Dragon Age: Inquisition Gameplay Footage, Previews and Interviews

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on September 1st, 2013

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Inquisition's normal view is a Mass Effect style third-person perspective, which allows for action game-esque combat. We saw The Inquisitor use powerful sword strikes to deal damage and a chain attack to drag foes towards him. As in previous games in the series, you're able to switch to control a party member at any time.

Also added to the mix is limited environmental destruction. The example shown was inside one of the game's many keeps, where enemies were positioned behind cover on top of a bridge. BioWare paused the combat before issuing The Inquisitor an attack order, sending him charging towards the bridge's foundations. During combat The Inquisitor brought down the bridge, killing the hard to reach enemies.

"We always wanted to do it," producer Cameron Lee told Eurogamer of the decision to include tactical mode, "since we had the right amount of time to do it. Having the console generation change and the new technology with Frostbite 3 meant pretty much everything was created from the ground up. Every piece of code, everything was brand new. So you have the opportunity at that point to look at what you want to accomplish, look at feedback and try and find a common ground in a way that strengthens both of those things.

"You take what the players wanted, which could have just been, well, just give me Origins, right? And we could have just done that, but we wanted players to feel like they were controlling the battlefield and battle space through things like some of the destruction, smarter AI, which we've been able to write, and some abilities the characters have for barriers and area of denial and traps.

"So it was a good merge of where we wanted to go and what the players wanted. And I think it's stronger. It's a really interesting creative process within the team to get the feedback from the fans, and that inspires. It gets people thinking. You end up somewhere you may not have realised you wanted to go and it ends up stronger."

The PC version of Inquisition will have a custom user interface and control scheme for mouse and keyboard, but BioWare doesn't expect you'll be able to pull the camera back farther than you're able to on console during tactical mode.

"We're trying to stay true to one of the original goals of the franchise, which is to be about a place, about a time," the creators said. "It's not about a single story, it's not about a single character."

That place and time in Inquisition are what the creators are calling a "world out of balance," where a cataclysmic event has opened giant rifts between dimensions, brought the dead back to life, and generally caused too much chaos to be just a coincidence. Both the mages and the Templars have the power to fix this problem, but they're too focused on a hopelessly deadlocked war to settle their differences and address the larger problem.

That's where the Inquisition, an ancient institution dedicated to rooting out corruption from outside of any church or established order, comes in. The new game is as much about building up this now-resurgent organization as it is about building up your characters, the creators said, gaining the trust of the people and the ability to wield more organizational power as you go.

The key to this system of influence is a series of keeps placed throughout the world, each of which lets you extend your control over the nearby area. You can capture them indirectly say by poisoning the water supply or using signal fires to draw out the keeps' forces or through direct attacks. Once you have control, you can tailor the keeps to a few different styles, deciding whether to focus on espionage, military strength, or commerce, for instance. You'll also be able to send out inquisition agents, who can unlock new projects and abilities in the area

The entire system of warfare capturing and maintaining your own keeps, soldiers doing battle all over the place as you travel the countryside, intrigue and spies sounds fantastic. I'm excited to see where all these ambitions lead, and hopeful that they take the game to new heights.

The fact that you can play multiple races, including the Qunari, as both male and female characters is also welcome news, as is the re-inclusion of item descriptions. Essentially, it sounds like BioWare listened very carefully to all the backlash directed toward Dragon Age II and then did their level best to fix each and every problem. Or, one hopes they have.

Another good sign is the return of the overhead tactical view for both PC and consoles. Origins had this for PC only, and DA2 abandoned it entirely. The ability to pause and issue orders was such a key element of Origins, it was bizarre to see it removed from the sequel and replaced with calorie-free, but very flashy, animations.

(Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy the more visceral feel of combat in the second game, and don't think better animations and deep, tactical combat are at all mutually exclusive.)

The new dialog wheel

Speaking of consequence, making tough calls has always been part of BioWare's legacy, but oftentimes the reaction to an action isn't quite what you expect. Selecting the "Shut up" option in Mass Effect, for example, may have led to an unexpected act of violence that didn't suit the character, or damaged something later on that you may not have expected. Now, when you highlight dialog, you'll see a text pop-up explaining what's likely to happen if you say or do something. This is optional, so if you'd rather not know that a village will certainly fall if you leave its under-attack inhabitants hanging, or you'd rather deal with it on your own terms, you can.

The combat

I loved the physicality of Dragon Age II's combat, but like many, especially PC players, I missed the almost-turn-based tactics level of stop-motion strategy from Origins' combat. That's back in Inquisition (on all platforms), so even console players can stop time, get a high-level view of the battlefield, and assign orders for each of their characters. You can assign move orders, spells, and attack patterns with quick grace, and jump right back into the fray for real-time slicing and dicing. A.I. states also let you assign behaviors to units, as usual, so you can send an aggressive character ahead of his or her teammates to take care of business while supporting them from afar. That, and the Z-targeting, reactive enemies, and vicious force of each strike really makes each fight look like a scary place to be.

Put a different way, BioWare wants to replace the claustrophobic basements and tunnels of Dragon Age II with a sprawling sandbox designed to let players create their own stories. The demo BioWare brought to Seattle for PAX showcased a couple different environments: the lush hills of Crestwood and the arid badlands of the Deep Desert. Crestwood alone, according to BioWare, is bigger than all of Dragon Age II while still "not even close" to being the biggest environment in Inquisition.

But don't go mistaking this for an Elder Scrolls game. Rather than offer a single, all-encompassing world map, BioWare wants to transport players between starkly different landscapes, each location offering a visually distinct look at the troubled nations and territories of the Dragon Age world. Your role as the leader of the Inquisition is to crack the proverbial whip on the warring factions of the world in order to unite against a common enemy, and to do that, you need to do your inquiring across a great many parts of the world.

"Inquisition keeps sending you to new places," says creative director Mike Laidlaw. "There are new spots that open up as the story progresses, as you explore more. You start to get more leads, more information, and that draws you to new and tougher locations."

What makes these new regions tougher is the fact that enemies don't auto-scale to the player's level in Inquisition, meaning you might wander into a landscape full of high-powered enemies capable of wiping you out in mere seconds if you haven't put in the proper amount of leveling. But come back to that area after you've spent some time exploring other parts of the world and it might be a different story.

"I want players to say, wow, that's an enormous dragon and I can't kill him right now," says Laidlaw. "But I'm gonna gear up and bring the right party, learn the right abilities, and we're going to go dragon slaying later. Other times, you'll come across a few low-level bandits and you'll get the satisfaction of just taking them out."

Part of the move toward bigger spaces is the desire to give players more control over combat situations. Instead of funneling you through one enemy-infested hallway to the next, BioWare wants players to be able to be able to approach a group of enemies from whichever angle they want, plan their approach, and execute that strategy on their own schedule.

The real meat, of course, will come from the inquisition angle. Now in charge of quite a sizeable group, there's far more you can actually now do, as demonstrated in the aforementioned Crestwood. As a group of red templars attack your group's keep, it's down to you to decide how such an attack is sorted out. Naturally you can take the fight directly to them, but choosing to do so puts a nearby village at risk. Ignore such peril and the settlement will suffer. Coming to their aid puts your own stronghold in severe danger. It's that moorish risk/reward design that BioWare have done so incredibly well previously, and with the returning caveat that every action you take will please/annoy your followers - in this case the returning Varric - means there's never a 'good' route to take.

Inquisition goes deeper than this too, however, by introducing the idea of choice without signposting it. A huge amount of satisfaction, or panic, can still be obtained from dicing with dialogue trees, but more, dare I say it, organic scenarios take this further. If you decide to push back the rebellion, you and your team will take a hidden entrance to gain the upper hand. Taking this route also brings you to where the red templars have moored their ships, though. Without any in-game prompting, the option is there to destroy these, stopping the enemy from returning later with reinforcements. How BioWare intends to keep that balanced is a question only the finished game can answer, but the fact that such ideals even exist should ensure the whole concept is pushed further than it ever has been in the past.

Once the keep is secured, another of Dragon Age's new toys comes into the fold. As the leader of quite a sizeable posse your troops need orders when you're off galavanting around on adventures. Each structure that you hold can be tasked with espionage (information), commerce (cash) or military (recruiting more soldiers/imposing your will on the world), and much like a strategy game it's up to you to decide how best to use your powers and then make sure it remains balanced.

"You can play the game the way you want to play it," said Laidlaw, pointing out the player can switch easily between following a party member in a third person over the shoulder view to the tactical camera. "There's situations in which there's advantages for both styles of play. I don't want every fight to be fought using [the tactical view]. Sometimes you just want to quickly beat up some guys."

Mopping up weaker enemies is also now a very real possibility in Dragon Age: Inquisition because the combat difficult doesn't scale with the might of the player. Foes that were tough when you started out will be a cakewalk later in the game, but of course that means there will be areas that are just too difficult to wander into until you've leveled up.

For example, the world area of Inquisition - we'll get back to how freaking huge it is in a second - is dotted with dragons. They have returned, and you can spend your time and resources in tracking them down to be known as dragonslayer by the people. But be warned, the bits we were shown in the demonstration were terrifying; dragons move and attack with their breath in very deadly ways, and your party will be hard-pressed to take them out.

"Each dragon encounter is hand-crafted, and they are designed to kick your ass," Laidlaw said. You don't have to kill dragons, it's optional gameplay, but every time you do you'll get resources and prestige you can use to build up the Inquisition.

During the demo, in which the party explored a region called Crestwood that was afflicted by problems resulting from the holes in The Veil, and later conquered an enemy fortress, it was revealed that Leliana and Varric Tethras will both be able to join the player's squad. (Also confirmed to return is Morrigan, though in what capacity remains to be seen.) While in-game dialogue was brief, it did reveal a heavy focus on the relationships between characters. One can only assume you'll be able to enjoy difficult romances or outright orgies, just like in previous games.

Dragon Age 2 had voice actors for the male and female player characters, an easy enough feature considering players could only play as either a male or female human. As evidenced by the inclusion of the Qunari, Dragon Age: Inquisition restores the wider range of playable races available in Dragon Age: Origins. But fortunately for those of you who liked being able to hear your character talk, Inquisition won't be returning to the mute protagonists of the original game. Inquisition will feature fully-voiced protagonists for all races and genders.

BioWare told us the extent of this voice work is still in the discussion phase, but that it's seriously considering taking a page from the Saints Row series, with a range of voice actors to reflect differences between Dragon Age races, and possibly even differences in body type. Get ready to spend even more time customizing your character.

You can't see it here, but there's actually a new prompt that will appear above each choice when you make a major decision. It won't tell you what will happen as a result of your choice, but it will clarify what that option does, so you don't wind up accidentally beheading someone when you just wanted to threaten to cut off his legs, or something.

"We never wanted players to take actions they didn't understand," said Laidlaw.

In hands-off demos, you the Kotaku reporter don't get to decide which action the Inquisitor takes. They choose for you: abandon Crestwood and send your troops back to the keep to regroup. This pisses off Varric, one of your dwarf companions (returning from DAII). It leads to a lot of snarky comments, and you get mad at BioWare for making what seems to be a pretty bad choice.P

Incidentally, what is perhaps most impressive about what I've seen so far from Dragon Age: Inquisition is the way in which it makes you feel like you're actually in the middle of a giant war. As I watched our Inquisitor climb and fight through the hills and caves near Crestwood, soldiers flanked the roads and fought enemies on the mountains. There's a lot happening in this world.

There are little bits of environmental interaction, too your character's boots will collect mud. She'll lean into hills as she climbs. She can use a spell or a torch to burn a warboat on the coast nearby.

Combat is still based on a four-person party, and you can still control any individual member as well as pause time and zoom out into a full top-down view. The impact of spells and melee strikes inherits a lot from Dragon Age 2, but what I saw had a greater sense of weight and impact there were no arbitrarily exploding torsos, for one thing. The new game has been built in the Frostbite engine, and environments are partially destructible. We were shown a wooden bridge being destroyed to send some archers tumbling to their deaths, and smaller scenery items barrels, barriers etc can be blown up or cast aside by magic.

Tactics the system by which friendly AI behaviours can be programmed will return, and full friendly fire for magic will be an option for players that want it. Interestingly, health regeneration will be very limited: adventuring for any length of time will mean bringing healing supplies with you or having a mage with the right abilities on hand. It's nice to see these kinds of hardcore mechanics making their way back into mainstream RPGs, and it seems like a natural fit with the size of the world BioWare are creating.

Finally, content in the game won't scale with the player's level. This means that certain encounters or areas will be off-limits until the Inquisition's power grows. As someone who feels that scaling difficulty creates as many problems as it solves, I'm pretty excited about this change.

The dialogue wheel makes a return and will be the primary method of offering the player the choices and decisions they have to make which will help (establish what kind of leader they want to be) and ultimately shape the world around them. Much like the combat, there are less structured mechanics outside of dialogue that can have a huge affect on your environment. One example given was a large dam near Crestwood that could be used to assist clearing out some attackers, but would obviously have a huge impact on the landscape. Like in previous Dragon Age titles, the choices you make will also have consequences and an impact on your relationships with your party members, who will comment on your decisions. Perry states that (in Dragon Age Inquisition, actions speak louder than words) and that (actions or inactions can open up content in the future or can close doors forever).

Discovery and exploration are being cited as a huge part of Dragon Age Inquisition and Lee and Perry demonstrated some of this during their demo. Opting to head through a cave to flank the enemy, the player picks up a Veil Fire torch which shows up markings on a cave wall that could lead to additional quest lines, loot and more. Mounts are also being introduced in Dragon Age Inquisition, primarily as a mechanic to (encourage people to explore the world) and should encourage players to travel and explore every inch of the world.

Establishing and taking over enemy keeps in the various areas of Dragon Age Inquisition seem to be a huge part of the game. During the gameplay demo, we were shown an assault on one particular keep that the player had already started to wear down by poisoning their well, ambushing patrols and drawing out their troops by lighting their signal fires. All of these things reduce the overall defence of the enemy keep and can make the final siege a bit easier to carry out. Like all combat in the game, a full frontal attack isn't necessarily the best approach and there's more than one way to assault. Once you have captured a keep, you'll gain access to their resources and establish an Inquisitor presence in that area.

Throughout, what BioWare most wanted to tell us, but weren't prepared to show us, was just how significant your impact on the world can be. (Tough, hard-hitting, with long-lasting consequences) they said. Packed with (dilemma) they said. (Complex choices) they added. (What kind of leader do you want to be?) they appealed. Trying to nail this down a bit more with Cameron Lee, it seems this means that they're aiming to embellish on the studio's biggest talent here: letting you vary the way you're going to experience the story they were going to tell you either way. It's just this time out, they're suggesting those variations might be more significant than we've seen before.

And at this point, I think, it's worth noting the name. '˜Inquisition' is a pretty loaded word. Most people's minds will go immediately to Spain's previous approach, and if you can get past the Monty Python references, it takes you to a pretty ugly place. But Lee was keen to point out that an inquisition doesn't have to go that way. As he puts it, (you can be an arsehole, or be really cool.) Dragon Age's The Inquisition was originally created thousands of years ago, to address a serious issue back then, but over time it seemed it weakened, and then in the ultimate abandoning of its independent status, became part of the world's religious organisation, the Chantry. And then went away. You're now bringing it back. Times are terrible, and your character has head enough. Or to put it in Lee terms, (You just go, fuck this, going to do something about it.) How you go about it, it seems, should define the nature of your inquisitory ways.

What else can I tell you? You'll no longer auto-heal between battles. That's rather significant, really, and belies an attempt to give the combat more gravitas an effort redoubled when they say that health potions won't be in plentiful supply either. Locations won't scale to your level, so wander somewhere tough and you're going to get slaughtered, and need to look elsewhere. And the world is partly destructible, which they showed off in a couple of ways. Firstly, a combat sequence inside a keep had a few enemy archers stationed on an overhead bridge. So taking out the bridge supports during the fight saw them fall to their deaths. And taking some initiative seems effective too when approaching Crestwood we saw enemy boats arriving into port, so when passing the docked ships, firebombs were found in the inventory and used to set them on fire. That would prevent a tougher battle later on, we were promised, as it meant those ships wouldn't be able to deliver reinforcements. Oh, and dragons.

At this point the game's interface was obviously designed for a console (despite, as I say, being demoed on PC), but strong promises were made that the PC's would have a completely unique design by next Autumn. It makes sense to ensure the game can be operated via the simplicity of a controller, and then have the complexity added back in for us after. They nailed that with DA:O (somewhat screwing the console version, leaving out the pausable battles!), so there's no reason to think it won't happen again here.

(I mean, we're not gonna have a Modron wandering around in Dragon Age,) Laidlaw qualifies. (It won't fit the world. But we can still look at our characters and say, '˜Are they intriguing enough? Do they offer wildly different perspectives?')

Perhaps even more exciting, however, is the prospect of choices heavily inspired by Planescape's exceedingly multifaceted approach. That, claims Laidlaw, is the real meat of this Dragon Age-Planescape sandwich, and he's quite happy to offer variety and choices with real consequences even if that means many players won't see a fourth of the game on their first playthrough. He continues, growing ever more animated:

(The big thing Torment brought to the table was offering a lot of solutions to problems really cool solutions. Not everything was fighting. Oftentimes being persuasive or having certain stat checks might take care of it. It was like, '˜I have a wisdom stat of 25, so let's shortcut the entire ending.' I really like that kind of stuff. It also did a great job of acknowledging the path you chose in the game.)

(That's something we're trying to explore more deeply. You know, it's one thing to make a choice. That's fine. But what about the aggregate of your choices? What's the long-term effect? And occasionally saying, '˜Well look, there's this really cool scenario, and not every player's going to see it.' But as developers, we're trying to get more efficient in our work because it lets be more like, '˜Not everyone's gonna see this. That's cool. That's not a problem. That's not wasted money. That's awesome.' Our goal is that it's a significant amount showing a big degree of exclusivity. A quarter or so.)

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