear me either I can hear me I will start from the beginning you have missed nothing we will rule recommend we could just go straight to the breakout room and carried on from there everywhere okay okay let's go

so forget everything I said we'll start again so you just screw the movie and get on with the talk yeah let's be like let's do that and try it at the end and see if it works could everyone hear me no my god this is a disaster isn't it my first ever talk of GDC this is dessert already thank you presentation oh no no we're good we're good all right here we go all right I'm Neil Thompson I'm the director of art animation for by where I'm based up in Edmonton it's about - I don't know probably 50 up there right now so this is a welcome change it's great to be at EDC I think more than

anything else I've come here from for many years now and I think what it gives you is a wonderful perspective on an industry when you work in a studio with maybe 200 guys and girls you don't really get an idea of how big the industry actually is and how many creative individuals that are working within it and then you come to San Francisco in March and there's thousands of people prowling the streets and they all do what you do and it's fantastic and it's really rewarding and I think it's it's a really creative boost to people to go back to their shoes and take all that positive energy I've been here all day looking at the watching the presentations and there's been some fantastic ones I think Alessandro's from Ninja Theory was absolutely brilliant grant doing the procedural work and Rob talking about cinematography and there's bits of all of those in this it was originally an hour-long presentation I've kind of crammed it into half an hour so we're just going to rock on through these slides and I'm just going to randomly you know spout so now we'll do it again yeah sure okay

what is the premise of Dragon Age the premise of Dragon Age is that magic is a dangerous thing so that people will use it become corrupted and it's this corruption that ultimately leads people to do evil things and when we're talking about the art direction of Dragon Age that's what we keep in mind so it's very much steeped in sort of medieval history and this idea of the memento mori remember you will die this was very prevalent in medieval times because they had plague and place to live but what it bred was a lot of very creative artwork that dealt with a subject of death in a kind of playful manner and it's that kind of playful sense of impending doom that hangs over the game and informs the other direction so what is the art direction technology does not dictate art direction when we come to games

conferences like this there's a lot of a lot of talks about engines and tools and systems and so forth but that's not art direction the slide we have here one of these is generally regarded as you know the high spot of Western Western art and the other is the Mona Lisa right they've both done in the same medium the medium of oils so let's look a bit closer about oils as a medium now when we were when we were talking about doing Dragon Age Inquisition if anyone's play Dragon Age 2 that was done on Bioware's previous engine this was the Eclipse engine it was an internal graphical solution and I think anyone who's played that game will kind of agree that it was sort of it you know was getting a bit dusty and it's seen better days so we were approaching this from use by using frostbite which is dices engine that they used to do the battlefield games and really you can you can draw a parallel between the Northern Renaissance and the artists working with oil which was a new medium at that time

and Bioware trying to get through grips with frostbite which was a new engine no experience of them before very little documentation as is always the case but what it gives you Prime early is a very good surface response so the way light falls on materials and that's really what we wanted to get into this is these are two works by hands Holbein the younger it's his portraits of Thomas More and the Erasmus of Rotterdam today and what you'll notice about these works is that what the what the medium of oil allowed into the juice was a much better realization of the materials on these characters so the fur looks like fur the skin has a real feeling - it's not photo realistic because they're still these are clearly still paintings but the realization of the material work is photo photo realist something no not photo it more realistic right it's real to life without being photo realistic and that's what we took our inspirations

from sorry it's starting to feedback I can't talk any louder I'll be shouting that's not is this specially on this does that mean everyone missed the mistake I made on the last slide so that's good if no one heard and they're filming this as well my god okay we could everyone hear me hey we could go back to the beginning and start again if you like that that'd be great okay so we can analyze these images and start to take kind of color and palette representations from them and this can inform the work that we do actually I can hear myself now so that's that's better so then we put it in the hands of the concept artist you know with with all these influences going around they

start to produce their work and what the concert art is is is looking to do is represent the world of Dragon Age taking its cues from the works of the great masters and then all the Renaissance so sense of epic aspirational fantasy because that's what everyone wants to see but also what is central to the themes of Dragon Age is the story and the characters because you can't have an engaging RPG without that side of thanks and the concept art has to reflect that it has to create a world that is both lush and vivid but also interesting and has something going on that drags you in and makes you want to makes you want to play an inhabitant so it's a visually rich and diverse world it can be bleak it can be romantic it can be threatening and it can be epic and it can certainly

be intriguing and rich and colorful grand and populous weird and otherworldly and of course there's got to be dragons so that's the kind of nuts abroad over to look at most of the worlds that are involved and I think there's there's a huge amount of disparity in there there's a huge amount of variation in the world but they all kind of sit within that central talent tenants of looking back at those early northern racehans paintings that used color and surface response to create a beautiful visual image and I think rob was talking earlier on if you were here about this idea that we still view these medium in a frame and what the our directors and I were talking about will matter woman is the our director and Dragon Asian one he and I spoke of a lot during this face was what is the final frame and who takes responsibility for that and that is the art directors prime role we talk a lot about we talked a little

bit about team building over the course of the day and think what team building means more than anything else is trust you build a team and you have a lot of talented creative individuals and as an art director or even a director of art animation you have to trust those individuals to be able to interpret your creative vision and then it's your job to make sure that they sit in that final frame in a cohesive manner so we do the same thing with characters a lot of characters in Dragon Age oh really what we're trying to do is build an interesting character to this through the shape and the profile of the of their of their faces and to really try and give a sense of their character through that design so Cassandra she's a bit she's very hard you know very spiky personality and that's reflected in the design there's a lot of sharp angles there within the face from every you know every the eyebrows the bone structure it's all angled and sharp and

then when we go when we got to the point where we wanted to take screenshots and start releasing images of the the followers in Dragon Age we wanted very much to represent them in the same way that reflects their character so coal is a mysterious he's basically a ghost that's a bit of a spoiler if you haven't played the game but we want to give them that sort of mysterious air so the first images that were released try to capture that so Liliana's the spymaster she looks kind of spy you there that's a word now of course there's Sarah who's a little bit more flighty and humorous and we wanted to give that with this little more bright bright environment and then Viviane who's got a very regal Orlesian look to her and there's a bit more of the golden light going on because it's a it's a story led RPG so you need to laugh and if you don't have the characters and you don't have the story there's no humor to it and I think this is one of the single greatest pieces of concept art ever ever created because if

you can't laughter that and I think it wonderfully illustrates Dragon Age and the the themes of Dragon Age in that yeah it's very dark and it's kind of the end of the world for the humor in it and there's a kind of playful humor that you know Bioware as an organization likes to likes to play with and if you ever played any of the Dragon Age games if you look hard enough you know there's the little Easter eggs of the cheese and so forth it's just you know it's it's games right you can't you can't take it too seriously I think it's very important that when we're in the studio we take our work extremely seriously but you can't take yourselves too seriously like if you do that then you know it's then then you're on the wrong side of pretentiousness ring and I like to get pretty pretentious soon so you need to cry you need to laugh and you need to chop their faces off which is what you want to do how much time we go okay we can also start to think about visual design in terms of the factions of

Dragon Age so we're looking in a sense in the Dragon Age has a pre-existing world you know there was Dragon Age Origins - there's several novels there was there was a movie so it's a lot to fall back on in terms of the law so that we can understand and it helps inform the character design and the and the art direction of the game so we gather our contextually relevant reference so this is the Chantry they're very austere so they're you know their uniforms and their design reflects that we hear a lot about people talking about silhouettes and color balance and color theory and this all goes into the thinking of it so that you can distinguish between the various factions we have the qunari as well we were looking at a lot of Nordic reference for some of this stuff there's some great kind of churches built out therein in Scandinavia that you know huge heavy wooden structures quite

unlike anything you know you see in in the rest of Europe really and though that's great stuff to inform the look of these things we've got the illusions you know this is extra excessive we're thinking along the lines of Versailles you know plenty of opulence candle light gold lots of lots of curvy stuff and then courses the two Venza which is which is Matt's personal favorite because it's all spiky angular and aggressive and only one of the one of the pillars of Inquisition that he set out was that it was it was pointing in gray so if if you play the game and you go into and see the tevinter architecture you know it's huge spiky kind of stuff and that's that's reflected in there not only in their architecture but also in the costumes and the character design and then of course we've got the Inquisition itself which is an interesting kind of contrast

because there you play the Inquisitor in the game it's as either so ostensibly you're the hero but yet a lot of their sort of regalia and design is a very year done in a very oppressive fashion you know there's the the persuader fist there to break down break down castle walls there's the I motif which is central to it so it's very oppressive we are watching kind of ideal and it's nice - it's nice to play with those kind of things as in a heroic stance rather than necessarily as a negative one and there you see the kind of color palettes that were were used in in the faction design but I think what was most interesting about as as Dragon Age developed was that it gradually took on a kind of art styling of its own began to began to evolve out of the game because there's such a rich lore these were these were some of the this was a this was a log that was originally experimented with and Dragon Age 2 and one the concept artist Nick Thornborough was doing this

work and it was this very heavy graphical design that was later done into stained glass for the Chantry and it tells stories from the law of dragon age and this is fantastic and it just started to carry on so when we got to Inquisition we started thinking about the front end and how we could do character portrayal and all that kind of stuff and I think someone came up with the idea of the tarot card motifs and then what happened was that the concept artists really just took off you know Matt just let them go for it essentially and what we got was a massive array of wonderful illustrations that sort of touch on these some primitive storytelling ideals that we all have from our youth you know this sort of dark Europe where the grimm fairy tales take place and the art of people like edmond du lac which is you know wonderfully expressive and it just went on and on and it was it was hard too hard to pull them back so there was

a graphical side of things the more expressive and then we got really into the baroque and that's where it got really exciting I think so there's this expression of anguish and strength and pain all done through the contortions of the physical shape I think I'll stand I was talking about this earlier and these kind of nods to the Spanish baroque girl which is which is beautiful because it's it's it's faith-based based art and that's a wonderful wonderful thing no matter what you think about faith or spirituality or religion what it has given us is a wonderful expression in in its artistic sense so you know when you look at those baroque paintings you look at those Northern Renaissance paintings that have religious or spiritual subjects there's a contortion and a pain and a feeling in our passion that is really compelling and that's really what you need to imbue yourself with as an artist when you when you start to express these ideas so there's some I

think that one in the center by the way I think is my favorite image in the entire game I think just this section of the artwork of the game turned out so strongly idea it was it was just wonderful to see and it really and it was just an evolution of the original pillars that were set out because we've been working on this I think the ultimately we worked on this game for about three three and a half years maybe a little bit more and it was a you know it was a long ride but the central pillars that were set out initially took us through and the game as a whole as an artistic whole I think holds true to the dictates of the of the franchise firstly we're also the vision of what that game was meant to be it goes on and on so what's my conclusion you have to build and promote your primary aesthetic direction so that's with nods to the Northern Renaissance there's a fair amount of

cinematic work in dragon age we were looking at directors like Kurosawa a very strong silhouette very bold compositional style you have to gather your contextually relevant reference and remember that art should support the experience and compliment the narrative not be in opposition to either and I think that's a it's really a warning to in in big in big console development when you have teams of artists and designers and engineers and writers the conflict tends to arise from time to time and everyone needs to understand that their particular discipline is just a part of the whole and great games are made when all those disciplines come together and work harmoniously and that's not easy it's not easy to achieve but it can be done and I think the final part because games are an art form I believe this and it's what's kept me

motivated for a long time we're doing this for a long time I think my first professional gig was in 1988 so that's like 27 27 years ridiculous but what excites me and continues to excite me about games as a medium as it it's always changing and you know if there's no other message that that you take away from this it's that as artists as creators you have to have a broad inspirational palette and what that means is that you need to suck in inspiration from everywhere right not just games and the message has come loud and clear today from some of the leading art directors in the industry as we're looking at film you're looking at architecture you're looking at classical art you're looking at you know you could be reading poetry books architecture everything everything you suck it all in as an artist and then what you spit out you know vomits out at the end of it is your creative interpretation of all those many inspirations and that's what

pushes the medium further it's the no value to look at just the latest great game and try and emulate that in your product right that's not pushing the medium that's mimicry we need to we need to look further than that we have this great thing that I believe the kids are using these days it's called the Internet and it gives you a window on every museum and every art gallery virtually in the world so there is no excuse for people not to take take advantage of that and really gorge yourself creatively I really urge people to do that so art which is of value stands up to scrutiny and interpretation I hope that is true and I hope that the games of tomorrow and the games that Bioware and all the other great studios produce can be interpreted and can be talked about as art in a truly artistic and valid way and that's my hope for the future so I kind of rambled a bit there but I guess that's my talk so if there's

any questions we have time for some questions we've got some got a few minutes or I can I can take it outside not in a bad way but we can we can go to the room over there and we can do we've got 77 minutes okay if anyone's got a question if you can use the microphone there if it was on oh it is on okay cool yeah so in the second Dragon Age is just a little related question it's related the art direction so um in the second Dragon Age the Inquisition or at least the appearance of cassandra interrogating barek very much gave that kind of oppressive feel to it but in Inquisition where the

Inquisitor is the head of it and you have so many choices in the game why take the direction of the oppression again because there was some dissonance with my character at least I was playing a good Inquisitor and it felt strange having all of these like fists and you know eyeballs and everything so yeah that's a good question I wish Mike Laidlaw always here to answer it for you yeah I think yeah I think it's interesting to play with juxtaposition right and if you can choose to be a good or bad Inquisitor right you don't have to do good deeds during the course of that game and I think the that the Inquisition does have all this kind of oppressive you know infrastructure around it it enables you to just play with that as you wish so I it's just setting up different different situations that you can play out as you wish okay thanks hello fantasy games are very common so

how do you guys really set the tone for differentiating your game from all the other sword and magic games out there because again it's so popular I just if there any sort of key thought process that goes into I'm you besides obviously the presentation of course yeah that's a good question there is a lot of fantasy out there and it's very difficult to try and do something that's original and engaging that hasn't been seen in a Lord of the Rings movie or Game of Thrones right and I think I think what Dragon Age has going for it is that that central vein of humor that keeps keeps it from falling into this sort of overly dark and sinister world we don't tend to do a lot of creatures it's not really that type of fantasy it's basically human factions actually there was a discussion going on in the studio the other way that I thought was very interesting and it's about this idea that sometimes

in fantasy games the gods of fantasy games are real gods right in Dragon Age they're not they're not it's it's a faith-based spiritual system so the factions within Dragon Age still have the same doubts and issues and existential angst that we do right so I think and I think that comes through either subtly or not and gives you a better connection to the story and the characters of that game because that they're dealing with the same kind of issues that we deal with that honored on a daily basis thank you this question is mostly about the characters in character design can you talk about some of the challenges from going to the Frostbite engine and retaining that kind of like stylized looking characters with something that's like a photo real engine we're still sort of maintaining that kind of Dragon Age style of characters it's you know a little bit yeah yeah slightly Illustrated from yeah yeah that was difficult because when you

look at some of the games that are done with with frostbite like battlefield or army of - or what have you there and I think it's partly in the in the process there's a lot of scanning work that goes into those games and heads and so forth who gives you a very believable facade all the characters in Dragon Age were hand handcrafted and I think that that's the difference really that they are we're looking for realistic surface response but not necessarily photorealistic fascia if that makes sense and I think that that sort of hand editing gives you that difference without using physical reference yeah yep okay I think that's it I'm around all week if anyone wants to talk about stuff thank you very much