Dragon Age: Inquisition Previews, Interview, Gameplay Footage

A new wave of previews and interviews for Dragon Age: Inquisition has been released, likely the last one before the game’s release on November 18th, and, as usual, we’ve rounded them up for your reading convenience.

PC Gamer has a write-up on the game’s first 5 hours:

The most important of these elements is, of course, the combat, which again enables players to mix realtime action with a more tactical approach. Spin back on the mouse wheel to zoom the camera out, or tap T, and you’ll pause time. From here you can assign targets to party members, order them to take potions, or choreograph their movement as carefully as your inner Sun Tzu demands. I only found the need to dip into it during the meatier encounters, like a battle with a three-storey tall Prideful Demon in which it proved advisable to keep the characters close to each other for quick revives, or have them focus on the spawning mobs before returning their attention to the boss.

For the most part, though, playing on normal difficulty I was able to let the AI look after itself. Deeper in, I suspect I’ll need to tweak some of the parameters which tell characters what abilities to favour and under what circumstances to use potions. Because I’d chosen to play as a mage, my party was a little too heavy on ranged damage and I found that switching Varric from using Bianca, his signature crossbow, to operating close with a decent dagger we’d found provided a much better balance. Again, glancing at a colleague’s screen, I noticed that they were whirling around the battlefield like a refugee from a Platinum game, which seemed quite a bit more dynamic than my stand-at-the-back-and-spam-spells-for-max-DPS approach. But the fact you can hotswap between all party members should provide welcome scope for variety.

With some relief I can also report that the mouse and keyboard interface, and the menus in general, feel like they’ve been designed considerately. I’m slightly less convinced, though, by how the game explains its multitude of systems early on. Clearly there’s a balance to be struck between overly explicatory hand holding and tossing players alone into the Marianas Trench, and in general I’d rather be allowed to work things out for myself, but a few elements felt unnecessarily opaque.

And an interview with executive producer Mark Darrah:

PC Gamer: What did you guys take from the success of the Mass Effect games that has found its way into the DNA of Dragon Age?

MD: They’re definitely, at their hearts, different from a franchise perspective. Dragon Age is very much darker, and more mature, just from a tone perspective. Mass Effect is like a space opera. It’s essentially a teen rated IP at heart. It wants to be something that could be on television on a Sunday afternoon. Dragon Age, if it was a television show, would be on HBO. So, from a thematic story-telling perspective, they’re so different it’s hard for them to share. But if you look at the flow of gameplay from Mass Effect through 1, 2, and 3, they actually experiment with a lot of different things like the Mako was in Mass 1 but not in Mass 2.

We’ve been able to take a lot of learning just from that the experiences they’ve had with those different gameplay modalities, especially because when you have exploration as such a primary mechanic you need a lot of supplementary mechanics in there. Things to do in that space. In our case, we have horses but we don’t go the route of Mass 1 where the Mako is this entirely different scale of thing which changes the balance of everything. For us, mounts are much more about getting somewhere faster and we leave the additional mechanics for a later time.

…

PC Gamer: Do you think we’re in a golden age of computer RPGs? You’ve got games like Pillars of Eternity coming, and Wasteland 2 just came out it feels like a pretty fertile period for the genre.

MD: I think we’re seeing two things. With games like Wasteland 2, I think we’re seeing sort of a recapturing of that old school, top-down role-playing game from the late Nineties. I think, as well, something that’s happened pretty much every time the console generations turned over is we’ve seen the rise of a new dominant genre. Like, shooters were not a dominant genre a generation ago, they became dominant in what is now the last gen. And I think we’re about to see that again. I mean, granted, I’m not exactly unbiased on this topic but I think we may see this be RPGs moment again.

What you’ve seen before is right around the generation switch a game arrived that sort of signaled that change. Halo 1 signalled shooters on consoles. I think Skyrim, Far Cry 3 and those kinds of games signalled big, open world games. Not necessarily RPG games.

Polygon also has a write-up:

The formation of the Inquisition isn’t just an excuse to pull together a party of diverse characters although that happens as well, of course. But the Inquisition actually offers a gameplay system that loops you into the political machinations that have always been at the heart of the Dragon Age universe.

You aren’t just a solo band of adventurers traipsing through the wild completing quests; you’re responsible for a whole group, a whole movement, and a major part of your adventure will be focused on building up power, gaining allies and convincing the world that you’re the good guys.

And what’s the best way to accomplish these goals in a huge, semi-open-world RPG? Sidequests, of course!

After forming the Inquisition, I was shipped off to the game’s first full zone, the Hinterlands. This forested region includes Redcliffe Village, one of the main locations in Dragon Age: Origins. It’s home to bandits, roaming packs of wolves and poor refugees displaced by the constant fighting between mages and Templars. That last part makes it a perfect place to seek new friends.

Though I spent almost all of my first five hours of Inquisition in the Hinterlands, Darrah promises many more zones of similar size. He describes multiple desert areas, a snow-capped mountain, a rainy coastal zone and more.

“We try to refresh the visual language every couple of hours,” Darrah says. “You’re not always in the same kind of area. We can show you something really different.”

There are also multiple video previews, including Gaming Trend:

PlayStation Access:

And GameTrailers.