For those who haven’t discovered the joy of dragon-slaying how approachable and open will Dragon Age: Inquisition be?
CAMERON LEE: You won’t need to have played the previous games. One of the things that Dragon Age does differently to something like say, Mass Effect, is that you’re always playing a different character when we release a game. It’s set in the same world, and in many ways what we’re doing is we’re telling the story of the Dragon Age world rather than the story of a particular character as we go through time. Here’s how it works: once you get out of the prologue we give you the ability to earn Power and Influence for your Inquisition by completing quests, by closing phase rifts, by helping people out, in a variety of different ways.
As you earn that power you open up more opportunities to go and explore the world. You can then go back to your Inquisition’s War Table, kind of like a general’s map, and visit these new areas. You can spend your Power and Influence mostly in whatever order you want and you can spend as much time in these open areas as you want. We’ve really tried to let players get as involved in the story as they want, or not, it’s up to them. You could spend a hundred hours exploring the world and only be a third of the way through the narrative, so there’s a lot of freedom.
In Dragon Age II it seemed like these scaly bastards popped up around every corner. Will dragon frequency play out similarly in Dragon Age: Inquisition or are they more of an event, a ‘holy shit’ moment?
Mate, they are. They really are. Jeez, I mean physically they’re a lot bigger than the previous games. They’re a lot more dynamic in terms of the combat. So, you might have seen videos out there we’ve done in the past where the dragon takes off at various times, does strafing runs, it sort of pounces and bounds around the battlefield more, and they’re all hand-scripted.
There are more of them in this game than in previous games, but they’re almost more intentional as to where we’ve put them and why we’ve put them there. There are some areas where you can run into a dragon very early in the game. If you want to take a stab at it, by all means, but you’re probably going to die. If you’re able to kill it though, at some point that could lead you on to other opportunities. There are some environments we’ve built which are designed to be so high level that players may not even be able to get in there and explore all of that area until almost after the main
story’s finished, because you can keep playing, right?
So in that particular area, you’ll happen to find three dragons in that one small space. Again, it’s very intentional as to why we’ve put them there as that kind of challenge. They’re definitely bigger events in the game and they still have all of the coolness of great loot when you kill them, of course, and really good crafting materials if you can kill them. Crafting’s really deep in this game.
So no random occurrences, each dragon has a purpose and a specific place?
They’re mostly territorial. One area in the Hinterlands has a dragon in it and it’s essentially taken an entire valley. Its young are kind of at the front of this valley.
So if you come in there and it sees you, it’s going to starting taking offence to that, right? If you keep pushing down the valley you’re going to finally get down to its major lair. Other dragons are actually nesting, so they may not have younglings but they might have eggs there. They are generally quite territorial. The dragons will actually play much more into the game’s narrative as well.
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Via HYPER