Dragon Age news had been very quiet post-E3 until a giant info dump this week. A lengthy Q&A, the various advisor reveals (including, at last, the identify of Scribbles), and the official release of the E3 demo has given fans a lot to chew on. As always, be aware of spoilers below!
The officially released E3 demo (featuring the female Qunari mage and split into two parts, the first of which matches the fan-recorded dwarf version), provides a clear video without all the static, noise, and middling camera work of the illicit one (and those streamed during interviews). I think acrimony within the fanbase (including sonorous finger-wagging from those who attended the event) could have been avoided if the devs had definitively said they were releasing their own version, but that's all water under the bridge at this point. It's worth noting, btw, that the game-build here is nearly three months old (that via Brian Crecente at Polygon who played through it with Mike Laidlaw; so that's not about content, just the game mechanics--not too much to be concluded from that other than game-elements are still being refined).
The second part features scenes that were not shown publicly anywhere, including Leliana's rescue (who expresses great bitterness at mages post-torture; something delightfully bemusing when the Inquisitor is a mage), a demon-filled fight, a battle against the Venatori (with the best demonstration of tactical fighting I've seen yet), and the full interaction with Alexius (more below). We already knew that Dorian had trained under Alexius, who is described as the leader of the mages we're trying to stop...so is he the leader of all the Venatori? The inference is there (and his speech about what he's done makes me wonder if Alexius is responsible for the tear in the Fade; it's worth noting he refers repeatedly to the "Elder One" who will destroy everyone). Reporters (Gieson Cacho specifically) mentioned that at their screening they actually saw the war table, so there's an element that has not been released, but in the Q&A this week the devs said we'll see something including it before the game comes out.
The Inquisition's power is not absolute: it must earn its place among the forces in conflict. Sister Leliana understands this well, and has called on an old friend, Lady Josephine Montilyet, to be the Inquisition’s ambassador in the halls of the influential. The eldest daughter of a noble Antivan family, Josephine is a rising star among diplomats, skilled at forging alliances with tact, grace, and carefully cultivated favors. She is a consummate planner who understands that resurrecting the Inquisition will require support and goodwill from Thedas's movers and shakers. Fortunately, the ambassador enjoys a challenge, and she sincerely believes that the Inquisition is the best way to halt the chaos sweeping Thedas.
It had been surmised some time ago that Scribbles, er, Josephine would be the diplomatic arm of the Inquisition and I'm interested to see how that plays out. She also joins Cullen as an advisor who is a romantic option.
And now for the Q&A (I've linked a number of sources below, although the most comprehensive is from princessstabbity[broken link has been fixed ]; credit to the devs for doing the Q&A as there was a ton of repetition along with troll questions mixed in):
-the Dwarven origin will be a surface Dwarf, while Human's who aren't mages will have a noble background
-there are 8 romances, one of whom is neither a companion nor advisor [correction via the link; 8 within the group plus one you can flirt with outside of it]; Cullen and Cassandra were confirmed to be straight only; two of the romances are race-locked
-mabari won't be appearing to fight with you
-while you can lose all but one of your companions, your advisers will never leave
-On the Twitter machine Patrick Weekes noted that we'll see Iron Bull deal with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)
-any chance of Shale or Zevran would appear in DAI were quashed, but Fenris was hinted at as a possible return (given the Tevinter connection and his hatred of mages it would make sense)
-Alistair's mother Fiona (The Calling) was confirmed
-We won't visit Kirkwall (no surprise), Orzammar (there goes one of my theories, although I'm not surprised), or Kal-Sharok--so the thaig we've seen in the promos remains unknown (and brings back the possibility of gamermd's theory of it being Kal'Hirol)
-major themes for the game are faith and leadership; the theme of leadership expected (we lead the Inquisition after all), but I'm interested to see how the element of faith will impact the story
-although it had already been confirmed, Flemeth and Dagna's appearances were re-confirmed
-all the voice talent for the inquisitor has been revealed
-readers of The Masked Empire we'll be able to figure out who killed Felassan
-the devs were asked if the Inquisition shot that looked like the Last Supper had any meaning and they responded with "That's really up to the player's interpretation"; this (I think) eliminates any direct comparisons and seems rather just a link to the "faith" element that the game explores
-there were bits on gameplay that you can read via the link above or more comprehensively here
-one of my favourite quotes: "Iron Bull likes bed time Olympics"
-just a note about Dragon Age Keep: while the team continues to add questions to it, given the content lock when the game hit Alpha (towards the end of May), none of this new material will impact the released game--this also means fans with early Beta access are in a unique position to know which content is most relevant
Once again AusGamers has conducted an excellent interview with Cameron Lee, who first talked about what kinds of things we can expect with DAI's style of open world:
You can go anywhere that you can see -- there’s complete freedom there. There’s all kinds of caves that you can explore into straight away; there’s villages, two different villages in that area [the Hinterlands], and there’s multiple other castles and outposts, and bandit camps and stuff like that. They’re all full of side-quests, activities, combat encounters; there’s a whole bunch of different things in there.
And (including thoughts on long-term playability):
the game isn’t structured such that you consume an area, then move onto the next, then move onto the next. It’s structured so that we encourage players to go back and forward between these different regions all of the time. Some of the areas in these regions are say too high level for you to get to go there originally -- there might be a dragon there -- so it’s, like, ‘I could go and fight it; I’m going to get killed, but I’m going’, so maybe you come back to that area later on. But then, when you finish the game, you’re still in the world, so you’re still going to do all of these different things. There’s parts of the game that we’ve built that are so difficult that we would only really want players to go there after they finish the story, because it’s just that high level. So it all sort of changes as you go through the story, and we want people to, as you said, have a lot of longevity in the game.
Then he talked about ways the world master system impacts what changes through the actions of the Inquisition:
one part in particular that I can recall: when you first go in there, it’s part of Orlais and there’s a lot of rebels, and you can do various side quests -- fight them, and clear them out -- that then brings in another faction that sort of takes their place almost, then you can do the same thing again, and something else occurs.
Which gives us some insight into how the Orlesian civil unrest impacts the game. And:
There’s another area which is like a complete enemy stronghold -- in terms of the whole region is a stronghold [which may be the Emprise du Lion] -- and you can come in and bring your Inquisition Forces in and almost fight this dynamic battle as you push the enemy back. You can send your soldiers in to defend this tower and stuff like that. So the world is quite dynamic. We don’t want it to be just time-based, we want it to be more based on the player’s actions, so if you as a player decide that you’re going to abandon this crew, then something is going to happen, but not just because you haven’t done anything. Because you don’t know how people will… they might be busy doing other stories and side-quests.
Then he talked about combat design:
We design the fights and the encounters, for the most part, assuming that there’s probably going to be a warrior, a mage and a rogue. So that’s three of the four [party members] that you can have. So the fourth one provides a little bit more flexibility to be whatever you want. So we generally design them like that, but that’s not to say that you can’t go in there with four mages, because you totally can. If you decide to do that, I’m sure you’ll be able to do it, but you’ve got to think about how to do it. The combat systems and the creatures and the enemy abilities, it’s so bloody complex that it’s almost impossible to create fixed encounters, so we just do it with a broad sense of assuming that there’s one of each class, and if they want to do all rogues, or all mages, or all warriors, or whatever combination, then have fun; go mental.
What about the AI?
So what we’ve done is we’ve created almost like a playbook system for the AI, so you can kind of… in the menu you can say, for the attack play, I want my characters to be doing this type of ability, and this type of ability -- not in mega, mega, fine detail, but just generalised. So that way when you say attack, everyone goes into attack mode, and you can do the same for defence and a number of different things. You can set those up really quickly, and really easily. We wanted to make it as impactful and as hardcore as it used to be, but simple enough that newcomers can get in there and get meaning out of it; get value out of the AI system. So that’s how we kind of do it, and you can change those AI settings on the fly. That’s one of the things that we’re going to do with Kinect, is you can actually just call it out and go “Defend” and everyone will go into defence.
The pre-set AI tactics sounds reminiscent of DA2, although I'm sure it's more sophisticated. Again to variation in the game via your choices:
that whole demo you saw [at E3], in the last half of it, when you’re fighting with Alexius and Felix, not all the players are going to see that, because going into that area is the result of a branching choice in the game. So you may have picked another area and you wouldn’t be going into that castle at all, you’d be going somewhere else entirely. There’s whole sections of the game that are like that, that we branch off entirely. You can go to Redcliffe Village, and see the consequences of you picking the other decision. So we’ve made sure that any exclusive content, you can still see the flip side of the consequences as well.
Which bodes very well for multiple playthroughs. Finally this:
We’re still working on some kind of companion app -- sort of iPad, iPhone, Android sort of apps -- that start to bring some of that theorycrafting out. I don’t want to go into too much detail about it, because we’re still working on it, but you can do things like create an awesome sword, in crafting, that has these great stats for this particular build, and you can share that sort of recipe almost, with someone else. So there’s all these sorts of different things that we’re doing.
Great stuff from both Lee and AusGamers, whose interviews continue to be among my favourites
Touching back on the Brian Crecente article from Polygon (link above), he goes through how gameplay works via an Xbox controller, but adds this little tidbit from Mike Laidlaw:
And as with Game of Thrones, Laidlaw points out, Dragon Age isn't too shy about killing off characters.
An interesting note to the world master system via Mike Futter who notes:
The plants will grow back over time, and even if you hunt an animal until its population in the region is low, they’ll come back
Something I find a bit puzzling, depending on how quickly creatures and plants are replenished (isn't the point of exhausting resources is that they are exhausted?), but until we see how it actually works it's just food for thought. He then adds:
As for the Inquisition, as any leader knows, it’s not all murdering bandits and killing demons. The War Table is where you spend the “power” you’ve earned by accomplishing deeds in the world. Killing a dragon, finishing a quest, liberating a civilian area, and many other things earn you this currency. It’s used to task the Inquisition to patrol areas, deploy agents, raid castles, and establish camps. More importantly, it’s the means by which the story is progressed in the open world.
I was on the verge of excitement when there appeared to be a clarification on the amount of gameplay coming indirectly from the devs via Ability Drain: she said that in addition to the 50 or so hours of story there was an extra 100 hours of exploration (as opposed to the 100 total hours we've heard before). When asked about it she seemed a little unsure and then Mike Laidlaw dismissed the entire idea of estimated gameplay:
It will vary by player, so the numbers are a highly inaccurate metric regardless.
Which makes me wonder where AD got the idea in the first place. The oft quoted number I've seen (for example here, here, here, and here) has apparently been provided by the devs (as Ability Drain suggests) for PR reasons. In the end it seems we should ignore the number and remain content with the notion of "there's lot's to do outside the main story".
Indirect confirmations that the Iron Bull is a potential romance continue, as Robert Purchese (of EuroGamer) re-iterates the Q&A for the character on the site that says:
He overeats, drinks himself sick, and will hop into bed with anyone he's reasonably sure he won't break
It's difficult to imagine this personality not being an romance option for the Inquisitor, but official word still hasn't come out.
This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)
Hi - your link to princessstabbity is broken for the Q&A.
ReplyDelete