Dragon Age: Inquisition E3 Interviews

Even though it’s already been roughly two weeks since E3, interviews and articles based on Los Angeles’ trade fair keep popping up more or less regularly. This time, we’ve rounded up a couple of Dragon Age: Inquisition-themed interview.

First, Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Nathan Grayson chatted with producer Cameron Lee:

(We have the World Master system, which flows into everything from creatures to NPCs to bandits. The player has, for example, driven out a particular faction from an area based on decisions and actions they take and another faction may move in and take their place.)

(There’s a whole area in the game it’s one of the highest level areas in the game, we kind of designed it for people to play after they finish the story that’s kind of a pitched battle. So you and your party come through and push the enemy back and back, further througout the whole area. And from that, the village that’s nearby changes. Maybe there’s more merchants on the roads and stuff like that, which then affects the in-game economy as well. It’s quite a complex and dynamic system.)

That actually sounds really neat, like someone got a little Mount and Blade in my Dragon Age and definitely not in a bad way. And on the point of character personality, Lee further soothed me with sweet, sweet words. There’s a whole new dialogue system, it turns out, and it is, much like World Master, rather dynamic and reactive.

(Characters are even more fully fledged than they were in Dragon Age 2,) he claimed. (They have much stronger goals and personal ambitions and personalities. Characters have stronger interactions now as well. Fans have always loved the interactions between followers now, so we made them much better. Hopefully you chuckled when you saw that little conversation when we were riding through a village, when [Iron] Bull is like, ‘˜I want to throw Sera over the front ranks’ and stuff like that. I love that bit.)

(At some points you can interject into those moments of follower banter. We’ve got this new dialogue system. We’ve still got the original, but now we also have a real-time thing. You can walk past people and they’ll start talking to you, and the dialogue wheel pops up, but you’re not locked into it. So you can walking away or go into it. When you’re running through the wilderness and your followers start talking to each other, the wheel might pop up, and you could say something like, ‘˜You know what? Sera? I want Bull to throw you. See what it looks like, guys.’ So you can be more involved with characters and their interactions.)

Lee was apparently fairly busy at this E3, because GameReactor also interviewed him, this time in video form: