Dragon Age: Inquisition Previews
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Digital Spy has word from cinematic designer John Perry that the combat will be "challenging":
"It forces you to think about the entire adventure as opposed to a single encounter," cinematic designer John Perry told Digital Spy.
"It really forces you to strategize. Who do I need to bring with me? I can only carry so many spells, so should I bring a healer or something like that, and if not, I'll double down on my potions.
"It really makes your focus on resource management, how you build your party, using their strengths to strategically mitigate that damage in those battles.
"Overall, it forces you to think about how you'll get through this series of fights, as opposed to how I can get through fight to fight to fight. It's more a long-term approach to the adventure."
Computer and Videogames:
After just a few steps in Crestwood, our hero (a fully voice-acted avatar replaces DA: II's Hawke, and can be customised from human, dwarven, elven and qunari templates) received a quest. The area, it seems, has an outlaw problem, and solving it poses a very Bioware dilemma: we can either rush to save a village besieged by enemies, or ignore it and focus on defending wounded allies at a settlement. While it's possible to save both, letting either get destroyed will cut off entire questlines. Harsh, but that's the price of player freedom - consequences have actions.
There's greater variation outside of missions, too. Keeps are a bit like Assassin's Creeds' outposts, and there are several ways in. Provided your party contains a rogue, he can sneak past the gate and unlock it. Or, if you've got a mage, she can blast it clean off the hinges instead (it's slightly noisier). There are keeps in most major areas, and once you've destroyed all occupiers and hoisted the flag, you can fashion them in three distinct styles: go military and erect great stone turrets and guard posts; go political and the keep turns into a grand white capitol building; go with espionage and you'll get lookout towers and camouflage netting.
Each route attracts different crowds to your keep, and therefore unlocks different quests and jobs. Elsewhere in the region, players can cap noxious gas vents to unlock sulphur (as used in alchemy) and gain entry to the cave system below it.
Games.on.net:
The first hint of this amalgamation of its predecessors' differing approaches is that Dragon Age: Inquisition lets you role-play as one of multiple races, including the physically imposing Qunari, while also telling a predefined story. As a leader of the Inquisition you're charged with discovering the origin of the Fade Rifts that are spawning nightmarish terrors into the world of Thedas but how you go about that is up to you.
Your choice of class and race as well as the action you take influences the direction and ethos of the Inquisition. Your choices will also affect your relationships with your immediate party members and it's apparent that the wry humour that stood out in the first two games will return here.
There's more choice and variety for defining your own character, then, and this flexibility spills over into the combat, too. Tactical View makes a welcome return and offers a paused, top-down view of the battlefield, from where you can direct the individual members of your four-person party. There's also the choice to take direct control of party members and adopt a more free-flowing approach to combat.
Eurogamer:
"The visual fidelity differences are huge," he said. "For example, the shaders you can put on the characters through different weather systems. The build up system we have, like when you walk through mud, the mud builds up on the leg, then if you're in a fight, blood goes on top of the mud.
"One of our graphics programmers took a nug and overlayed all these different things on it. Eventually it looked like a nug that had been dipped in chocolate because there was so much stuff that was put on top of it. That's all the power you can get from the gen four stuff. You'll see that sort of a difference.
"The spell visual effects are incredible on the gen four and high-end PC. On gen three they will be much lower fidelity. Seeing Vivienne bringing up that big fire storm is brilliant on gen four and high-end PC. That's the kind of stuff that will make this a gen four experience."
