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Ball Uniform?


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#676
Nefla

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Which is why there are uniforms, be glad that we didn't go there wearing pajamas. :P

Incredibly unfashionable and unflattering uniforms that aren't even representative of our organization (none of our soldiers wear them) it's like the 7 people going to the ball got together before going and invented a uniform for just them. They're like the power rangers I guess? The first time we go into an area that lets us change into our armor, I destroyed all the nutcracker suits in my inventory thinking I would get to keep my armor on if I did this, nope! I was dancing at the ball in my long underwear. <_<


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#677
turuzzusapatuttu

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Incredibly unfashionable and unflattering uniforms that aren't even representative of our organization (none of our soldiers wear them) it's like the 7 people going to the ball got together before going and invented a uniform for just them. They're like the power rangers I guess? The first time we go into an area that lets us change into our armor, I destroyed all the nutcracker suits in my inventory thinking I would get to keep my armor on if I did this, nope! I was dancing at the ball in my long underwear. <_<

 

Not a nice view, I guess...



#678
Epzaos

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Incredibly unfashionable and unflattering uniforms that aren't even representative of our organization (none of our soldiers wear them) it's like the 7 people going to the ball got together before going and invented a uniform for just them. They're like the power rangers I guess? The first time we go into an area that lets us change into our armor, I destroyed all the nutcracker suits in my inventory thinking I would get to keep my armor on if I did this, nope! I was dancing at the ball in my long underwear. <_<

Cassandra herself said that wearing formal armor would have been better. ;)



#679
Nefla

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Cassandra herself said that wearing formal armor would have been better. ;)

And I agree T_T let me wear fancy filigreed dress armor!


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#680
Winged Silver

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I'd love to have an outfit similar to Vivienne's for the ball...I'd even take something reflecting Josephine's look (though I think she's the only one who can pull the ruffles off ^_^)

 

I don't know if there were just resource/time constraints, or if it just wasn't thought of, but this seems like a good opportunity for the designers to show off a little cultural bling. There's a fair amount of concept art in the art book regarding the fashions of different areas - this seems like it would have been a nice opportunity to pull out the fashions that we didn't see in game so much (e.g. Your Dalish elf wears what might be considered formal dress, etc.). 

 

I don't know if we'll see anything happen for Inquisition, but hopefully whatever next game decides to do a formal event gives us a little wiggle room.



#681
Das Tentakel

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I wish they had sat down before the games were made and come up with a solid style concept for each country we'd be visiting or meeting people from: a general look for the nobility, peasants, and soldiers of each nation. I hate that the dress uniform looks like someone pulled it out of their butt before the ball. It doesn't match with any existing in-game style, none of our inquisition members had ever worn it before, it doesn't tie in to our heraldry or our inquisition soldier and scout's uniforms, it came from nowhere. It's like the day before the ball, one of the advisors thought "guys we need a uniform! You there requisition officer, be useful for once and sew 7 matching, one-size-fits-all outfits for the ball. Just make something up, I don't care!"


In a general sense, BioWare seems to be suffering from a 'visual style' inferiority complex when it comes to Dragon Age. DA:O had a (for the time) reasonably competent but not particularly great 'brown' generic, mainstream fantasy style. It wasn't all that pretty and certainly not original, we might as well call it boring, but it got the job done. It conveyed the mood of the story and setting ('lots of blood and mud') pretty well, and even looked (superficially) cohesive.
Ever since DA2, however, they have been trying to escape this 'generic' visual style. As a result, they have been trying too hard. They have plucked stuff left and right, from two millennia of art history on multiple continents to whatever's popular in movies, TV, comics or fantasy RPG art plus the nooks and crannies of the Internet and put them in their DA fantasy blender. The result isn't particularly cohesive and often looks fugly like hell. Other times it does look kind of pretty, but clashes with other parts of the visuals or feels very fake. Here, there's a generic 1100-1200 Anglo-Norman castle in Ferelden; over there, a 1700-1900 neoclassical villa / palace in Orlais. Here's a dude in quasi-medieval 1300-1400-ish armour, there a dudette in a weird 1500-1800 carnival costume / robe / clownsuit mix and over there an Inquisition officer in a slightly modded, late 19th / early 20th century British army dress uniform... :rolleyes:

Originality can be a fine thing, but recognisability is better, particularly in mainstream fantasy. You can't just throw things on a heap and hope they'll 'stick together'. While I get it that a lot of BioWare's current audience are younger gamers with not much knowledge of other periods and cultures or anything like historical processes, there are still quite a few gamers who did pick up the basics through history class, documentaries, movies, series, public events and even books...
When it comes to medieval fantasy in RPG’s, movies or TV – or any kind of historically inspired fantasy really - the need for recognisability imposes certain restraints. There’s of course the ‘historical correctness’ school that would go a bit like this: ‘Ferelden is vaguely 1100-1200 England with some extra Scandinavian influence, and depicted as somewhat backward. Orlais is kind of France, but described as sophisticated and flamboyant, so it should be like France in, say, 1300-1400 with its opulence turned to 11’. However, Dragon Age is pretty much mainstream ‘vaguely somewhere about there-ish and a bit of that-ish’ fantasy, so it’s not too bad when things are blended so that it’s a bit more like a mix of popular ideas about the medieval period and medieval-ish fantasy.

Now, when you abandon more or less firm (quasi-) historical shores and go for the generic Hollywood blender look, there are still some constraints in place. While the broad public has little to no idea about the differences between early, high or late medieval, or western European and eastern European or Byzantine styles, there is still some general understanding of what looks ‘medieval’ (castles, long flowing robes, metal body armour, shields etc.), ‘ancient’(Greek & Roman stuff, and of course Egyptian), ‘early modern’ (ruffs, primitive gunpowder weapons, renaissance-ish clothing, morion helmets), ‘18th century’ (‘whigs and powdered faces’), ‘19th century’ etc.

I’m not making any bets on what a modern teenager has picked up, but the older the greater the degree of exposure through enough costume dramas that you learn to recognize stuff. As a result, little harm is done when you blend a bit within these broadly defined periods or borrow some bits that don’t stand out. However, things like having a ‘medieval’ nobleman wearing a 19th century top hat or a British dress uniform from the same period probably isn’t going to go down well with a part of the audience*.

 

However, if you're really, really trying to 'break the mould' and thoroughly mix up things, you better have some really, really excellent designers around who know what they're doing and have all the time, budget, manpower and tools they need. If not, you'll end up with lots of stuff looking 'weird' and 'off'.

IMG_0806.jpg

‘The spring ball I organised for my Orlesian guests was hilarious. There was so much pollen in the air that half of them sneezed their masks off’
‘And the other half?’
‘Wore these ruffs up to their mouths. My servants had to place the food on the ruffs, so that the Orlesians could bend backwards and let it slide into their mouths.’
‘The Nug soup?’
‘They’ll be picking chunky Nug bits out of their ruffs all the way to the Orlesian border’

...

'I will thank the Maker every day for our own eminently practical and totally boring, non-flamboyant clothing...'


*Unless you’re making a JPRPG-style game where your avatar can have a 'meaningful' relationship with a teenage Hamsterfolk girl who wears a tophat and Steampunk goggles and flies an airship powered by swamplizard gastric gas. I rest my case ;)


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#682
Vanth

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I think they should have allowed us to attend in our armor.



#683
DarkKnightHolmes

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Those uniform made me want to barf. They looked especially hideous on Leliana and Josephine. And Cullen pretty much became Zapp Brannigan.


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