#velantis

[vampiresi]

Prologue

Rona

Velantis

Environmental attempts from @idrellegames Wayfarer. I fell in love with the detail and the magic involved in every new place, so I figured they’d be the perfect way to attempt to paint some environments.

[idrellegames]

Why is velantis that huge????

In-universe answer:

It’s one of the oldest cities in the world and it’s situated on a major trade route, so it’s had a long time to grow and it has a lot of traffic passing through. 

It is also one of the former Lotharic city-states, a loose alliance of city-states dotted around the Lotharic Sea. They were essentially small, independent maritime nations. Around 200 years before the start of the game, Farandor (which is a country on a separate continent in the far south-west) launched a number of raids up and down the Lotharic coast. The city-states didn’t have enough manpower to push the Faran raiders out, so the Arathian Empire stepped into the offer aid. 

And then, in classic Imperial fashion, pulled a coup, occupied the city-states, and folded their territories into the Empire. 

By the time the events of the game roll around, Velantis is seen on a global scale as a major Imperial city. But there are those (particularly a lot of dwarves and elves) who lived through the annexation and remember what it was like before. They’re none too pleased about it. 

Development answer:

It’s big because when this was a DA fan game, it was set in Cumberland (in Nevarra) and according to DA lore, Cumberland is a giant city three times the size of Denerim. 

[idrellegames]

i wish I could draw perspective properly to draw velantis, but alas. But I wonder! Do you have a map of Velantis that'll be released with the game, like with the current "job already accepted/inciting incident already happened" ending of the demo with the choosing where to go via map? I may sound a little confusing in this ask but im not sure how to make myself sound clearer lol :p

Haha, no worries, I get you!

Yes, there will be a Velantis city map. I have a rough draft sketched but I haven’t made an in-game copy. Wonderdraft doesn’t do city maps very easily with its base assets (it’s more for world maps), so I’m trying to find some open-source ones that will help me build an accurate city map. 

Velantis is huge (it takes up an entire peninsula, it really is the size of a small country), so there will be maps for individual areas, too. The interactive map/exploration function is a key feature of the game, so there will be plenty more instances where maps will be used!