Dragon Age offers a ton of different customization options – within the character creator alone there are hundreds of options to customize things like hairstyle, body type, and face for your playable character Rook, as well as a ton of armour options.
Companions have an armor slot, a ring slot, an accessory slot, and a weapon slot, while Luke has access to even more slots, namely a helmet, two weapon slots, a belt, an amulet slot, and two ring slots. It might sound odd that the belt has its own slot, since it’s not the armor that typically comes to mind when outfitting an RPG warrior. But the belt is an important aspect of Luke’s gear. The better Luke’s belt is, the more potent his healing potions will be, which are replenished by destroying green urns scattered around the world. But that’s not all; a high-quality belt will give you more power. [editor’s note: proc is a term used as a shorter way of saying “programmed random occurrence”] Additional effects such as temporary invincibility.
When you create a character, you can see the armor you want right away, but according to game director Corinne Busche, these won’t apply to Rook’s class until “mid-to-late game.” You can also switch between Rook’s starter gear and casual clothing in the creator, so you can get a pretty good look at how Rook will look in more relaxed cutscenes and combat, as well as how he’ll look later in the Veilguard’s journey. Busche said that much of the Veilguard’s gear is custom-made for Rook and his followers, which means that armor for Warrior class Rook probably won’t be in the chest of Mage class Rook. Similarly, armor designed for companion Bellara Lutara won’t be available for another companion, such as Lace Harding.
A visit to Bioware’s Edmonton office and a few hours of watching Bush play the game was all it took. Game Informer If you look at the cover story, you’ll see that there’s a lot of armor you can collect, for example from chests scattered around Al-Rasan Forest and other places. Some of them are great, some are just not to my personal taste, that’s just how it is in the RPG genre.
But Busche told me that the game has a transmog feature, or transmog for short, that he calls “robust.” This means that you can apply the stats of one piece of armor to another piece of armor. In other words, if you have a really cool piece of armor that you like, and you find a new piece of armor with higher stats, but you don’t want to give up the look of your current armor, you don’t have to. With transmog, you can apply the stats of the new armor to your current armor, so you get all the benefits while still maintaining your preferred look style.
Transmog isn’t just for Luke, though: he can transmog his companions’ armor and other things, too. We don’t know how Veilguard’s transmog system works in-game, but just knowing it exists gives us peace of mind that Luke will be looking as fashionable as possible while saving Thedas.
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