Dragon Age: Inquisition E3 Previews and Interview
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We have rounded up a few more Dragon Age: Inquisition-themed articles and videos that came out of this year's E3. Most of the impressions seem positive, though BioWare's widely-praised showing doesn't seem to have dispelled all doubts.
That said, it's clear that the folks at GameInformer were impressed, and decided to dedicate an entire article to five features of the game they found particularly striking:
The Vast World
Dragon Age II received its fair share of criticism for overused environments; the world didn't feel as impressive as Dragon Age: Origins. That's changing with Inquisition. The area we saw in our live demo alone is bigger than the entirety Dragon Age: Origins, according to creative director Mike Laidlaw. He says this is the biggest Dragon Age game yet. What's striking is how much the war impacts the land and lets you see the conflict. NPCs react to what's going on, and everything is in ruins. Even the enemies you fight and their relative population are influenced by how you play. For example, say you eliminate a lot of bears in one area. If you go back, the population dwindles. Looking in the distance, the area feels grand and never-ending, from mountains to waterfalls. Fortunately, BioWare included a mount system that helps you to navigate it. We saw a horse, but Laidlaw says Inquisition has numerous mounts to find and collect.
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Balancing Action And Tactical Combat
In Inquisition, you can approach situations by just heading straight into the action or stopping it to make some tactical decisions. The action combat looks really smooth, playing very close to Dragon Age II's combat, but more refined. It puts you right into the fray with tons of things going on at once. Expect your elven archer Sera to dodge incoming attacks with backflips, and see powerful spells make their impact on the enemy. However, for those who want to make sure they have their positioning down, the tactical view pauses the action so you can strategize, survey the area, and put your party members in the most advantageous spots. For instance, maybe there's a high ledge where you want to position your ranged characters, like archers. A tank like Iron Bull might serve you best being thrown right into the enemy line to absorb the bulk of the damage. If an enemy's back is turned, you can set a rogue to perform a stealth kill. Then you set your selections into motion. If you're not pleased with your choices, or see that maybe a positioning you thought would be good really isn't, you can easily switch back and make adjustments. Also, you can switch between different party members and control them directly at any time. This offers up some variety in how you approach battles. At first, I wasn't sure if I'd use tactical view, but seeing it in action changed my mind, as it can be extremely helpful in tougher battles. If you want to use your environment to your advantage, it looks super useful.
Videogamer.com, on the other hand, is a bit more cautious, though I'd be hard-pressed to call this preview negative:
Even with the glut of open world games it effortlessly holds its own, and, thankfully, there are still some nods to the franchise in general. The breach a rift open that has allowed the human world to be infected with demons feels very much like The Fade, and the sheer amount of options when it comes to how to create and customise your character will keep even the most meticulous gamer happy.
The same can be said from a combat perspective as well. A mixture of real-time and tactical battles return, allowing you to fly forth with absolutely fury, or freeze events, take a look at the field and then slowly decide what actions to take. It's what the franchise has been doing since day one, although now it's all very much refined and, seemingly, far easier to use.
Unfortunately, Inquisition does feel very much like the Canadian studio having to start all over again. The promise of returning characters is a welcome one, but by this stage I'd have expected them to have been front and centre, hours of choices and branching paths evolving them into entirely different people. Mass Effect was a great example of how to make that work and knowing that, potentially, the likes of Alistair and Morrigan won't have a great impact on events is a little disappointing. It's also, one would assume, the reason why the number '˜3' has been ignored in favour of a subtitle. The stories may be linked, but this is BioWare's attempt at redeeming Dragon Age.
Like many other Bioware games, Dragon Age: Inquisition keeps the player customizability and choice at the forefront, offering different races, genders and classes to choose from when designing your protagonist. In addition to aesthetic customization, Inquisition allows for 200 different skills and spells across the classes, all of which can be assigned throughout your party. The Inquisition party is one of the game's biggest features, allowing wide customization of your team and how they function both in and out of battle. The basics of equipping specialized armor and weaponry is a rather common step for RPG's, but Inquisition's War Table acts as the main hub outside of basic equipment as well. As the leader of your Inquisition, you can assign your party members to different tasks, whether it's obtaining resources, exploring new regions, or completing missions. Bioware mixes traditional RPG customization with a touch of micromanagement, giving the player tremendous control over their team.
The combat also takes full advantage of Bioware's commitment to the Inquisition gameplay. In the preview, the character organizes the formation of their party members to take out a dragon enemy. Support characters stay out of the fray for empowerment spells, magic and archery specialists stay at distant or high-altitude spots for sharpshooting, while steadfast melee characters man the frontlines. The preview also introduced us to the Tactical View, allowing for full arrangement and strategy even during combat. Better yet, the dragon's limbs can be individually targeted, giving the player even more opportunity to strategize. The heightened AI was demonstrated in the alpha with an archer staying back out of battle, prioritizing ranged attacks from higher ground for the best effect. Laidlaw explained the development team's commitment to making every battle purposeful, shying away from the random battles of RPG's past, along with stronger enemy AI. Enemies will use teamwork just as much as you will, constantly offering dynamic battles.
Combat is more fluid than ever before in a Dragon Age game. Hardcore Dragon Age players are familiar with tactical view, and it makes a return in Dragon Age: Inquisition. This time around you can set the line of fire for all of your characters attacks, allowing you to harm multiple enemies with single attacks; this is especially useful for mages and archers. Special attacks can also be used once your party builds up a specific meter that fills up gradually through combat. One of these attacks was "haste" which allows you to slow down your enemy while your team speeds up.
Past critics of the Dragon Age series who were unhappy with the lack of weapon and armour customization will be happy to know that both elements are completely customizable, even down to the cosmetic appearance. You can even use materials collected by yourself and the inquisition team to craft new items.
The presentation seemed to take place in the mid-game, when the Inquisition is already established and is now exerting their influence in different areas. Our objective was to infiltrate a keep and claim it as ours. We had sent scouts to hold the keep but we hadn't heard from them in a while and it was at this point that we decided to go in and investigate. We find our scout being interrogated for information and were told by the developers that was because we chose her to scout ahead, our relationship with her as well as her personality changed. Team dynamics are a strong suit of BioWare and it's good to see them sticking with that feature.
We run into one of our team's old mentors, who has betrayed us. Here we are given the familiar good and bad morality choices and after some questionable decisions and a lengthy battle with the former mentor, shit really hits the fan. We're left with the option of leaving our team for the greater good or sticking with them and perhaps dooming the world. Now this entire experience was a result of the choices made earlier in the game and exclusive to this playthrough. Your decisions and actions will alter your individual playthrough and affect what you experience.
GameFront is disappointed the game doesn't seem to build on what they think Dragon Age II did well and dubs it "generic fantasy game":
What we saw of Inquisition was mostly a dungeon crawl in the guise of an open world. Combat speed is between the sluggishness of Origins and quickness of DA2, and Darrah inexplicably made a point of telling us you can directly control any companion during battle, saying it in that (feature-touting tone) E3 presenters have even though that's how Dragon Age has always worked.
Now you can also pause the game and issue specific orders to everyone. Cool, yeah. There will be lots of combat and probably it will be passably enjoyable at worst, as (decent combat) is one of Bioware's hallmarks. They also showed a battle with a dragon, which I have to say was probably a bad idea given the extreme scarcity of dragons in previous games. Showing a dragon battle in a Dragon Age preview is like showing the end boss fight in a preview of most other games.
That said, there are dashes here and there of Bioware things. Darrah promised (emergent) world thingies, like how as people in an area start to like you because you've done quests for them, there will be fewer bandits and your Inquisitors will start patrolling the roads. (This is a (living, breathing world.) Take a drink.) Also, at some point Leliana was captured and tortured offscreen because of something the Inquisitor did (also offscreen), and so now she's mad at you or something. It's hard to really get into concrete examples of how branching mechanics work in a demo, especially when only like two minutes of the demo are dedicated to them.
I wasn't able to play it, but I watched live gameplay footage at a presentation rather than a prerendered trailer. It wasn't ideal, but it's definitely better than nothing. From my presentation, they chose a female Qunari mage to show off one of the new races players can pick in character creation. This particular mission was to stop the war between the mages and the templars, something that has been brewing since the original Dragon Age. The game world in DAI has opened up considerably. Players are no longer restricted to Ferelden, and like The Witcher 3, if you can see it in the world, you can go to it (Hell yeah, bring on the open-world gameplay - Ed. Vader). There are no invisible boundaries here either. And just how big is it? The game's executive producer said that the area our demo was in was three times larger than the part of Ferelden shown in Dragon Age: Origins (That does sound impressive. DAO was huge. - Ed. Vader). At least there are various mounts you can acquire to help you travel through it as quickly as possible instead of just walking.
With that open world comes an open story, much more so than in Inquisition's predecessors. As per the BioWare standard, you have a lot of control over the main character's interactions with others, which leads to a branching plot that varies according to how you choose to play. In the preview, we were shown an example of a scene that only shows up for players who make a certain series of choices. The player's party forced their way into a dungeon to rescue an ally - one who had been captured and tortured as a result of the main characters actions and was, understandably, a bit peeved. Had the player made different choices along the way, this scene would have played out differently, or not at all.
When they talk about branching paths, BioWare aren't messing around; this isn't Mass Effect 3, where different story routes converge to bring only a handful of truly unique endings. "We've got about 40 major endings, and then from that, we tried to calculate it, something like a thousand other smaller variations," Lee told me.
Expanding on this branching narrative is a reworking of the way romances work, to create a more authentic process of courting potential suitors. "It's not like in the old games, where you'd just give gifts, get your approval rating up, and suddenly you can snog them," Lee explained. "It's more about you interacting with them, you going on a quest together, you helping them with their personal goals." The whole thing looks a lot more lifelike and nuanced.
Enemies have gotten a makeover and of course dragons are the most formidable. Not only do they have a completely revamped look, their combat behavior is far more advanced than previous Dragon Age titles. Before you can come close to killing a dragon, you will need to take out its legs individually, this is not as easy as it seems. It was altogether a very impressive battle and probably one of the most challenging dragon battles I have ever witnessed in a game and, yes, that includes Skyrim.
As the Inquisitor you have gained a special ability to close Breaches, which are massive holes between our world and the Fade that are beginning to open and unleash all manner of evil upon the land. In order to mend a breach you will need to fend off waves of demons. You are also heading up the Inquisition and can use your wartable to send out troops to certain areas, assign soldiers to combat, dispatch spies upon your enemies, or search for resources.
From what we were privy to in our tour, it looks like Inquisition's gameplay will incorporate a lot of aspects familiar to the series along with a good amount of refinements and innovations. You'll be able to choose your main character's gender and select from four races and three classes, and put together a full party that will back you up in combat and interact with your story-based decisions throughout the game. Like the previous games, combat will be active and tactical, allowing you to switch between party members and pause the game to utilize your team members' strengths while exploiting the battlefield. The skills and spells that we saw were as hard-hitting as ever, and we were told that the area populations of wildlife and monsters will depend on your actions. Thin the bear population for their hides, and you'll see less of them over time; spread your influence through your adventures, and more of your troops will show up in a given region.
Inquisition will offer over 200 talents and spells with which to customize your characters, and will have mounts and fast travel to help you get around the world more quickly, and in style. We got to see a tremendously epic battle with a dragon that showed off a bunch of flashy spells and skills, and illustrated how bosses (at least, the one being shown) have separate hit boxes for their heads, feet, hindquarters, and more. When hit, the dragon would react to the specific area from which it was attacked, which suggests some interesting possibilities for boss AI. At one point, one of the characters used a shared party resource called Focus to slow time for everyone except for the party, and this led to more spell-flinging and dragon-punching.
In Dragon Age Inquisition, character and item customization has been expanded to give players the greatest amount of choice possible. The new crafting system allows for items like armor and weapons to be unique, getting you the look you want with the stats that keep you alive and dealing massive damage. Character levelling works as you would expect in an RPG, and BioWare promises over 200 talents and spells to choose from. You can also fully customize the members of your party, and indeed take direct control of them in battle as if they are the hero meaning their stats are just as important as yours.
The requirement for well trained and equipped characters is said to be a crucial factor for player success. Our demo showcased a battle with a dragon, said to be one of the toughest foes in the game, and ones that will easily overpower unprepared parties. The demo crew was well outfitted however, and after a lengthy battle sequence were able to get the best of the beast. We watched as the battle switched between multiple perspectives, either on the fly or during the pause mode. With the focus on third person action, the game utilizes a straightforward control scheme: a dodge button, three attack buttons, and one special ability. This may come as a disappointment to fans of the original game and having the option to use a wide number of spells and attacks at any given time. Perhaps that is also possible in Inquisition but the developers would not comment.
While the core combat works off the similar combat engine to Dragon Age II, a key difference is the ability to pause the battle, and zoom out to a strategic perspective. This allowed for players to set their ranged characters to attack from the back, and use more defence orientated characters to block entrances and protect them. The system was very snappy and intuitive, and allowed you to view to action from multiple perspectives, then take back over manually if you change your strategy or for any other given reason.
The demo closed with the best possible demonstration of these systems through a battle with a dragon purportedly the strongest enemies that you'll face in the game. It will be crucial for your players to work as a team in order to firstly, take down the legs of the dragon and then lay some punishment while it was down. In this instance however, the dragon had flown off before it was finished. While the challenge will certainly be appreciated, the battle felt like it went on for really long, so hopefully this isn't a hindrance in the final game.
This time around, the devastation is not just something you may encounter from time to time, or hear about from NPCs. Instead, as you traverse the countryside you will find side quests and dialogues about the ways (both big and small) that locals are affected by the ravages of the war between the Mages and the Templars. You can even encounter environmental obstacles that can be overcome to gain access to new areas.
Moving around the world is also a more varied experience. There is fast travel between major locations, but with a much larger map, it can take way longer to get around. Thankfully, Bioware has added mounts to the game to get you from point A to point B. There will be normal and exotic mounts to collect, speeding up your movement and adding variety to exploration.
Speaking of variety, Dragon Age: Inquisition has an all new crafting system. For the first time in Dragon Age, you'll be able to craft your own equipment and customise the look and stats.
Ashley "Lady Insanity" Serano published a breakdown of the 35-minute behind-closed-doors demo:
EXPLORATION AND ENVIRONMENT
Certain areas will have (look points). By viewing through these look points, the Inquisitor can mark and track different (shards) in an area. In the Hinterlands, there are 23 shards present for retrieval.
Specific markers also indicate places to set up camp. These are designated areas; it seems players can't just set up shop wherever they wish.
Remember how the devs said there will be destructible environments? How about constructible? In the demo, the player can construct a previously broken bridge that was signaled by the command (Energize).
Horses can be called and will appear after you "whistle" for them. Other horses and mounts beyond what was shown in the demo will be available.
SPELL EXAMPLES
One of the spells is a yellow-colored slow, which slows down time for everything except the party. Cold Snap is another.
Firewall is really effective - when casted, it hits everything in the line that the mage strikes. The fire is essentially a blockade at that point, causing a damage-over-time on anything afflicted by the fire. Judging by the gameplay, AI automatically avoids it at all costs (which is good for choke points).
GameTrailers has some positive "eyes-on" impressions with a somewhat surreal discussion on E3 demo horses, while Giant Bomb's Jeff Gerstmann doesn't seem extremely impressed and notes that the game looked more action-y than fans of Dragon Age: Origins might like.
Finally, PC Gamer has a video interview with creative director Mike Laidlaw.
