Dragon Age: Inquisition Interview

We head into the weekend with a new four-page interview with BioWare producer Cameron Lee ready for reading over at OXM UK, with the entirety of the questions focusing on Dragon Age: Inquisition and the RPG's release later this year. A few samples to start you off:

Will the plot take into account things like the DLC packs for Origins?

Yeah, so the Dragon Age Keep includes the ability to go through and set all these different decision and action points from the previous games and the DLC, and I think even one of the flash games. Coming into Dragon Age: Inquisition there's a lot of those decisions that impact the story and impact the world. The world is really a character as well if you think about it, and how that world is set up by the player as 'their' world is really important to us, so we wanted to make sure that... You know, one of the primary reasons that we did the Keep, is that we'll know when the player sets up their world that's the world they get. So you will see a lot of those impacts coming through, both very large and very small as well.

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In terms of the Inquisitor, how do you define the character within the story while allowing him or her to be a completely customisable entity?

It's interesting, when you think about Dragon Age: Origins, it's a very similar situation to what we have in Inquisition, because there's an overarching narrative and story that takes place. In Origins you could pick your race, it's the same in Inquisition, you pick your classes, the sorts of decisions that you make across the board are very similar in terms of scope - in Inquisition it's probably a lot larger actually.

And there's much more customisation in Inquisition than there was in Origins, in terms of what you can craft, how you look, how you can look after your followers and all that sort of stuff, so I think there's more choice and more customisation and the ability for the player to feel like the character is their own.

Balancing that against the story is always interesting, but it's up to the player, because there's so much dialogue, so much story, so much involvement that the player has in the story, and once that the player feels that they have created their story, it works itself into the experience of ownership. Whereas DA2 was more like pick this character kind of thing. We see it as more of an Origins experience in that sense.

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Can you talk about the difference between Orlais and Ferelden in particular? That seems to be the big cultural split for the Inquisition world. I know some people aren't that fond of Orlais because - and I quote - "it's too French".

Yeah! There's a new novel coming out by Patrick Weeks, centred around Orlais, so that'll be a great place for information but, Orlais it's very - it has a thin veneer of splendour to it, but there's a lot of underbelly as well. Ferelden is more, I guess, in your face about its different classes and social statuses etc and what it's trying to accomplish. Of course there's also Tevinter, which is north of Orlais, that's a big factor in Dragon Age and is talked about a lot.