Dragon Age - New Screens
 

To celebrate the release of David Gaider's book, BioWare has released five Dragon Age screens that apparently show scenes relevant to both the book and the game. Catch them at Gamer's Hell.
More information.

I love the one with the two dwarf statues.

Nice, I like them :)

Nice; however, like good hearted RPG geeks everywhere, I wanna see a shot of the character stat screen.

They look good, albeit a bit generic. So far, I prefer the look of Mass Effect. Don't get me wrong: I am sure this will be a fun game.

Agree on the generic look, that hurt me too, and that's true that ME use well the SF theme for picturing some original places. SF theme is an easier context but when will we have Fantasy RPG that have Fantasy places. Avernum translated with imagination and skills into full 3D could achieve something interesting.

Well I think they look great.

Dang, that is cool. I'd like to have those guys at the end of my driveway!

Definitely would make the Jehovah's Witnesses think twice…I liked these shots, too. The third one reminded me a bit of Vizima, and I swear the flames in the last one looked just like something from a Baldur's Gate II mage fight--nice.

Looks great.

Cant wait for this. Going to have to try and finish NWN2 and expansions before this comes out… Maybe delays aren't all bad.

Wow, those are really impressive. Ok, games finally look pretty enough. NOW let's spend the next decade just focusing on improving the way they play, and figuring out how we can get back to developing them for less than 4 years of 80+ people's time and millions of dollars.

Go!

No kidding.

BioWare got hit hard by the New Engine bug. Combining Mass Effect (new engine for us, and wasn't feature-complete when we started working with it) with Dragon Age (engine switch mid-development to new internal engine) has resulted in our recent games taking a long time to make.

We're hoping for Mass 2 have a shorter to-shelf time than Mass 1. Same goes for sequels on Dragon Age. Making the levels and characters look good will still take time (along with, you know, story, cutscenes, balance, and all the things that make a game a game), but hopefully the lack of "Hey, let's make a new engine from scratch!" will cut off that part of the development cycle.

'Cause that sucks for you guys AND for us. Nobody wants to be a five-year veteran with no game credits.

I see no reason why ME2 and DA2 should not use the engines of ME1/DA1. Most of my top 10 list is made up by games that used technology that was mature, but not outdated just yet (instead of using state-of-the-art).

Examples:
- Baldur's Gate 2: Bigger and better than 1. Used the existing Infinity Engine, with some tweaks.
- PS:T: Infinity Engine again.
- Might & Magic 7: I know many that would rate this as the greatest RPG of all time. Used the same engine as MM6, but with a few tweaks.
- Gothic 2 (NotR): Incredible game. Simply stunning. Used the engine Piranha Bytes spent years developing for G1.

From time to time, a new engine is needed, but it's a massive waste of resources to make a new one for every game.

Plus, if the game engine is built in an organized and modular manner, you can easily build a new graphics engine and "plug" it in the game engine, in order to keep the game updated graphics-wise. And if you want to update game logic, simply do the same. A modular approach where systems are somewhat independent of one-another goes a very long way.

Or slight updates, as they did for the Witcher.

Nice! I especially liked how all the magic looked (except maybe the shiny platform in this one). The troll was awesome (or whatever that big ugly thing was), and I liked the dark feel of everything.

The only thing I definitely didn't like was the outfit on the woman in this picture. What the heck is that? She looks like a comic book super-hero.

I'm definitely looking forward to this game!

You won't have to worry about that, it's a ancient screenshot from a testing build that used the Aurora engine.

Do they still have that screenshot kicking around? That's from the proof of concept demo that we showed at the 2004 E3, prior to the DA world actually being created -- not even the same engine, actually.

yeah, looks like she should be wearing leg-warmers!

Well, in all fairness to Gamer's Hell, that screenshot that Squeek linked to for some mysterious reason is in fact posted under the correct "2004-05-20" date on the final, last and oldest page of their DA gallery. Anyone who is browsing the gallery can not possibly be misled about the age of the screenshot unless they have serious visual or reading comprehension issues or some sort of problem with numeral stuff ;) .
Seriously, it is 100% obvious that this screenshot belongs to the first and oldest batch of screenies that have been released to date.

Oooh, I see what I did. After opening one, I just kept clicking on the thumbnails at the bottom till I browsed through them all. They aren't segregated when they're viewed that way and give the impression they're all in one group.

Next time I'll be careful to read the directions!