Dragon Age: Inquisition Preview and Interview

There’s been an overload of Dragon Age: Inquisition-themed content lately, but considering the lack of information that preceded it, I’m willing to take my chances and assume our readers will forgive me for another news post on the title.

GameInformer has a preview based on the demo shown at PAX:

Before reaching the keep the party passes the several Red Templar boats parked on the shore. The player could choose to ignore them, but the BioWare rep decides to torch them with Antivan Fire, which cuts off their escape. Mages could also burn them with a flame spell.

Entering a cave underneath the keep, the player lights a torch with an enchanted flame called veilfire, which burns eternally. This magical light also has the ability to reveal ancient markings on cave walls, but the party doesn’t have time for archeological investigations. They catch up to the Red Templars attempting to breach the keep, and combat ensues.

The action is fast and furious, as the Inquisitor uses a Scorpion-like hookshot to drag enemies into his sword’s radius, and then finishes them with brutal swings. The combat doesn’t scale in Dragon Age Inquisition, so if you return to an area at a much higher level than you were before you can make quick work of the region’s enemies. On the flip side of that coin, every area has more difficult threats that you won’t be able to defeat your first go around, so tread lightly.

These Templars are accompanied by a towering pet behemoth with a thick layer of armor that prevents the party from taking him down. Cassandra uses her shatter armor skill to expose the demon and blows her war horn to keep its attention, which gives the rest of the party a window to focus its attacks on the chink in the armor.

After the fight the party’s health doesn’t immediately recover as it did in previous games, so the Inquisitor drinks a health potion. BioWare says players will have a finite number of potions, so you need to use them judiciously during the course of an adventure.

Official Xbox Magazine reports that BioWare still hasn’t decided whether to do multiplayer or not (keep in mind they said the same thing about Qunari as a playable race a month ago or so):

BioWare obviously broke the mould for multiplayer in RPGs with Mass Effect 3, whose Galaxy at War component integrates with single player, and has attracted a sizeable following. “The Mass Effect multiplayer stuff was really good, so we’ve certainly looked at options like that,” Lee told me. “But we haven’t decided on anything in terms of multiplayer at this point.

“Shooters are really easy to make,” he added, when I suggested that it would be harder to justify a Dragon Age multiplayer. “Well, not exactly ‘easy’ to make as a multiplayer game – but certainly there’s a known quantity to what you want to try and create.”

While fansite Dragon Age Saga has a more proper interview with cinematic director Jonathan Perry:

-How will the dialog and romance system work in DAI, what will be the new caracteristics of romances and dialogs ?

– I think the way we’ll handle relationships with the followers and potential romances and things like that will be very similar to the previous games. Unfortunately we can’t talk about who you can romance and how you romance them, cause I know we’ve had different systems, like kind of approval systems, in DA:O you could give gifts. We really aren’t able to talk about exactly how the relationships will work, but as in the previous games they will react to your decisions. As you Varric is very upset with what you chose to do as opposed to helping the villagers so that’s really impacted his relationship with you and that may have other consequences with your relationship with him.

-Does your class have an impact on other NPCs’ actions ?

-Your choice of race and class, we’ll try to react to that as much as we can, wether it’s through content or through the way characters talk to you, there may be some content that you would get as you know, one class or one race, that you might not get as an other class/race, but unfortunately I can’t get go in too much details we want to create a unique experience for you based on how you build your character.

-Is DAI the conclusion of the saga, or do you have some ideas for what will follow ?

– Mass Effect was always kind of going to be a trilogy, but we never planned out Dragon Age, there’s so much of Thedas that we still have left to explore, and I know from talking to D.Peter there’s a lot of story that , I don’t see this being the conclusion of Dragon Age.

Finally, this seems to be as good a moment as any to bring this tidbit of information from executive producer Mark Darrah’s twitter to your attention:

There will be a threshold that you will heal back to after combat. This threshold will change at different difficulties. #DAI

normal difficulty will have none, I hope?

likely a very small one so that revived characters aren’t literally at 1hp

Would like to ask if normal difficulty will be hard enough so we still have to watch out to not die in fight ?

yes