00:05So I'm here with Ben McGrath, who is the lead environment artist here at Bioware Edmonton on Dragon Age Inquisition.
00:11So Ben, let's get things started. What exactly do you do here?
00:14Well, I lead the team that creates all of the level art for the game.
00:17So Inquisition is being made in Frostbite 3. How has that changed the way you guys work, especially when it
00:22comes to environments?
00:23So Frostbite 3 has offered us much more advanced rendering capabilities than our previous engine, allowed us to have a
00:30lot of micro-detail in the environment.
00:32We've got realistic water, we've got incredibly dense foliage, we've got wide open vistas and much, much greater environments than
00:39we've had before, much bigger environments than we've ever been able to do before.
00:42How much bigger are we talking?
00:43It's difficult to put an exact number on it, but I would say that any one of our zones is
00:48probably comparable in size to either of the previous two games, and we have about 10 of them.
00:52How does the world itself help to kind of tell the story of what's happening in Inquisition?
00:56We've tried to make it a lot more believable than before, and we've tried to populate it with evidence of
01:00the events that have been occurring in the story.
01:02But there's a lot of death, destruction visible in the world, there's a lot of buildings that have been destroyed,
01:07there's a lot of evidence of the Mage-Templar conflict.
01:10We have like plague wagons and corpses everywhere and people fighting.
01:14So this time we're going to lots of different locations in Thedas. How are they kind of different from each
01:18other?
01:19The world is divided into a lot of different areas, populated by different races.
01:22What we've done is we've actually created a bunch of different architectural styles.
01:25So we have Orlesian-style architecture, we have Threlin, we have Dwarven, we have Elven, and we have the Tevintha
01:31style as well.
01:32They're all very different. On top of that, the different areas have different biomes.
01:35So some are arid, some are boreal, and some are temperate.
01:38Each area in the game can often be wildly different because it has different flora and fauna and a different
01:43architectural style.
01:44What was the biggest challenge when you were developing it?
01:47Coming up with systemic gameplay elements that layer on top of each other and allow for events to occur for
01:5320 or 30 seconds or so in the world, it's really difficult.
01:56Can you talk a little bit about these kind of events going around?
01:58We have all kinds of things. We have, you know, your average skirmishes that go on and we have bandits
02:02raiding areas, then we have mages and Templars fighting.
02:05We have these weird kind of cool puzzle mechanics like the ancient view skulls that you can look through and
02:12find hidden stuff.
02:13We have like astrariums where you solve logic puzzles, which are cool.
02:17Again, they open up hidden dungeons, find mounts.
02:21You can go hunting. It goes on and on.
02:24So how have you managed to kind of balance the having stuff to do in the open world with sort
02:28of trying to keep people on track with the main story?
02:30So that's exactly where the Inquisition mechanics come in.
02:33So everything that you do in the world feeds back into the concept of the Inquisition and this army that
02:37you're building.
02:38You can claim camps and those give you a small base of operations.
02:41You can also claim keeps.
02:43And then the decisions you make throughout the story affect what's going on in the world.
02:47So depending on what you say or do, you can find Templars roaming the landscape or mages or bandits and
02:52so on.
02:52Ben, thank you so much for telling me about Dragon Age Inquisition's environments.
02:56For more on the game, make sure you look out for some more of our videos from here at Bioware
03:00Edmonton.
03:09For more on the game, make sure you look out for some more of our videos from here at Bioware
03:11Edmonton.
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