Dragon Age: Inquisition Previews and Interviews
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 2012
Lately there's been quite a lot of news for Dragon Age: Inquisition, and we decided to focus on that rather than any more generic interview or preview that was being published. Now that things have cooled down a bit, though, it's time for another round-up.
PC Gamer offers a hands-on preview:
It's a kitchen-sink approach to RPG design in some ways, but the relationships between these features are encouraging, especially in how they support your role as an Inquisitor within the metagame. It isn't scale for scale's sake, from what I've played. When I ask BioWare what's interesting about its biggest RPG ever beyond being a useful marketing line, executive producer Mark Darrah brings up something he calls (intrinsic storytelling.)
(Big levels obviously can't narrate themselves; that's impossible. The scope of that is too big. They need to give the player opportunities to tell their own stories and ultimately that's what comes from exploring this open-world gameplay.) I get a feel for what Darrah's talking about in an area called the Dales Highlands, a zone that ends up being my favorite in Inquisition. The intro to the Dales is incredibly light. An arcane, malicious blizzard has grasped the area's rough, typically-thawed cliffs, icing the river that nearby Sarhnia depends on for food and trade. What I notice throughout this area, and appreciate, is the lack of heavy-handed exposition about who, what, where, and why: the theme of the Highlands, as I discover simply by fighting through it, is driving out an invader and advancing the frontline.
The Red Templars (a faction of rebel, overzealous Templars) are to blame for the magic winter, and I see their signature pocking the cliffs as I climb: red lyrium. This potent, dangerous anti-magic substance is the source of the corruption that's tainted these Templars, and huge crystalline shards of it are piercing the Highlands. I cleave and shield-bash through a fourth pack of the misguided knights in an ice tunnel; the whole screen is a glow of blue light filtered through pristine ice and unnatural, saturated red emanating from the lyrium. These colors tell the story as well as any dialogue.
Further up, I fight a Red Templar Behemoth, less a soldier and more a 15-foot-tall, faceless lump of bipedal lyrium. For the first time I have to toggle-on Dragon Age's tactical camera, renovated for Inquisition, to kite the monster and deliberately spend my party's abilities. It's here that I realize how comfortable Inquisition feels when played as a real-time action-RPG; even more than it did in DA2. Broadly, the combat isn't as demanding as a conventional action game there's auto-attack but it also never drifts into, say, over-generous hit detection or the disconnected '˜combat dancing' of some MMOs.
They also offer a video interview focused on the game's multiplayer mode:
Destructoid offers a write-up based on their hands-on experience with the game's recently-announced multiplayer mode:
As level one adventurers we only had access to a few abilities, but even with just three powers (things like stuns and charges) and a standard attack combat was engaging and fun. The enemy variety kept things interesting as well, as we constantly had to adapt to faster or more damaging foes with new skills, and we subsequently talked strategy as a team while it was happening. In case you're wondering, combo-based skills are in, and are more fun than ever with other players to coordinate with.
It's not just a mindless slog from room to room either, as the dungeon we ran had a more twisted labyrinthine format. During each "run," certain bonus doors can be opened by a lockpick skill (rogues) or by dispelling an enchantment on it (casters) -- these routes often grant you treasure, but can also bypass rooms and lead to shortcuts. It's not required by any means, but having a well balanced team will grant you certain bonuses beyond just spells and ability synergy.
Joystiq too has a multiplayer-focused article:
Dragon Age: Inquisition's multiplayer has a more direct tie to the game's story than Mass Effect 3's multiplayer did to Shepard's space opera. In the single-player campaign, players take on the role of Inquisitor, leader of a group of that hunts demons and other forces of not-niceness. As you progress through the story, you'll acquire a small force of lieutenants and agents who can be sent off to deal with problems you're too busy to handle. These are your multiplayer avatars.
This is an important distinction, as it means the characters you'll play as in Inquisition's multiplayer are not the blank slates they were in Mass Effect 3. These are pre-defined people, with names, personalities and backgrounds. BioWare is aiming at a better fusion of multiplayer and the quality of storytelling the studio is known for this time around, and having players control an existing character instead of making their own aids in that quest.
Multiplayer heroes are unlocked by acquiring the armor their class would wear in the field, which can be done via crafting or, as in Mass Effect 3, via purchasing loot packs. Loot packs, in turn, can be picked up as a random drop, paid for using in-game gold, or purchased by way of platinum currency the game's converted form of real-world money. BioWare stressed that users of platinum currency will not gain access to any exclusive items or bonuses; that everything a platinum user can buy, a gold user can earn.
GameInformer also focuses on multiplayer for its video preview, while Wired has a lengthy interview divided into two parts with creative director Mike Laidlaw and executive producer Mark Darrah, from which I'm going to quote a brief excerpt:
Wired.co.uk: Dragon Age: Inquisition is considerably larger than the previous games, which seems to be a trend with western RPG's. Is there a kind of arms race between developers to create bigger, fancier worlds, and is it risky creating worlds so big players can't experience all of it?
Mike Laidlaw: We've definitely moved towards a game we don't expect you to see all of. That's actually good though, because historically we've had this problem of people not wanting to talk about, say, Mass Effect 2 because maybe you've not gotten to the same point as me and I don't want to spoil it for you. Especially in this day and age, where people are much more socially connected, you want them to be sharing their experiences. People talk a lot about Skyrim saying "oh yeah, I totally went on that drunken bender" and then someone else goes "There's a drunken bender? What?" It is intentional in our case to provide more game than the average player will experience.
In terms of whether it's an arms race, I don't know. I think you could look at the state of open world games right now with games like Skyrim, the Batman: Arkham games, Far Cry or Grand Theft Auto. These are all very different games with very different gameplay, but they're all open world. I think they share some elements but they're not really in competition with each other, other than that these games all take a certain amount of time and are therefore inherently in competition with each other. We're a fantasy RPG which obvious makes us much closer to Skyrim than GTA. My hope is that people will not see this as BioWare's take on the former so much as an exploration of the Dragon Age universe.
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Inquisition is the third main game now, and you have millennia of history in the Dragon Age world. How do you keep that straight amongst yourselves, particularly when story paths can branch off?
ML: We hired a crime reporter. We actually did. One of our editors is someone we brought on initially as a contractor and then hired full-time because he's fantastic. He is a research specialist and was a crime reporter with the Edmonton newspaper. He's very dedicated and very thorough -- crime isn't something you want to mis-report -- and what he'd do is comb through everything in Origins, everything in the novels, everything in Dawn of the Seeker, the comics, all the different products. We've developed this internal wiki that tracks the states of all the characters. There are various fields for the characters: Dead, Alive, and Quantum, for characters like Alistair who may or may not be alive depending on player choice. Within the entry, it explicitly says "If Dead: This. If Alive: This". So we have that as our internal reference, and while the fans maintain a really good one, they can't put notes about what's coming, so we have to have our own.
That's helped us organise things because there are a lot of products. We've announced our fifth novel, there are four out at the moment and a lot of the characters from the novels get referenced in Inquisition. The script-writing team will go and reference that. Being able to copy a noteworthy paragraph from a book that describes a location and then send it to a concept artist when they start to draw it for the game, that's invaluable. That's how we keep it all on track.
