I am not really a Dragon Age person, as I only played bits and pieces of 1 and 3, and for some reason, played all of 2 (it was short?). I was probably going to play Veilguard a bit, but the more I see from it, the more I’m impressed. And I am impressed with one of its features specifically.
The streamlined, not quite-Fortnite-ish art style got a lot of criticism when it was first shown off, but in recent content it’s looked better, and has now shown off one aspect of the new look that’s exceptional, its hair tech. Yes, hair tech.
It’s also about who is getting that hair tech. That would be your player-created Rook, not just NPCs in the game where they specifically did extra work on them. We have seen good hair tech in a game like Horizon Zero Dawn when Aloy and her long braids are the central focus of the entire thing, but to get this kind of tech working on player created characters who will have a wide variety of hairstyles is something else entirely. This scene is not a pre-rendered cutscene, it’s actually taking place within the game engine itself.
IGN has even more instances of how this looks in motion. We’re only seeing women, but there will no doubt be long hair options on the men as well to take advantage of this. And it should work for shorter hair as well to a certain extent.
Hair has been one of the last great frontiers in video game “realism” as it’s very resource-intensive and often sidelined as a result. Even games that go all-out for graphics in other ways often fall short of effective hair styles which either remains plastered to a characters’ head or moves in really basic ways. Not so here, and this is probably the best hair tech I’ve seen in a game, even if we are counting things like the Horizon series. A new game like Stellar Blade where the main character, Eve, has a long ponytail at all times may have it constantly moving, but it is endlessly clipping through her body rather than reacting to it:
One question, of course, is if hair rendering is so resource intensive, is this going to affect the performance of the rest of the game? That’s a question we do not have an answer to as of yet, nor if there is a “turn cool hair” off option to increase performance.
Regardless, this is one of the most significant leaps forward in hair tech we’ve ever seen, and I am not excited for how this could be applied in the next Mass Effect game which I imagine will use something similar. Minus, you know, all the bald and scaly and tentacle-headed aliens. Ooo, but what about tentacle tech?
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
