You probably wouldn’t expect to see the world first screen of a triple A game at an animation festival, but that’s where Eurogamer spotted the first Dragon Age 3 screen shot, at the Bradford Animation Festival. BioWare art and animation director Neil Thompson showed it for a moment while talking about how video game art has progressed throughout the years.
To demonstrate this, Thmpson showed an image of Space Invaders, then two images of Mass Effect 3 and then finally, the first alleged screen shot of Dragon Age 3.
“That is Dragon Age: Inquisition,” he said. “It's the first time anyone has seen a frame of it outside BioWare studios.”
A fan managed to get a fuzzy cell phone shot and posted it on the BioWare forum. Strangely enough, BioWare community manager Christ Priestly directly contradicted Eurogamer’s article by claiming it was concept art.
Astute fans noted that the image seemed to be similar to this image’s location, though it is still unknown if there exist any screenshots of the game yet. Opinions and confusion seem to be prominent on this point as Thomspon reportedly referred to it as a screenshot several times.
Thomspon also talked a bit about how the Frostbite 2.0 engine is affecting the development of Dragon Age 3.
“Mass Effect was done on Unreal of course,” he said. “Dragon Age was done on the proprietary engine Eclipse. I think anyone who played Dragon Age 2 would agree that engine was starting to creak a little bit by the time that was released.
“Obviously Frostbite is the Battlefield engine built by DICE. It's a beautiful, beautiful engine. And what we've found is an improvement with DA3, is the artists who were really battling with the Eclipse engine have just embraced Frostbite. The work they're doing now is stunning.
"I think the screenshot I showed earlier is pretty stunning. That's unusual for pre-production. Usually you don't get to that kind of quality until a week before gold master.
With Dragon Age 3: Inquisition due out in a year, we’ll be sure to get more information and images as time goes on. Fans can rejoice in at least knowing that Dragon Age 3 has been in pre-production longer than Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age: Origins, and Mass Effect.
Source: Eurogamer
