This week we’re going to have a bit of fun looking at some of the interesting armor choices for the recent Dragon Age: The Veilguard. In a way, this is an extension of the post on “The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor,” because I think Veilguard provides a pretty exceptional example of visual character-design armor borrowing from other character designs – rather than from historical armors or armoring principles – resulting in some odd outcomes and unusual patterns.
That said, before we get in, I want to clarify this isn’t a review of DA:VG. For what it is worth, I liked the game, though I found the move away from what I’d term ‘sociological storytelling’ – the emphasis on culture, politics and institutions in previous titles – really disappointing as that had been a major strength of the Dragon Age titles and Veilguard gives it much less attention, a real shame because we were at last in Tevinter! That said, the combat is good, the companions are mostly agreeable and the Big Lore Reveals are mostly fairly well handled and also appropriately Big. The writing is uneven and one can feel the scars of executive meddling, but the end result isn’t bad. It’s a shame it may be the end of the franchise, given the way Bioware is going – cursed by a decade of catastrophic mismanagement by EA – but at least DA:VG, if it is the last entry, closes the circle on a lot of the Big Questions raised in the first three games in a satisfying way.
But that’s not what we’re here to focus on, we’re here to focus on the armor design. And it should be noted at the outside that the Dragon Age games have always had something of a ‘house style’ in armor design (particularly the first two). Interestingly, while I’m going to be fairly critical of a lot of designs here, DA:VG makes some notable alterations to that ‘house style’ towards better, more function designs: there are now choices without comically oversized pauldrons, and the breastplates are all properly shaped now (as opposed to the flat-and-too-long designs from the early Dragon Age titles). As we’ll see, they still struggle with tassets and faulds, but the old bad solution of ‘skirt of something with tassets on the sides where they don’t cover anything’ is out and that’s at least some improvement.
Veilguard‘s other deviation from the ‘house style’ is that it takes a ‘shotgun’ approach to armor designs, from some pieces that seem almost historical in their design to other outfits that are pure absurd fantasy. Part of that comes out of Veilguard’s effort to express several different cultures (Rivain, Tevinter, Daelish, Nevarra and the Grey Warden’s Orlesian-anchored style) with very different outfit designs. The raw variety means that there are both a lot of very silly designs, of course, but also some interesting designs as well. It’s a little messy and all over the place, much like the game itself, but in the end I quite enjoyed it.
But first, as always, if you want to help me afford my own suit of historically accurate armor,, you can support me and this project on Patreon. Equipment, as I always stress, isn’t cheap! If you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) and Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon(@[email protected]) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I am in the process of shifting over more fully to Bluesky than Twitter, given that the former has, of late, become a better place for historical discussion than the latter.
Bags and Pouches
I want to start with the bags and pouches, because they were the first things I saw that made me think I ought to write this up. DA:VG really loves bags and pouches; a notable slice of its outfits have not just one or two pouches but a host of them, strung along belts and bandoliers all over the place. I’ve pulled a few examples; for the sake of keeping them straight as I talk about them, I’ve lettered them on the image below:
Now, I suspect for a lot of players, these pouch-heavy designs (note, specifically, box pouches) look practical and ready, the sort of thing for a character who isn’t some pampered knight, but a work-a-day adventurer who has to carry their own kit. And I can see the appeal for designs that indicate that sort of practical mindset, as compared to some of the flashier, more posh-looking armor.
You can see the same sort of thinking going into something like Skyrim’s Thieves Guild armor. Clearly folks like the design a lot because a mod that repurposed assets to allow players with other armor to equip bandoliers and pouches in the same style has also been very popular in the Skyrim modding scene. So clearly this isn’t just a Veilguard thing.
That said, if you go looking at pre-1500 armor, you will not find a lot of box-pouches. Indeed, given the prevalence of bandoliers, pouches, satchels and so on in the depiction of fantasy ‘adventuring kit,’ the modern reader may be surprised to find functionally no pouches on medieval or ancient armor or campaign wear. A soldier’s gear was instead carried in a pack, sometimes (as with the Roman sarcina) at the end of a stick to make it easier to carry, or sometimes in a satchel or hunting bag. If you had a horse, of course, saddle bags might equally store supplies and other necessities.
And that actually makes a fair bit of sense: if you expect to be fighting in close combat, you hardly want anything on your person adding encumbrance or weighing you down or providing an extra easy hand-hold for someone to grab and pull at. And more to the point, your ancient or medieval soldier doesn’t need them because he has nothing to put in a bag or pouch that he needs to grab in combat. His primary weapon and shields, after all, are carried in his hands, his armor is worn on his person, his backup weapon is in a scabbard at his waist…and that’s it. Archers might carry arrows in a quiver, of course and slingers stones in a small bag, but that’s just one small container of clear and distinct purpose, generally at the waist. This is just a design feature one does not find in the kind of technological environment posited in these games.
But of course that made me wonder where all of these pouches, as a visual design language, were coming from. Because there is a kind of soldier who has a use for a whole bunch of pouches and pockets all over the front of their equipment so they can quickly grab at things: gunpowder infantry.
Of course the way that gunpowder infantry store their ammunition varies based on the sort of weapons they use; it is technologically sensitive. Above, you can see how an early musketeer might carry his ammunition. The cartidge hasn’t been invented yet, so his ammunition load comes in three distinct parts: measured powder charges for the main charge (loaded down the muzzle) carried in small wooden vials attached to his bandolier, a powder horn (the canister over his leg) for priming the pan before firing and of course the actual bullets, in the pouch at the base of bandolier. Note he also carries a lit matchcord (in his left hand, just over the butt of the musket, lit at both ends, so if one end went out, it could be used to reignite the other) but has a spare matchcord, unlit, also dangling from his bandolier. This fellow is pre-flintlock, so he is relying on that lit matchcord to ignite the powder in the pan of his musket which in turn sets off the main charge which sends the bullet down range.
By contrast, for the soldier using a paper cartridge, carrying his ammunition was made a lot simpler: cartridges could be carried in a cartridge box, typically a single, square leather box with rigid sides, carried on a shoulder-belt and suspended at the waist for easy access. The paper cartridge might contain enough powder to both prime the pan and load the musket, removing the need for a separate powder horn or powder flask, which of course was useful both to speed loading as well as reducing the amount of loose black powder in a combat situation, which reduced the chance of your musketeer exploding at an inopportune time. Consequently, where your early musketeer has a bandolier with a whole bunch of wooden powder flasks hanging off of it, with the paper cartridge, all of that fits into a single cartridge box. There’s generally not a need to carry multiple boxes, because these weapons fire so slowly.
But that’s not what we see here; what we see here is a chest rig with at least half a dozen large pouches, generally rectangular in shape. And it was actually in looking at Armor C, with its huge chest-mounted squared off box-pouches that I realized what was driving this tend, which I will note I’ve also seen everywhere in fantasy adventurer concept and character art. It is, of course, this:
Modern combat load equipment generally includes a whole mess of pouches – or in more sophisticated versions, a modular pouch attachment system, as with NATO’s MOLLE – for carrying all sorts of things. Now some of this is what we might term general equipment: communications equipment, water, first aid kits, and so on. But most of it is for magazines. Because a modern soldier has to carry a staggering amount of ammunition. While a soldier using paper cartridges and firing a muzzle-loading musket or rifle might have carried ammunition for just a few dozen shots, the standard U.S. Army combat load, I believe, includes something like 210 rounds of ammunition, which is seven 30-round magazines. Those magazines need to be carried in combat and they need to be carried somewhere they can be retrieved quickly and without looking, thus they end up carried (and indeed have been since the World Wars) on waist- or chest-mounted rigging in the front where they can be easily reached. Because magazines are generally rectangular(ish), the pouches that carry them also tend to be rectangular.
And, just so this doesn’t remain unsaid: you are only going to keep on your person in these sorts of pouches things you need in a fight. Marching equipment, supplies, those neat crafting ingredients you picked up, those are all going to go in a marching pack, either carried or worn, which can be dropped if you get into a fight. In short, what I think is happening with the proliferation of pouch-heavy fantasy armor designs – especially with lots of on-the-front square or rectangular pouches – is that that artists, riffing off of later gunpowder equipment, have imported elements of that equipment into a context where they don’t actually make a great deal of sense.
As an aside, the usual counter-argument here is that these pouches are either for potions or reagents. But as we’ve already seen, even just ammunition pouches change in form substantially depending on how the ammunition is carried, so I have to imagine the carrying system for ‘magical ammunitions’ like potions or reagents would equally be different. For one thing, cartridges are uniform, but reagents and potions might be particularized; you need a way to make sure you aren’t grabbing the wrong one! Of course in the case of DA:VG it doesn’t really matter: the only in-setting reagent is lyrium (carried in glass bottles) which is no longer represented in the game mechanics and in this game potions have been streamlined into a single resource of which you only carry three.
But even in a Dungeons and Dragons setting with lots of reagents and potions, I think we might well imagine them carried differently than modern warfare-inspired box-pouch webbings. Personally, I actually think the early gunpowder bandoliers might represent an easier way to carry such things: premeasured amounts stored in wood bottles (more durable and much cheaper than glass). For that purpose, modern magazine pouches or mid-19th century cartridge boxes (Armor A appears to have one on the right leg) probably aren’t ideal. Everyone so often I see one of these where the bandolier is a potion bandolier, with slots for each standardized potion vial to fit in and that actually makes a lot more sense to me in a fantasy setting.
But what I find most interesting here is the way in which the self-referential nature of fantasy armor design has taken a design element – lots and lots of pouches – which is almost entirely out of place in this context and made it somewhat standard as a way to signal that a design is ‘practical.’
That said, we also have some oddities with armor, and we can start with my perennial complaint:
No One Knows How Faulds Work
This, of course, picks up directly where our pieces on The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor left off. There we noted that using rigid materials to armor a human body without inhibiting movement is an extremely solved problem – that is, humans have already come up with a wide range of solutions on how to do this effectively. One of the key problem areas for armorers is the waist. To fight effectively in close combat, humans need to be able to bend and turn at the waist, so any armor there needs to allow a wide range of motion. Consequently, the breastplate – the rigid plate covering the upper-torso – can’t extend much further than the natural waist (the thinnest point on your torso, which is generally a couple inches above the belt-line) without unacceptable inhibiting movement.
There are a few ways to solve this problem. Some beastplates flair outward at the base in a ‘bell’ shape allowing them to extend a little below the waist (but not very far) without inhibiting movement. That might be paired with a flexible protection of leather, textile or mail extending below, like Greek pteryges, or it might be hanging flaps of lamellar armor as with Japanese kusazuri upper-leg protections. You can also try to cover part of the area with a broad metal ‘belt,’ basically continuing the protection of the chest-plate with a disconnected (so it can articular) piece of armor that can at least cover some of the hips, which we see, for instance, in central Italic armors from the fifth to the third century BC. But in the medieval armoring tradition that most Dragon Age armors draw from, the solution arrived at was probably the most comprehensive: tassets and faulds.
And I know someone at Bioware knows this because they did it right, once, on Armor E above. You can see the breastplate which effectively terminates at the natural waist (where they have a high belt, but not how high that belt is – up at the waist not down at the hips – flaring out just a bit below that belt (the ‘bell’ shape noted above). Then below that are attached a set of thin, curved metal plates (faulds), three in total, which run parallel to the ground and are going to be connected to each other by leather straps on the inside which allow those faulds to telescope in. That lets the wearer bend at the waist and rise the legs and even sit down: the faulds just telescope in. Finally, beneath the faulds, to protect the upper legs are two solid, hanging metal plates; these are called tassets. Note how those tassets are ‘cheated forward’ – they cover the front not the side of the upper legs. In a lot of historical armors, they’d be even more to the center, making that center gap between the thighs smaller (particularly as this character does not require an open space to permit a large mostly cosmetic armored codpiece).
So they do know how it works! Or perhaps more accurately, one of what was probably a team of artists noticed and incorporated this feature into this armor but not any of the others. Which creates the problem: Thedas has invented faulds and then just…decided to almost never use them.
It’s not hard to see the problems with the comparison armors D, F, and G. Armor D lacks faulds, so the tassets have to begin really high up and they’re tiny leaving an enormous gap in protect over the upper legs. That’s quite bad because the upper legs are filled with big arteries moving lots of blood, meaning that a wound there can quickly cause disabling or fatal blood loss. By the time you are going in for dedicated knee plates and huge, oversized decorative pauldrons, you probably want to have tried to do what you can do to protect those upper legs.
Meanwhile, Armor G has a host of problems, but among them are its absurdly massive tassets. Once again, there appears to be no fauld and instead they use a sash combined with what appears to be at least three belts to conceal the fact that the breastplate extends too far down the torso to connect to these gigantic single-piece tassets. To understand why you don’t see that very often, just imagine running in that setup and how the tassets are going to react as you bring your knees up, flapping upwards in your way.
And then there is Armor F, which fits a pattern I see more and more of in concept fantasy art and such: the “I give up” solution in which the groin and belly are just left entirely unprotected because it is really hard to figure out what to do there. I should note that while I picked ‘F’ (the starter warrior armor) because it was really clear, there are several outfits in the game that follow this pattern. The problem here is that there’s a lot of blood vessels and vital organs in the groin and belly – a strike in either is extremely likely to prove both immediately disabling and eventually lethal. What needs to happen ehre is the chest plate needs to extend down to the natural waist (it terminates too high here) and then something, even if it is just thick leather straps (note that Armor D actually has something like pteryges, though they ought to be more substantial) to cover the groin. Meanwhile, it preserves the ‘sides only’ school of tassets that has been part of the Dragon Age ‘house style’ since Origins (also common in MMORPG armors) but hasn’t started making sense at any point in all of that.
Now I rather assume some of this aversion to tassets is that they might be hard to animate, though unless the player is looking close, the traditional expedient in video game armor animation of ‘making the rigid thing bend’ will work just fine to give the impression that they’re telescoping. But with the amount of resources on display here – all of these intricate armors, with lots of moving parts and cloth physics – I have to imagine tassets and faulds could be made to function properly or at least ‘faked’ convincing.
More broadly, I think a big part of the issue here is precisely that fantasy armor design has become really disconnected from historical originals, to the point that folks drawing and designing these armors are unaware of the common solutions to their common problems, in a way that comes out pretty clearly with Armor F’s, “I didn’t know what to do” solution to the center torso or some of the awkward ‘just cover it with belts’ solutions from games like Baldur’s Gate III. It’s that sort of thing which suggests to me this isn’t that artists have made a conscious choice to avoid a specific historical solution, so much as that they do not know it exists and so are at a loss as to what to actually do about that region of they body: they know they can’t just extend the breastplate down because it looks wrong, but they don’t seem to know how to fix it.
The irony is I think faulds and tassets can do a lot for the other problem these artists seem to struggle with which is maximizing visual interest. We’ll come back to this in a moment, but western audiences kind of expect armor to come in an ‘alwyte‘ style, which is to say with lots of uncovered, polished visible steel, as opposed to facing armor with colored textile or putting things like surcoats and tabbards over it and so on (which was, in earlier periods, very common!). But there’s an aversion to just having a lot of solid steel surfaces which don’t have a lot of bits and bobs of visual interest. You can see that really clearly on Armors D and E; the former uses a LOT of fluting, kind of like Maximilian plate armor, while the latter presents a breastplate riveted together unnecessarily from a bunch of smaller plates mostly just to break up its lines and curves.
But while breastplates weren’t usually composites of half a dozen plates (they were sometimes composites of two plates), protections like tassets and faulds give a lot of opportunity to add layers and movement, as well as decorative surfaces to make visually interesting armor that doesn’t end up feeling quite so overwrought as most fantasy armor does. After all, while tassets and faulds look neat, they’re also clearly practical, quite obvious in the way they protect part of the body.
And that brings us to problems with…
Pauldrons
Now I should note at the beginning that the Dragon Age ‘house style’ started in 2009 when the World of Warcraft-inspired vogue for gigantic pauldrons was still very much in effect and so if you look at the armor of the Dragon Age games, particularly Origins and II, you’ll see nearly all of the heavy armor has really big ‘bubble’ pauldrons, much larger than what we’d generally see historically.
Veilguard moves away from this: some of the pauldrons are still jumbo-sized, but the classic oversized ‘bubble’ shape, already relatively rare in Inquisition is now basically gone. What is unfortunate is that the designers don’t seem to have quite known where to go from there: Veilguard features a lot of pauldron designs and almost none of them are quite right.
The easy problems to point out here are poor Davrin’s armors, G and I (G is also available for Rook), with just use pauldrons. Armor G in general is just kind of a trainwreck. The in-game description makes a point that Armor G is basically the heaviest of all heavy armor and everything about it is a bit over the top. We’ve already mentioned the gigantic tassets (but alas, no faulds!) and the massive pointed pauldrons are likewise just silly. As an aside, sharp or spiked armor is very rare, historically, for the obvious reason that you are going to spend more time wearing and marching in any kind of armor than fighting in it and so lots of sharp edges.
But equally awkward is this armor’s deeply silly enormous bevor. A bevor (or bevor plate) is a metal plate which extends up from the breastplate to protect the neck, often intended to be used with a type of helmet called a sallet, which could interlock with the bevor to provide pretty darn complete protection. Now this bevor that Davrin has with Armor G is too far from his face to work with a sallet, but more to the point when you look closely you realize that entire plate, which runs down almost to Davrin’s naval, is the bevor: there’s an entire second metal plate (the actual breastplate) behind it.
More broadly, I think one of the things that a lot of fantasy armor designs struggle with is that they want to communicate “huge and heavy,” and so want armor that is thick and broad. The problem is that armor shapes are dictated by human biomechanics and the need for have blows glance off, which means they don’t tend to be that sort of enormous and indeed cannot be. Instead, even the heaviest armor almost looks thin to modern eyes, because of course it is armoring the body of a relatively fit person and aims to fit as closely as possible. Just about the ‘chunkiest’ armor I think I know of is Henry VIII’s Italian-made field armor – which ends up looking ‘dumpy’ as much as threatening – and that was mostly because Henry VIII was himself very big both vertically and horizontally by the end of his reign.
Armor I also has fairly oversized pauldrons, by the thing I actually want to note about these pauldrons isn’t that they’re big but the contrast in how they appear to attack. Armor I’s left pauldron appears to attach at the shoulder and hang down, whereas the right shoulder – the really oversized decorative one – attaches on the upper-arm and is supported upward.
This style of pauldron attachment is rapidly becoming a trend in the fantasy armor concept art space I’ve been noticing, another example of ‘DeviantArt Disease’ where by new fantasy concepts are based in old fantasy concepts rather than historical armors. Pauldrons (and their less elaborate cousins, spaulders) are the part of the armor that protects the shoulders and parts of the upper arms. The trend I have been seeing is to feature pauldrons and spaulders which, instead of hanging down from the shoulders, with articulated lames (thin bands of metal), projecting down to cover the arms, these fantasy ‘pauldrons’ (really technically bizarre and oversized rerebraces) attach to the arms and project upwards alongside but not overtop of the shoulder.
And you can see that problem in both right and left pauldrons in E and A, along with the left pauldrons on H and I. I don’t know enough about the technical details of video game animation to be sure, but I think the issue here is actually that the pauldrons are being rigged as a single solid object which moves based on the position of the shoulder and the animator doesn’t want it to clip into the character’s face, so they’ve moved the edge of the pauldron way out away from the neck. You can see that really clearly on Armor A, where the upper lame of the spaulders, which ought to over the entire shoulder are instead absolutely tiny and barely cover anything (and are, for some reason, mounted on a continuous leather backing, rather than articulated using sliding rivets or leather straps).
The coverage problem here is significant. Biomechanically, all strikes in close combat originate from the shoulders and one of the easiest and most instinctive strikes to make with almost any cutting or bludgeoning weapon is the falling diagonal strike (in longsword fencing, this is the classic zornhau, “wrath strike,” but the basic physics of the falling diagonal strike show up basically everywhere). That strike, aided by gravity and using a lot of the body’s muscles is really powerful and extremely dangerous (to the person being struck) and also basically instinctive. And it is going to fall, if aimed correctly, basically at where the neck meets the shoulders, give or take. So armoring that area is really quite important and historical armors very often reinforce that region: early Roman mail armor (the lorica hamata) was doubled over that space, the thick ‘yoke’ of the Greek tube-and-yoke cuirass protected the same area, and in the high Middle Ages that area would been protected both by the mail of the hauberk (the coat) but also by the hanging mail of the aventail (extending down from the helmet). And once plate protections are back on the table, you protect that region with the upper component of pauldrons or spaulders.
By moving the pauldrons out to the upper arm, that region is left almost entirely unprotected, or protected only by the top of the cuirass. Instead, a lot of these designs create what is basically a ‘shot trap’ where a descending diagonal blow is going to hit the shoulder (in a less armored place) and then catch on the pauldron, preventing the weapon from sliding off. That may matter less for armor penetration, but it matters a lot for hooking and pulling, which are important elements of a lot of close-combat.
Finally, can we just note that Armor H is just generally terrible? I’m not sure what NPCs wear this design, but it is available to the player and is just a mess. We’ve got some sort of padded puffy textile under the armor that both doesn’t look like a non-synthetic fabric and also doesn’t look like actual padded armor. And then we have a metal cuirass which inexplicably leaves little openings on the side to allow an enemy’s sword or arrow easy access to your lungs. Meanwhile, the lower legs (less important) have enormous greaves while the upper legs (more important) are entirely unarmored. Meanwhile for all of that lack of coverage, there is still a sharp, angled solid downward projection, secured by rivets, over the groin to make sure that sitting or riding a horse is as uncomfortable as humanly possible. I am honestly a bit baffled by it.
But let’s close out with something positive to say.
The Uses of Textiles
One thing about Veilguard‘s armor choices is that they’re so varied that you get some really interesting designs that I do think have interesting ideas that I want to see percolate into the broader thinking about fantasy designs, although I kind of hope we might anchor them in their original historical exemplars, rather than their fantasy presentations. As noted above, one of the big challenges these artists face is the demand to create a lot of visual interest in their equipment, which can be tricky with alwyte armor that is mostly just shiny steel.
The thing is, this was a historical problem too. Soldiers and warriors in expensive armor wanted to look impressive. They also wanted to be individually recognizable in a lot of cases. And so there were a lot of solutions to try to add color and interest to their battlefield kit in a way that would render them recognizable and impressive looking.
One of the standard ways of doing this, historically, was to alter the shape and color of the textile elements of the panoply, rather than the metal ones. In medieval Europe, the fashion for alwyte armor comes relatively late, in fact: for much of the Middle Ages, it was instead common to cover the metal elements of your armor with textile. You might, for instance, wear a tabard, jupon or a surcoat – a textile garment, often elaborately decorated, with the colors or arms of your family – over a mail hauberk or coat of plates. That textile could then, of course, be dyed or embroidered or decorated in any number of ways. Indeed, early plate cuirasses were often faced on the outside with brightly colored textiles rather than left ‘white’ (with the metal showing).
One option for visual interest that I am shocked more games do not imitate is the Japanese jinbaori, a sleeveless vest or coat sometimes worn (as an optional element) over a samurai’s armor. I think that is the direction Armor M is going as well: you can see the plate cuirass underneath, but then it is covered by a sleeveless coat. Jinbaori, as far as I know were generally shorter, more vestlike, but I have seen longer examples that look like they ran down to the knees, so the length of the coat on M isn’t a problem (though it has a lot of layers and gets visually confusing a bit. Likewise, it looks like, rather than do cut outs from the breastplate, instead the big shadowdragon crest in the center of the breastplate is framed by an out, decorative textile layer to the armor, which would work and was done. It’s not perfect (the breastplate has that odd groin-remover sharp projection at its base because we still haven’t figured out tassets and faulds), but Armor M was one of my favorites.
Meanwhile, Armor K shows another option. I suspect this was an effort to bring forward some of the style of many of Inquisition‘s player armors, which featured long coats over relatively modest breastplates. K is far from perfect here – the breastplate has an odd cut down the center (but is clearly metal and shiny) and you can see the “we don’t know what to do at the waist so we added eight belts instead” solution being used here too. Now in practice, textile garments over armor – like a surcoat – tended to close at the front; I can understand why developers don’t want to go that way, because it hides the armor and introduces a lack of clarity as to if a given outfit is or is not armor. So I am a bit forgiving of the open-coat approach; again, I think working from historical jinbaori is probably the right idea here.
Finally Lucanis there in the center with Armor L shows another option, wearing both a scarf for a spot of lighter color, but wearing his coat underneath his plate cuirass. This particular configuration, of a plate cuirass worn over a thick leather coat was a common early modern setup, as armor – being made thicker and thicker to resist bullets – started to drop everything but the most important components. Normally in Europe that coat would have been made of buff leather, which tends to come out a very distinctive orange-brown as a result of the treatment process and tended to be left that color, but there’s no reason your fantasy environment can’t have other colors to work with and in this case, they wanted to keep Lucanis’ theme colors which are blues.
But the point I want to make is that while none of these outfits is perfect (though L is actually pretty damn good), they all show options for adding lots of visual interest through decorative textile armor elements – a very common historical solution! – without necessarily damaging the functionality of the actual metal armor.
Conclusions
Overall, Veilguard takes a ‘shotgun’ approach to armor and outfits, with a lot of different styles and approaches, a sharp break with the previous Dragon Age games, which tended to hew to just a handful of styles, be it the ‘house style’ of the first two games or the ‘breastplate under leather jacket’ motif of Inquisition. Naturally that shotgun approach produced some absurd armors, but also a few good ones.
But what I think it revealed most is the degree to which this design process, as with film and TV costume armors, has turned in on itself, endlessly riffing off of other fictional armor. Part of the reason, as an aside, that I think video games often mess up tassets, faulds, pauldrons and spaulders is that these are components that are hard to manufacture in the real world cheaply using pressed plastic and other cheap materials and as a result they tend to be done poorly in live-action film and TV. Of course, animation doesn’t have the same limits, but if the character design team is riffing off of Game of Thrones instead of the arms and armor collections at the MET or the Wallace Collection, they’re going to import those corner-cutting practices all the same, even though they’re unnecessary, looking silly and cheap.
Ironically, as I’ve been writing this, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II just came out and I have just started playing it. I have no review thoughts about it yet (though my sense from others is that it avoids some of the historical missteps of the first game, offering a lot more depth to the wide range of people and lives one might see in medieval Bohemia), but one thing it shares with its predecessors is a steadfast commitment to using historical armor designs. Admittedly, they fudge the chronology a fair bit, with some equipment showing up being either probably a bit too old or a bit too new (e.g. some rounded-visor bascinets showing up a few decades too early), but I don’t think anyone really minds that kind of limited fudging. I certainly don’t.
Instead, what I find striking already about that game’s approach is how actually using historical armor designs rather than fantasy designs solves so many of the problems one might face. The problem of developing visual interest is fixed by decorative surcoats and jupons; many characters are instantly recognizable, even in full armor, because their armor is distinctively colored and decorated.
Another trend in fantasy RPG armor has been the move away from components to having just a single armor slot. TESIII: Morrowind‘s armor came in 10 mix-and-match slots; by TESIV: Oblivion that was just 5 and by TESV: Skyrim just four, with bracers, pauldrons, and the cuirass all being merged together. Veilguard has a single ‘armor’ for appearance which includes everything but the helmet. The usual justification for this is that otherwise it is really hard to get all of the various armor pieces to ‘play nice’ with each other without clipping; by limiting the combinations, the developers can better control how the armor all fits together.
But actual historical armor was designed with a degree of ‘mix and match’ in mind. Indeed, tournament armor often included ‘pieces of exchange’ – alternate components for different events or uses which could be swapped in and out. Anchoring the presentation in historical designs thus allows for a system where the various pieces ‘play nice’ together because they were designed to do so in the real world without overly limiting mobility. KC:D2, for reference, has twelve armor slots, layered over each other, representing fairly well the basic components of c. 1400 heavy armor.
In short then, I want to encourage fantasy artists and designers, for every kind of production – film, video games, or just 2D artwork – to spend less time looking at each other’s fantasy work and more time looking at historical armor. A lot of today’s fantasy armor tropes come out of the 1980s and 1990s early years of Dungeons and Dragons when it was much harder to get good information and especially good pictures of historical armor. But that’s changed! A lot of museum collections are online now with pictures. The best thing is, that also lets you expand beyond Europe: there are fascinating armor designs from all of the world over which almost never show up in these settings. South Asian-style mail with mirror plates, for instance, or Chinese-style lamellar, or the differently constructed and absolutely awesome looking Japanese lamellar. Heck, even in the European tradition there are cool armor types which almost never show up in fantasy fiction, like the oft-overlooked brigandine.
The armor design language developed over the past c. 3,000 years globally is both far richer but also deeper, informed by a wider range of concerns of practicality and decoration, than the last twenty years of fantasy film and online character art. Thanks to online collections and better publications, a lot of that variety is available to you and a lot of knowledge about how and why these armors worked the way they did is also accessible. You’ll get better designs if you use it!
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