They’ll approach those more intimate moments in a ”mature and tasteful” manner, but action between the sheets won’t be the focus. Smut Cinematic director Jonathan Perry says they’re rather costly.
All that suggestive rubbing and writhing… it costs a few bit of time in animation you know. It has to look somewhat realistic after all, so a higher fidelity has to be applied.
”We certainly could push those romance scenes in any direction we wanted really,” Jonathan Perry told GamerZines.
”Something that didn’t work well is that we tried more, well I won’t say graphic, but in Dragon Age: Origins we had characters crawling around in their underwear and it looked weird because they were wearing these lacy Victoria’s Secret panties and outfits which looked out of place.”
Follow the money - it isn’t all about ‘controversy’ and alien nookie: ”Certainly when you have these characters interacting with each other in such an intimate way it’s incredibly expensive in terms of animation fidelity and getting it to look like they are really there and touching each other. I think Mass Effect’s scenes were done really well and I think we will take Inquisition’s scenes in that direction.” Grotesquely misinformed media and politicians blasted BioWare for ‘forcing gamers into sex’ with Mass Effect, despite everyone who’s played it knowing the romancing is optional.
”You might have a nude character but they are framed in such a way that parts of them are in shadow, or having characters in various states of undress. We also want to focus not just on the sex itself, but also that this is the culmination of spending a lot of time with a character and getting to know them, and so we’re giving scenes a mature and tasteful treatment I guess. We’ll see where it goes for Dragon Age: Inquisition, it’s something that we’re working on right now so we’ll see how these scenes pan out.” Yes we get it: More pillow talk, less pillow biting.
Dragon Age: Inquisition is powered by DICE’s Frostbite 3 engine, which already shows a dramatically improved Dragon Age from all the gameplay teasers BioWare have released. Fancy some ‘levolution’ tonight, my dear?
Dragon Age: Inquisition releases on PC, Xbox 360, PS3, Xbox One and PS4 in Q4 2014.