Dragon Age: Inquisition Info Tidbits

A lot of info has emerged from GameInformer’s coverage of Dragon Age: Inquisition in the latest issue of the mag, with some of the salient points rounded up in bullet point form on NeoGAF. Here’s a few details that might interest our readers:

-At least three playable races (female/male of humans/dwarves/elves). They’re considering Qunari.
-Same three classes.
-Instead of just your characters growing, you also grow your inquisition army through lots of various methods ranging from doing favors, blackmail, finding ancient lore, getting ancient relics, obtaining secrets, making connections, etc, etc. An example of how this helps you is that say a castle turns you away. If you only have a few people, you might just be turned away. However, if your inquisition is an army, you can just siege the castle to get inside.

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-The world is split up into parts across multiple countries, but they’re large and explorable. Instead of progress being gated by how many of the missions you’ve completed, you are gated by the power of your inquisition. So, you have to go explore across all these areas and find ways to increase the power of your inquisition. Basically think of like DA2’s first act where you had to amass a ton of gold, but on a much larger/broader scale with a lot more choice/variety in what you do, and that the entire game works like that. Also, the inquisition buffing stuff doesn’t overlap with your character growth mechanics like gold did, so you don’t have to avoid buffing yourself to save your cash. Their goal is that ultimately you can do the types of content you like and explore the places you like and still finish the game.
-They want to increase the variety of things you do. Think of your traditional kind of open world game where you have all sorts of various quest option types.
-The map spans from Eastern Ferelden to Western Orlais. “Each of the areas we’re building is bigger than anything we’ve done before.”
-The zones are all traditional open world zones where it’s large open and there’s interesting stuff scattered all around that can start quests or open a new side dungeon, etc, etc.
-You can run into random monsters in the wild and have a mount to help go through the giant open areas. There’s a lot more environmental variety.

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-The PC version’s controls will be tailored to the PC unlike DA2.

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-Wants to make the action less frantic and more deliberate, returning to more tactics-oriented approach to encounters. Big return to party-based tactics
– Part of that is slowing down speed of attacks, more important is designing enemies that force you to examine the battlefield and choose actions carefully
– Battles veer away from button mashing toward a structure where observation and reaction take precedence
– Instead of swarming enemies, your foes have specialized roles; work together and force you to size up the battlefield
– You won’t regularly see waves of new bad guys appearing out of nowhere to extend encounters

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– (Trying to drive exploration- something that frankly, Bioware hasn’t done in a while.) (In a way like Baldur’s Gate, areas that existed in part just to spaces that you went to, but they had a story of their own.)

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– Warrior class has grappling chain that can pull enemies in close
– Enemy scenario: Fighting a massive, armored dragon, you can target a leg, send warrior into melee range to bash off armor, rogue can sneak up and poison the exposed limb, dragon stumbles around allowing others to unleash spells etc
– Weather effects can impact exploration, ex. Rainfall, desert sandstorms
– Rainy weather can make areas muddy, slowing down your traversal/agility in combat, while sandstorms can inflict damage causing you to seek shelter

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– Morrigan is not a party member; not a cameo role though
– Collect resources/materials and craft armor for you and all your party members; heavy emphasis on customization
– Each armor retains a certain iconic look, but looks different on each character. They want the squadmates to each have an iconic look, but customize armor to tailor to each while retaining elements of that iconic look

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– Game begins as Thedas is in chaos
– Chantry and the mages are at war
– The Seekers of the Truth and Templars are no longer tied to Chantry rule
– Ferelden continues to recover from the darkspwan Blight that ended 10 years ago
– Orlais is involved with a civil war
– Tear in the sky links the real world to the Fade
– Magic and demons come from Fade
– Rip allows demons to cross freely instead of using a mage host
– Demons/abominations are running free all over
– With everything going on, (there is a suspicious level of chaos in anticipation of this event)
– Reinstitute the Inquisition
– This is an organization that doesn’t answer to any outside power
– Inquisition puts aside politics and extracts answers

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– Still has classic enemies including ogres, elves, qunari

You can find a lot more at the aforementioned link, including info on one of the new companions.