Dragon Age: Inquisition Interview

There’s a new Dragon Age: Inquisition article-style interview over at RPGWatch, which covers combat, conversations, choices and consequences and all the usual subjects. Here’s a snip:

My first interest was the combat in Dragon Age: Inquistion and what it would be like compared to its predecessors. Jonathan Perry (JP) started out with saying that they received a lot of feedback on combat and how it changed from Dragon Age: Origins to Dragon Age 2. They are taking all this feedback while developing Dragon Age: Inquisition to define what combat will be like in the game. Overall Dragon Age: Inquisition will be much more focused on tactical combat. Using your party members’ unique abilities, you can get more strategic about how you are using your party in combat. For this purpose you can use what JP named Pause and Play (which sounds as Real-Time-with-Pause) to position your party members and give them commands for what they will use as attack or defense action once you continue to play, thus making full use of your party’s abilities. This should accommodate the more strategic players, but Dragon Age: Inquisition will also keep the very fast reactive combat from Dragon Age 2 as they feel it worked very well for a lot of players too. These two styles will be meshed so you can decide for yourself which combat style you want to use. Furthermore the enemy design has been changed and has become quite complex. They are not just going to drop from the sky and start hammering on you, but they are more intelligent and will work together against you, as well as using each other’s strengths in combat.

My next interest was concerning some of the role playing elements and if there were any changes expected to Dragon Age 2. For this Melanie Faulknor (Mel) mentioned they got quite some feedback on how choices and consequences were handled in Dragon Age 2, resulting in improving Dragon Age: Inquisition such that your choices do matter. There is a lot more reactivity and there are more different scenarios possible depending on your choices.

JP adds to this that these choices can be made in conversations, but actions speak louder than words, so you could say to a person one thing, but if the situation changes and you feel you should have chosen differently, you can still do that and shape the future differently. Both your actions and inactions can and will result in different outcomes. In many of the situations that occur in the game there is no right answer and choosing one will not be that easy.