This is what Dragon Age: Inquisition looks like running Frostbite 3

During an in-game trailer that played at the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show in early June, developer BioWare revealed that its fantasy role-playing game Dragon Age: Inquisition won’t release until fall 2014.

That’s a long time to wait, but the developer is talking about Inquisition’s development with a new blog from its senior programmer and the first high-res screenshot of the next Dragon Age running the Frostbite 3 engine.

The screenshot shows a group of knights crowding around a table. It is a high-res version of a scene from the E3 trailer, but it is the first good look at Inquisition running the engine developer DICE created for its Battlefield first-person-shooter games. Previously, BioWare used its own Eclipse engine for the Dragon Age franchise, and that wasn’t exactly known for creating high-quality visuals.

Going into the next-gen of consoles, publisher Electronic Arts — which owns both BioWare and DICE — wants all of its studios to use Frostbite engine or its Ignite engine for sports games. This should bring down development costs as all the studios move on to a unified engine, and it also has the benefit of producing some of the best visuals we’ve seen in gaming (at least thus far into the new console cycle).

In addition to the screenshot, senior programmer Matt Komsthoeft talked about how he ended up at BioWare working on Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Komsthoeft started his career working on hardware. He helped develop the graphics chip Nintendo used in its GameCube console. He spent eight years working on graphics chips before he decided to pursue a career making games.

“So eventually I made the leap from hardware to software and got a job at BioWare,” wrote Komsthoeft. “So far I’ve worked on two of the highest-rated games of all time — Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 — and made friends and had a great time. Now, I’m working on the Dragon Age franchise and having a lot of fun doing it. We are trailblazing with an engine that has never been used to make an RPG before, yet already has a number of beautiful games using it.”