Dragon Age: Inquisition - Developer Interview

Ausgamers has a new developer interview with Producer Cameron Lee to talk about game difficulty, crafting, and More for Dragon Age: Inquisition.

AusGamers: With the larger scale of the world, how much of it is interactive? Are there a lot more side-quests?

Cameron Lee: What we’ve done with the story of Dragon Age Inquisition, it covers two nations -- Ferelden and Orlais -- and that’s thousands and thousands of kilometres of world, so the story is that broad and sweeping. We can’t make that amount of space -- thousands of kilometres -- so what we’ve done is we’ve taken the best parts, or the parts that make the most sense to the story, and we’ve made these massive open areas.

I couldn’t actually tell you… I don’t know how big it is in terms of the square kilometres, but that part of the demo that you saw -- the Hinterlands -- that’s definitely bigger than all of Dragon Age: Origins. 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, and there’s multiple other castles and outposts, and bandit camps and stuff like that.

AusGamers: Talking about the tactical mode you have, where obviously you can stop time and play like that, do you worry that that’s then going to create a potentially cheap way to play? The demo was very immersive, particularly watching the dragon being slain, that was awesome; then they showed me the tactical view of other encounters -- the one where they were putting the warrior at that bottleneck -- where it looked like you could almost figure out a winning strategy, set it up and walk away while it plays out.

Cameron: Possibly, but I think if they can do that, then more power to them if that’s how they want to play. The way we’ve looked at the tactical view and the action side of it, is that everyone is different in terms of how much pressure they can take in the action combat. You sound like you would be able to handle a lot of action, with shit flying everywhere and being kind of crazy; other players have a lower tolerance for that kind of stuff.

So the pause and play -- the tactical view -- you can fire it at any point, and what it does, is it removes time as a variable. So you can go ‘boom’ I can take a breather, pressure is lowered, and if that’s the type of player that they are, they can then maneuver things around. It’s really up to the player to decide how much they want to use it and how little.

The higher difficulties that you can play the game in, you’ll probably want to use it, because it’s so hard; you’ll get slaughtered. But the tactics, you can set them up, but the variable is always… even if you try to find one fantastic tactic that is going to work, the enemies are pretty smart, and they’ve got a lot of abilities that can screw with you, so they will react to the tactics that you put down. They’re going to then counter-tactic, so they might break you.

Often when we play that demo, and we put Iron Bull into that chokepoint, you’ll see some of the enemies start to try and move around. There’s actually another ramp, and you’ll see that some of them actually end up getting to the top, because you put Bull there to defend the spot. That’s an example of the AI being a little bit smarter.

AusGamers: For the PC fans out there, are you guys going to have mod support in this game at all?

Cameron: We’ve thought about it and talked about it, but we’re still kind of talking about it. I guess at this point, I can’t really go into much more detail than that.