During a panel at PAX Australia Chris Priestly, Cameron Lee, Patrick Weekes and Karin Week from BioWare released a few hints about what’s to come in Dragon Age: Inquisition.
Firstly the group talked about how save games will carry over. Camaron Lee, Producer for Bioware, stated “We know what we want to do,” going on to say “It will absolutely come across – your decisions carry [and] will matter.” Exciting words for anyone who is worried that the third part of the Dragon Age saga will go the way of Mass Effect’s third act.
Chris Priestly elaborated with “There will absolutely be some ties to some of the previous games, maybe some of the books or that sort of thing that you’ll recognize if you’ve played the previous games…but they’re not going to be reliant on the previous games.”
This is a slightly odd statement to make given how Dragon Age: Inquisition will be taking place during the Mage-Templar war set in motion during Dragon Age 2. The confirmed returning character Morrigan, from Dragon Age: Origins, seems heavily ingrained in the third’s narrative. With her story having multiple rather different endings, a save from the first games ending seems rather important.
Later on in the panel the group discussed dialogue choices in both the Dragon Age series and Mass Effect. Lee on the topic said “some people were concerned that what they picked from the paraphrase text didn’t necessarily reflect what Hawke or Shepard said…We can improve on that.” Patrick Weekes chimed in by stating “What we don’t want to do is have every difficult moral decision rendered moot by the presence of brightly glowing text“.
Weekes also went on to say “What we want to do, at least on Inquisition, is we want to be aware of that. That doesn’t mean we never use anything like that, because the idea of having some kind of pre-requisite-based dialogue option that allows you to get a more optimal outcome is cool. Whether that is something you get by putting points into a stat, or by having someone in your party, or by making choices earlier in the game that unlock that dialogue option – that rewards the player playing the game. I like that.”
So what does all this mean? Well hopefully it means that Dragon Age Inquisition will be a good game first and foremost. After that many fans would be happy to not have a repeat of Dragon Age 2, which many felt was lacking the quality of the original. One thing many people agreed on however was the high quality of the companions and their impact on the story. After this panel, Bioware seems very eager to improve upon this.
The full panel can be viewed on Gamespot here.
Dragon Age: Inquisition will be out Fall 2014 on PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and Windows PC.
What do you think? Do you hold hope for a worthy sequel to the widely-loved origins? What do you want to see in the third, and possibly last part of the saga? Let us know in the comments.
