Shane Hawco: Increased visual fidelity was the main goal for the development of Dragon Age: Inquisition. With Frostbite, we were able to give the characters more complex shaders that resulted in a realistic material response from Frostbite's powerful lighting and rendering abilities. In addition to this, we wanted to focus on giving the player increased customization options, allowing for upgrading and changing outfits as well as customizable materials. We also worked closely with the environment team to marry the character assets into the massive new environments. For this, we employed various different environmental effects as well as buildup properties to the shaders, not only to integrate the characters but to give weight to the exploration gameplay elements.

Shane Hawco: One of the biggest challenges for developing Dragon Age: Inquisition on the next-generation consoles and PC alongside the aging previous generations of consoles was in increasing the visual fidelity of the assets without affecting the customization options needed for gameplay. Most of this was done within the shader technology of Frostbite, which enabled us to turn off non-essential features that weren't necessary for gameplay. This allowed us not only to deliver the same gameplay experience to both console generations but also to add some really nice features to the PC, PS4 and Xbox One. Additionally, Frostbite allowed us to increase the triangle count by utilizing LOD (level of detail) models which gave us the ability to double the density of meshes for the next-generation experience. This is evident in the cut scenes, where the increased visual fidelity really pays off in the characters' facial features. That of course is a primary area of focus for BioWare, where storytelling is an important pillar to our games.

Ramil Sunga: One opportunity for the character art team was to take RPG elements like customization from our past games and bring that to the current gen. This was a challenge because of all the limitations that come with it. Sharing texture maps like diffuse, makeup, tattoo, stubble, etc., was difficult because they have to look good across the board on all shapes and sizes. While keeping the fidelity and integrity of the assets high, one of our goals was to make sure all the combinations from customizing looked natural, believable and worked well together.

Shane Hawco: That was quite a challenge since Dragon Age II introduced a more stylistic approach to the art from that of Dragon Age: Origins. We wanted to keep the visual design language consistent with DA2 but knowing that we were shifting to Frostbite, we wanted to build on the strengths it could provide to the franchise. This empowered the team to create vast and lush environments with a more advanced lighting and rendering technology. For the characters, this resulted in enhanced model details with more complex shaders and a realistic surface response.

Francis Lacuna: Frostbite opened up our customization features and surface treatment by giving us modern shader graphs. One of those features I'm particularly proud of is the texture swatch tinting. When characters craft their armors, the surface of the material changes. Atop those surfaces, we added accumulation effects that adapted to environments. When it rains, water drips down their gear. Step in water and legs get wet based on the water depth. Mud and dirt were built up on the characters as they explored the world. These features gave weight to a more intricate level of detail and aesthetic.

Another toy worth mentioning was Frostbite's displacement mapping to add more detail without the need for additional geometry. It was only showcased on a handful of creatures in the game but the gains were huge. DA:I was the first Frostbite title to make use of displacement maps and it really makes a difference in the models where it's used!

Shane Hawco: Outside of the increased triangle count and increased shader and rendering technology, we wanted to utilize the power the Frostbite engine gave us to create a deeper and more rewarding customization experience for the player. Working closely with Design, we developed a complex system for the playable characters that empowered the player to customize their visual appearance as well as open up gameplay options, all while retaining the unique visual design and characteristics given to each of the followers.

We started by calling back to the customization options given to the player in Dragon Age: Origins. In DA:O, various outfits that the player could wear were broken up into three different sections: arms, torsos, and legs. These outfits could also have their materials (metal, leather and cloth) customized and parts combined to create numerous unique appearances. The problem with this system, however, was that the unique characters would lose their identifiable appearances if they could wear basically anything that the player and NPCs could have equipped.

On DAII, we resolved this issue by giving each of the followers a unique appearance that only they could wear, resulting in each of them having characteristics that retained their uniqueness as well as the ability to be quickly identified and differentiated from other characters on the battlefield. This visual success unfortunately led to the loss of customization.

For Dragon Age: Inquisition, we wanted to retain the best of both worlds, giving the player the ability to customize their followers while still retaining a unique appearance for each character that helps define and embrace their unique characteristics. We did this by reinstating the arms, torso and leg parts, as well as coming up with a base and bitpack system. Each character would have a couple of different base outfits to which bitpacks could be applied. Each of these bitpacks would also have a progression that could be upgraded over time. The combination of the parts, bases and bitpacks — along with the customizable materials — would give each character immense customizable options while still retaining the unique visual characteristic for each follower.

For the Inquisitor, we wanted to retain the unique appearance as well as display the player class choice in their visual appearance outside of the weapon they carried and abilities they performed. For this, we made three different bases and bitpacks to represent each class: a light armored cloth base with leather jack bitpack for the mage, a medium armor leather base with leather and metal bitpack for the rogue, and heavy armored chainmail base with heavy plate bitpack for the warrior. All of these have customizable cloth, leather and metal materials. Since these appearances could be shared amongst all the classes within the deep customization system, we wanted to ensure there was some class-specific detail remaining. The result is the accoutrements on the belts of primary Inquisitor outfits: a spell book for mages, a lock pick for rogues and a war horn for warriors. I was confident this was something players would appreciate, so we wanted make sure we got it in there. It's the small touches that help give personality to a complex system. With the time players put into their appearances as well as the dedicated effort that cosplayers put into their outfits, these small details would not go unnoticed.

With the immense visual impact we could achieve from Frostbite, as well as the rich detail we were putting into the outfits and their customization, ZBrush became an essential tool for the development of Dragon Age: Inquisition. All of our high-detail modeling was done in ZBrush and we also made use of Decimation Master and ZRemesher to help with quick proxymesh breakdowns for rig and animation testing.

Francis Lacuna: One of the big goals we set out to achieve was to improve upon the armor mod ability we had done on previous BioWare games. I wanted to give the player the choice to wear not just cool armor but to get the feeling of upgrading it throughout the course of the game. Unfortunately, we ran into some challenges that made it difficult to achieve that goal fully. One of those was having to deal with limited part counts and performance budgets on the previous gen consoles. Limited G-Buffers also made it impossible to pull off our multi-material characters and attempts to apply full PBR (Physically Based Rendering) rules. So the challenge came in expending time to make variations with fewer parts, rather than have many parts with interchangeable variety. In the end we came up with novel solutions to work around these issues but I feel we could have done so much more. That said, the future looks bright for the possibilities.

Patrik Karlsson: When it comes to Cassandra, customization was a good way to enhance her character and also give a sense of progression as you explore the world. Like the other followers, Cassandra had two bases and two bitpacks that were all interchangeable. Each part of the bitpack — torso/arms/legs — were divided into three progressions each. This, together with various materials and colors, occupied the player for some time with customization while still maintaining the specific feel of a character. The example shown is the kind of visual payoff you would get when upgrading your chest piece on the second bitpack.

There are a lot more challenges to this than one might think at first glance. Not only do you need to plan in advance how the pieces will work in relation to each other to give the visual impact, you also need to keep in mind how they would work on the other base and in relation to other parts that might have other progressions on them. There are lot more textures that need to work with each other and in order to keep the character efficient you would need to remove covered geometry on more advanced progressions. For each progression we needed to make four additional LOD (level of detail) models. It ended up being more or less an army of geometry when you would place all of those parts out. Keeping track of it all and making sure that everything adds up in the end is a big challenge and with all of that in mind, we strived to keep the quality bar high within the project's deadlines.

Rion Swanson: An important part of the gear for characters (the bitpack system noted above) is that as you might imagine, the more it was planned out in the concept stage, the easier it would be to get it built in an efficient manner. In other words, this went smoothly for characters who were concepted and built later on once the system was all figured out, but we had to go back and revisit some of the initial characters. Blackwall and Dorian are two that come to mind who were built early on as gold-standard prototypes but had to be heavily adjusted at a later date to work within the new bitpack system.

Another big aspect of the system is the bitpack progressions. We figured that since we made all these complex bitpack additions, we could break them down into stages. So you go through the game and find (or craft) a new armor that fits on top of your base outfit -- but it is only part 1 of 3. This alone allows for tons more variety and has a good impact in-game as you can eventually be rewarded with the full armor set (progressions A, B, and C). We broke each body model down into torso, arms, and legs, so each of these ended up having bitpack progressions. For example, on the arms you'd start with the base outfit, then maybe get forearm plates for progression A, then the addition of hand and elbow plates for progression B, then the addition of heavy shoulder plates for progression C. The arm variations also can be equipped without the corresponding torso or legs (or vice versa), so this gave even more variety but also made it more challenging to plan for.

In the case of Cole, for example, he had tons of overlapping cloth pieces and less plate armor. So whereas Cassandra or Blackwall had all sorts of armor parts that would accumulate as a bitpack, Cole had various jacket and sleeve pieces that would combine and amount to a complex fabric costume with only some armor bits. Any time there was overlapping cloth in the concept design, we would have to take an extra close look to determine how the parts would be built. We also had the added task of determining which parts would translate into a simulated cloth piece and where it would be cut, if the cloth continued up over the character's body. This required some back and forth with the technical animators, who would do initial tests and then request changes to the cloth pieces to make them work as well as possible.

In the end, the player certainly has a huge variety of costume options. Many people really seem to enjoy customizing their characters, so I think it was well worth it to put in all the work to achieve this system.

Shane Hawco: We wanted to make use of a lot of the legacy models from DAII and even some from DA:O. The first step for this was to go back to the original ZBrush sculpts and determine what (if any) reworking would need to be done. From there, we would utilize the high-res sculpt to make a new updated rendermesh and LODs, then reproject the ZTool to generate new textures for the shaders we made in Frostbite.

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