The Art of Dragon Age: Inquisition

The media could not be loaded. The Art of Dragon Age: Inquisition is a large hardcover artbook that's much thicker than I expected. Although it's listed at 184 pages on Amazon and publisher Dark Horse's website, the book's actually 264 pages. That's an additional 80 pages!Collected within is a huge amount of beautiful concept art created for the game. There are designs for characters, props, landscapes, storyboards and some story scene paintings.More specifically, you'll see castles on hilltops, cavernous throne rooms and interiors, exquisite carvings that adorn the walls and ceilings, props such as thrones designed to reflect power of the rulers, faction banners, ancient ruins in deep jungles and other mysterious places imagined by the artists. Even the few screenshots of locations in the game looks great in terms of lighting and mood. The design is very cohesive.Character designs are mainly influenced by medieval warriors in armour. The book includes many variations of costumes and characters. I prefer the environment and prop art to the character designs although they are pretty good as well. There are some creatures and dragons but not much. The captions that come with the artworks talking about the designs are quite insightful but too brief.The style of art is mainly painterly, quite detailed at times to show off the architecture and history of the places. There are some rough pieces but for the most part they look wonderful in terms of textures, composition and invite you to marvel at the details.The recent video game artbooks published by Dark Horse are all pretty good, including this one. Considering the extra pages, amount of content and quality of the art, this is certainly fantastic artbook for fans of the game and fantasy art. Good value for money.(See more pictures of the book on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)

It's always interesting to peek behind the scenes and learn about the creative process that make the characters and world of a game. Bioware, despite their flaws in game design, always excells in creating unique characters and environments and for Dragon Age Inquisition, it's no different.This coffee table sized artbook is a real treat, with over 200 pages detailing the process that lead to life everything in this game. Separated by chapters following each of the game's main missions, it shows how the artists approached each character concept and the feelings they wanted to convey through the various environments.Some pages can be quite dark, however, so I'd definitely recommend reading through under good light. Just a minor inconvenience, but something to keep in mind. Worth the money, though, the little notes by each of the artists adds a lot to an already great artbook.Obviously, there are spoilers in this book and references to past games in the franchise as well.

Great art book with a near perfect balance of character design concepts to background and prop concepts and storyboard panels. This book and the Art of the Mass Effect Universe book are great examples of what animation art books should be like. Some companies put too many screenshots and text into the books. The concept art and character turnarounds are the most important parts of an animation art book, with notes and commentary appreciated. Screenshots should be kept to a minimum.+ At least half character turnarounds+ Plenty of character art with multiple designs+ Multiple pages of storyboard panel examples+ Plenty of good background and prop concepts- Lack of profile and front view poses for characters and creatures- Brief creature section- No weapon section

One of the best Concept Art books I have in my collection. As others have reviewed, the advertised pages is far lower than what you actually get.The character designs are beautiful, and really shows the production process with varying outfits and expressions, and facial attributes. I love to reference this for my own art for ideas and as a basis on designing.The matte painting of scenes is superb how so much implied detail is created in such quick brush strokes, and is really inspiring. You can tell the influence of Mass Effect switched to Fantasy-esque (Obviously same team at BioWare), and the content created for this game, in both art and story is unrivaled.A must for any BioWare fan, for sure!

Dragon age my beloved

As an artist and video game lover, books like these are like gold. I love collecting video game art books and this may be my new favorite. It is HUGE and every single page is beautiful and interesting. The type of concept art rangers from character design to lovely world design. There is even storyboards! I highly recommended this book, you get above and beyond what you pay for.I had been eyeing this book ever since the game came out and what finally pushed me to buy it was wanting to cosplay Cole and seeing that the art book is a fantastic source of references for the character designs.