New details about the upcoming “Dragon Age: Inquisition” have been released. There’s lots of them.
“These are hundreds-and-hundreds-of-tons beasts. They don’t stand still. They destroy the environment as they charge you. The animators looked at how cats move. Imagine a couple-hundred-ton cat with claws and horns. That’s what it looks like,” Bioware producer Cameron Lee said.
Lee told the Wall Street Journal that developers took full advantage of the game’s Frostbite 3 engine, which was used for Battlefield 4. This engine opens up new possibilities that weren’t possible in the two previous Dragon Age games. The graphic capabilities of the next-gen consoles also allow more detail to be built into the game, such as 3D facial scans.
“The visual fidelity immediately jumps up to just an amazing level. The lighting is just stunning,” said Lee. “That allowed us to create a high-fidelity game, allowed us to do destruction in the world. The dragon charges at you, destroys a building.”
Lee said that the game will also play well on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
Players in the game will play as the Inquisitor, a customizable protagonist, while the main story revolves around civil way and the need for the Inquisitor to save the world.
Lee said that the game will probably take players between 40 and 50 hours to finish, although with all the side missions and potential exploration, there will be over 100 hours of gameplay.
The new lead character will enable more themes, said executive producer Mark Darrah.
“Hawke’s story, it’s not done, but the most important event of his life is essentially what’s happening in Dragon Age 2. With the warden from Dragon Age: Origins he carries a lot of very divergent baggage. Anything from he could be dead to maybe there’s a kid in the picture, maybe he’s actually ruling Ferelden with Anora,” he told PCGamer.
“He’s a very difficult character to proceed with because the universe is in very different places based on the events of the Dragon Age: Origins. Just reflecting those changes in the future games is a big challenge. To actually have him as a playable character is just—it would tie our hands too much. It would require us to make a story that was too constrained.
“When we started this franchise, what we really wanted to always be doing was telling the story of the world, as opposed to the story of a single character. When we have a character, these events are big and world-shaking. We basically are trying to tell the story in the best way possible, rather than trying to have an arc for a single character.”
The transition into the new game from the previous two is pretty big, Darrah added.
“In a lot of ways Inquisition has been the game that we’ve really wanted to make from the beginning. From a systemic perspective Dragon Age 2 is actually very similar to Dragon Age: Origins. Its bones are the same, but we’ve put a very different outfit on top of it, for a lack of a better term.
“Dragon Age 2, we decided we want to try something, to try to do very different storytelling, something much more personal, something much more tightly constrained. No chosen one, no clear overarching threat. I don’t think it was a perfect success, but that was intentional.
“A lot of the other changes that are perceived, the overall scope of the game or the perception of the combat getting a lot simpler or waves and things like that—not intended, exactly. That was supposed to be more evolutionary. I think we just overreached. We pushed too hard.
“Because of Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age: Inquisition is having to be a lot more ambitious, to address those concerns and really try to get back much more to the roots of the franchise. Much more about tactical combat and a higher level of deliberate difficulty. More clear overall story, with the moral choices still in there, but much more in vein of Dragon Age: Origins style storytelling. You’re right to ask. The goal wasn’t to revolutionize the series every single time, but Dragon Age 2 forced our hand to a certain degree.”
Check out more of newly released screenshots from the game, which is slated for an October 7 release date, below.
