E3 2014 - Dragon Age Inquisition In-Depth Preview

With the tagline “lead them or fall”, it’s clear BioWare isn’t interested in underplaying the fictional stakes of Dragon Age Inquisition, the third installment in the Dragon Age series and the studio’s first foray into new-gen consoles.

As a long-time fan of Dragon Age—Origins is probably my most replayed game to date—it’s unsurprising that EA’s half-hour demo of Inquisition was the first thing I lined up for at their booth. After being ushered into an obscenely comfortable, air-conditioned theatre (something you quickly begin to appreciate in southern California), the Dragon Age team played the game’s E3 trailer and talked a little about what to expect in Inquisition.

As with previous Dragon Age games, players have the option to customize the gender, class and race of their character. However, BioWare has added a new playable race: the Qunari, intimidating horned giants that until the events of Dragon Age II had kept themselves largely apart from the affairs of elves, dwarves and humans. Players now also have the option to pick their character’s voice, a return feature from Dragon Age: Origins, out of four options—two male, two female—for the game’s fully voiced dialogue.

For those unfamiliar with the series, Dragon Age Inquisition is set in the middle of a civil war begun in Dragon Age II between the mages—those who can work magic and bring demons and spirits into the mortal world—and the Templars—a religious order tasked with keeping mages in check. To make things even more tumultuous, something called The Breach has opened up in the sky: a huge tear in the barriers between the mortal world and the Fade, the realm of spirits, demons and dreams. Players take on the role of the Inquisitor, the sole survivor of the opening of The Breach and the only person with a chance of closing it.

With the exposition out of the way, the team begins our demo of Inquisition by picking a female Qunari mage Inquisitor with a flattering pixie cut. What we’re seeing is just a piece of the game’s alpha, our commentator explains; but the demo area alone is larger than the combined map of Origins. Inquisition promises to introduce a much more open-world feel, creating a place where your actions have visible and dramatic consequences. To this end, the development team created something called Worldmaster, which tracks all of these changes based on your decisions and actions. If you hunt a lot of bears in one particular area, for example, the game will deplete the bear population permanently. Alternatively, you might see your Inquisition troops patrolling areas that are now under your control.

“Inquisition is ultimately about restoring order to a world that has fallen out of balance,” explains our commentator. By focusing on the effects of even seemingly insignificant player actions, the developers hoped to give players a sense of impact; every action, it seems, comes with a cost the Inquisitor must be prepared to pay.

For our demo, the Inquisitor leads a small party made up of Iron Bull, Sera and Varric to Redcliffe Village, taking us through a valley full of enemies. In Inquisition, our guide explains, enemies work as teams to fight more intelligently. As we watch, enemy mages work together to bring down a section of cliff face, bottlenecking part of the battlefield. Inquisition also introduces tactical view, which allows players to freeze the game during combat and issue orders, or just quickly scan the field. Outside of immediate combat, players can further customize their party members by purchasing spells, crafting armor and creating enchantments.

After a brief battle that showed off the game’s new combat animations, the team introduces us to yet another new feature of Inquisition: mounts. While the demo showed a relatively mundane horse, players have the opportunity to collect a number of mounts, including more unusual ones, thus explaining (to some degree) the bog unicorn available as part of the game’s preorder package. As our party rides on to Redcliffe Village, we hear snatches of the flavor conversations that have quickly become a BioWare standard. My personal favorite was between Iron Bull and Sera, after the former proposed physically throwing the elf into the fray during our next battle: “think of the mayhem Sera, the MAYHEM.”

And of course, it can hardly be a Dragon Age without at least one dragon—it would probably count as false advertising otherwise. The biggest change in Inquisition is the sheer size of its dragons, each of which is carefully rendered into a flying, fiery behemoth of a boss battle. The game’s dragons are so large, in fact, that players now target body parts instead of the dragon as a whole, which serves to add a tactical element to the battles. Targetting the wings, for example, could force the dragon to land, leaving it vulnerable to melee party members like Iron Bull and Sera. In this demo, the dragon uses the landscape to its advantage, circling behind a ruined castle before strafing us with its fire. In the end, our demonstrators choose to chance off the dragon instead of killing it, and the dragon lives to fight another day.

Taking a detour through a swampy abandoned village, the Inquisitor uses her abilities as a mage to raise a sunken bridge, allowing us to grab several phylacteries—vials of blood that allow Templars to track down mages, and control them. In Inquisition, phylacteries appear to function something like war resources from Mass Effect 3, and collecting them gives players the opportunity to control groups of mages, apparently.

At this point, the presenters skipped ahead to the almost-end of the game to show us a (potential) outcome of the mage-templar conflict. This time around, we have a new member in our party: Dorian, a character BioWare has been relatively tight-lipped about. Hailing from Tevinter, which is something like an evil Roman Empire, the mage has come to Fereldan to restore the honor of his nation, which in the team’s own words has been “something of a boogie-man” of the Dragon Age universe. We’ve come to Redcliffe Castle, a mage stronghold, to rescue one of our agents who has gone missing.

Entering a torture chamber (essential to any castle), we find a familiar face to longtime fans: Leliana, a former Chantry Sister who was a party member in Origins and appeared briefly again in Dragon Age II. After dealing with her interrogator, our party moves out to the courtyard where we encounter a rift—smaller tears in the Fade that are appearing all over Thedas which only the Inquisitor can close. Looking up, the party also comes to an alarming realisation: The Breach is widening, turning the entire sky a sickly green as pieces of monumental sculpture and the castle hang suspended in the air.

Inquisition’s demons are a whole new breed from the ones players are familiar with, with strange physical appearances entirely unlike the pride and desire demons that populated the first two games. They look like something pulled out of the farthest reaches of the Fade, with alien anatomies that seem appropriate, given their origin. Closing rifts, we’re told, takes time, and often it’s best for players to deal with their strange guards first. Once they’re quickly dealt with, the Inquisitor uses her “mark” to close the rift—a legacy from her first encounter with The Breach.

Returning inside the castle, we encounter a man named Alexius, Dorian’s former master and a man he once respected greatly. It’s clear, however, that Alexius is not the man he once was, and after a fatalistic speech, it becomes clear that he is at least partially responsible for The Breach. After a brief conversation that quickly goes sour, the party finds themselves once more in the middle of pitched battle, this time against a powerful mage able to create rifts, which ultimately ends in the Inquisitor’s victory. Taking Alexius’ amulet, Dorian quickly begins to work on a spell to close The Breach.

He only just begins however, and it becomes clear that the party is trapped—a horde of demons in the castle courtyard are threatening to break through the doors, and death seems imminent. Iron Bull and Sera volunteer to hold the door as Leliana guards it from the inside against the enemy’s inevitable breakthrough. As Dorian opens a rift to the Fade, the doors break, and in horror the Inquisitor watches as Leliana is dragged backwards by a pack of demons poised to cut her throat before the screen cuts to black. End demo.

Dragon Age Inquisition looks ready to bring just about everything I hope for—a brutal conclusion to the trilogy, and the sorts of agonizing choices that will keep me up at night wracked with guilt. Admittedly, after unsatisfying fiasco that was Mass Effect 3, I still have my concerns about BioWare’s abilities to deliver the ending fans deserve, and I’ll probably continue to have them until the credits roll on Inquisition and I’m hopefully proven very, very wrong. While I was originally dubious on the usefulness of tactical view, it has serious potential, and at the very least looks like it won’t be detrimental to the game’s combat system. In the end, I came away from the demo optimistic about Inquisition—although ultimately hoping for a better ending on my own playthrough.

Dragon Age Inquisition releases on October 7 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PC and is already up for pre-order.