Dragon Age II Art Design Editorial
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One of the most straightforward examples of aligning art and game design Goldman could give me was the character Fenris, a former Tevinter slave with lyrium scars from years of torture. "That guy, he required a lot of going back and forth between design and art. I think we redesigned that guy ten times." Fenris' character design is a function of his backstory as well as his role in battle, both of which changed well into development, sending Goldman's team "back to the drawing board ... trying to blend those elements into something that's interesting and unique from everybody else in the world."
"I don't think you need to show a drill going through a baby's eyeball to tell a terrible story," he says to me. "It doesn't need to be black and dripping with blood -- that's pretty Halloween." He uses Halo as an another example: "If you read the backstory and the literature from that game, that is one grim hellhole of a universe. That's not what the game plays like." He adds that Halo doesn't look like that, either.
In a recent Q and A session at BioWare's Edmonton studios, lead designer Mike Laidlaw explained that, for his team, "style is measurable." After picking a slew of visual inspirations -- other games, art, film, wood cuts -- the art team studied the color palettes and saturation levels that most appealed to them. Their first task was to set out to replicate those styles in Dragon Age II.
The second step of Dragon Age II's visual overhaul was to create what Goldman describes as "picture-making opportunities." Taking particular cues from The Triumph of Death -- a 16th century oil painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a Flemish artist -- and Akira Kurosawa's classic 1957 samurai film, Throne of Blood, Goldman's team studied each artist's use of planar composition and negative space to frame each scene in a way that focuses on character interaction.
The result is a brighter, more colorful game, with a focus on a dramatic presentation layer. "Just because you're treating dark themes doesn't mean it has to be physically dark and that you can't see where you're going," explains Goldman, setting his game apart from the current trend in videogame visuals. "By setting the story in a place that has better picture-making opportunities, you can use the framing ... to evoke a mood."
