BioWare Blog: Followers’ Customization in Dragon Age

We already got to see a glimpse of BioWare’s ideas on the future of companions’ customization in Dragon Age in a panel recently held at PAX East, but if you’re curious to hear more about the subject, David Gaider has penned a post on it on the official BioWare blog. Here’s a snip from the FAQ:

What’s wrong with the inventory system used in Dragon Age: Origins? Why not just use that?

There’s nothing wrong with that system per se. It was, however, a lot of resources that led to end results which weren’t ideal. namely that we had less appearances overall in addition to very little visual identity for the followers. Morrigan was the only character in Origins who had a unique appearance, and one which was immediately lost the moment you put different armor on her. Other followers had little visual identity at all outside of their faces, and ended up looking like every other character who wore that armor. Again, that’s not terrible in and of itself (characters are defined by more than just their appearance, after all) but we’d like to do better.

Did you do it (better) in DA2? If that was so great, why not just do it again?

We did like the visual direction for follower appearances in Dragon Age 2 but resource limitations meant that we couldn’t do the number of variations on those appearances as we would have liked. So you couldn’t change their armor at all, and that had a negative impact on player agency. as in the agency one feels by having control over their gameplay. It also meant you found a lot of armor that you simply couldn’t use at all, while this proposed system eliminates that problem. So, ultimately, it was good on one side and very bad on the other.

Thanks RPGWatch.