Also apparent during the battle is Dragon Age II’s new look. The Darkspawn are recognizable, but now they have a more unified look. Executive producer Mark Darrah says that the team wants to emphasize that they’re suffering from the effects of the Blight, “In Origins they looked good, but we wanted a look that was more cohesive.”
The new look for the Darkspawn is part of an effort to make Dragon Age look less like what Laidlaw calls “generic fantasy property B.”
“A year and a half ago, there was like four or five fantasy games, and you could put them side by side and it was kind of hard to tell them apart. I think part of that is that visuals in video games have gotten very baroque, very highly-detailed in their environments, very noisy, very cluttered,” Darrah explains.
