DAI news continues fast and furious and what follows is the latest. As always beware of spoilers below (I forgot the warning in my last blog post--my apologies!), and if you notice any errors or omissions, please let me know.
The Choice and Consequence video, the final gameplay piece before release, is out and it has a number of interesting visuals:
This is a beautiful shot of Redcliffe.
I have no idea who this is, other than one of the Venatori (Alexius?).
Could this be Dagna?
I'm not sure who these archers are, but they earn a cut scene, so presumably they have some importance.
It's a stretch, but could this be Tallis?
A great shot of Stroud and default-Hawke.
I'm guessing this is an assassin--and what an outfit! [I've been informed on Reddit that this is a Harlequin, exactly as it appears, which appears in the Dragon Age Heroes app.]
This is an interesting shot because of where it's located within Ferelden (just south of the Storm Coast). In previous map images the word "Crestwood" could be seen written across the Frostback Mountains near Orzammar, so either that was a mistake or the term describes a very large territory.
I wonder if this is Briala (The Masked Empire)? [As has been pointed out to me, the woman above does not have elven ears--alas--so sadly is not a candidate for Briala.]
Along with the above videos there have been a bunch of reviews in the press, all from a group of journalists who were given a five-hour snippet of gameplay last week. Various minor spoilers about the beginning of the game abound, but a few items can be shared: 1) the prologue/introduction section takes about an hour to play, 2) apparently there are 80,000 lines of dialogue in the game, more than DAO and DA2 combined, 3) Mark Darrah (same link) added to the befuddling variation about the estimated game length (120 hours), which at this stage I don't know what to think about (it has ranged all the way up to 200 previously).
Speaking of Darrah, he gave PC Gamer a lengthy interview that included a number of interesting comments:
Dragon Age is very much darker, and more mature [than Mass Effect], 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.
Tac cam is really about being a time decompressor. You can pause the game and get additional information which allows you to plan more carefully, as if you basically had as much time as you wanted. Essentially you do have as much time as you want to plan what you’re going to do—issue commands, order people around. So that’s really what it’s about: giving you a more perfect understanding of the battlefield. But ultimately if you are sufficiently outmatched that can only help you so far, so you’re going to still need to know how to do other things as well.
From a pure storytelling perspective it would be very convenient to be able to ignore Dragon Age: Origins, because it leaves a bunch of divergent hooks all over the place. I mean, we’re due for a dwarven civil war pretty soon based upon on some of the epilogues of Dragon Age: Origins
I think the struggles with DAO's various dangling plots are partially reflected in the Keep and undoubtedly there will be a great deal of work to cut off as many as possible.
Mike Laidlaw talked about the absence of blood magic in DAI (something he's reflected on before):
I made myself a promise -- if we went back to Blood Magic we would do it up real good. I felt like we were undercutting its significance, because in the Dragon Age world it is the ultimate temptation. I think that to do it right it almost needs to be the Malkavian option from Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines [check that out here]. And it's something we need to explore, but in a game where we were also exploring open world and five platforms and multiplayer it seemed like perhaps we had enough irons in the fire.
At some point I'll go back to it huge, because it's an absolutely fascinating part of the world that I want to do more with. If you read Dragon Age: Last Flight though, you get to see Blood Magic as it's supposed to be. It's gruesome and horrible, yet highly effective.
I guess it's disappointing to some people because they kinda dig it, but again, there's the Blood Magic you imagine it could be, and looking at what we had I don't think we were going to deliver that. So I said ok, let's get some other specs down, one of the biggies for me for mage is getting back to the combat mage, which is Knight Enchanter. They're frankly almost the cleric of the DA world because they have very good protective spells and inspirational buffs and stuff, so they're very good front line fighters too. They can be right up there swinging, like the Arcane Warrior kind of fantasy. I decided we would get some of those in that don't have this massive story overhead like Blood Magic does.
It's an interesting idea that they decided to focus on the Knight Enchanter rather than blood magic due to all the other incumbent elements the latter requires. It does sound like if there's a fourth game we'll see blood magic again.
I'm not sure how much else will be released before the game (other than reviews), given that there's only eight days before EA Early Access and thirteen days before the game hits in North America. I've been compiling a massive "What we know" article for awhile now and one thing that's struck me is that virtually nothing has been said about Morrigan's role in the game; the same applies to Hawke, as all we know is that s/he appears and (apparently) helps us out. I think the devs have done well in keeping story spoilers to a minimum.
This article is written by Peter Levi (@eyeonthesens)
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