Dragon Age: The Veilguard Should Thank These Two Games for Its Impressive Strand Hair Technology
A couple of titles from publisher EA allowed BioWare to bring an astounding level of detail to its characters' varied hairstyles in Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
- BioWare and EA worked together to repurpose the latter's Strand Hair technology from FIFA and Madden '25 for Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
- With a lot of hairstyles and variables in play, BioWare's work with Frostbite has provided an immense level of realism to its latest addition to the Dragon Age franchise.
- It has allowed The Veilguard to stand out with its distinct visual style and excellent customization options for the player character.
With Dragon Age: The Veilguard receiving a lot of positive attention for its story, combat, and an astounding level of visual detail in several explorable locations, many players and critics have marveled at its unique visual style with one particular detail receiving a lot of appreciation in several reviews of the game.
BioWare’s return to form is a showcase of how the studio learned from the mistakes it has made in the past in order to ensure that one of its most popular franchises benefitted from the expertise of its development team. Working in tandem with its publisher Electronic Arts has allowed The Veilguard to excel in many areas, bringing a novel Dragon Age experience to its players in more ways than one.
The Incredible Magic of Strand Hair Technology
While Strand Hair technology is not new to the gaming world, having featured in two other EA titles in the past, BioWare’s evolution of the technology allowed the studio to showcase the talent it has at its disposal for all to see. The two games in question are FIFA and Madden ’25, sports simulators that rely on the accurate depiction of individual characters in order to bring realistic digital avatars of famous personalities in football to life on players’ screens.
However, EA’s expertise was taken up a notch in The Veilguard considering that none of the playable characters in FIFA or Madden would need to take on enormous monsters and magical foes with particles flying left, right, and center as the action unfolded. Nor would they need to traverse enchanted forests or underground labyrinths while keeping their style game on point thanks to a customization system in BioWare’s offering that offers an astounding number of options for its players.
Bringing a New Benchmark to Life With Frostbite
With Frostbite, EA’s in-house engine that runs its games, being brought to assist with Veilguard’s incredible visuals, BioWare must be commended for its work on evolving the technology to match its sprawling narrative and customization options for the many potential characters that players can create for their Rook – a detail that includes a variety of hairstyles with varying lengths and a lot of variables.
BioWare’s ability to factor in those variables and allow its players the freedom to create a character that best represents their personal tastes in a narrative in which their choices have an impact on the fate of its fictional land of Thedas is nothing short of extraordinary. It is a benchmark the studio has achieved by taking the best out of FIFA and Madden to bring innovations like “50,000 individual strands per character” as per the studio alongside adaptability to various environments and biomes that allowed for a level of realism hitherto unseen in a modern game.
It is an excellent use of current-gen technology that stands out best in the game’s well-implemented Performance Mode which maintains a solid 60FPS although our review noted a dip in those framerates for its Quality Mode. The results are evident to anybody who plays The Veilguard, with every character’s hair behaving exactly as it would in a real-world setting as they pass through its environments or dash and weave through their foes’ attacks.
BioWare and EA must be commended for their ability to adapt existing technologies to better suit a new product while also being able to craft a narrative and combat system that made the most of their innovations. It is an achievement that both the studio and publisher would be proud of even as they consider how to best approach the criticism levied at the handling of a few members of The Veilguard’s expansive cast and a toned-down approach to a player’s options in interacting with their companions or NPCs at large.
However, BioWare is sure to make good use of its improvements on Strand Hair in its future projects even as it takes Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s few issues in its stride as it approaches its future projects.
