Gallery: How Dragon Age: Inquisition carries the story onto next gen Gallery Gallery: How Dragon Age: Inquisition carries the story onto next gen + 12

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Following on from part one, Wired.co.uk concludes our discussion of all things

Dragon Age: Inquisition with executive producer Mark Darrah and creative director Mike Laidlaw. Here, the creators cover how players will continue their epic stories across console generations, upping the difficulty while giving gamers more control, and how the critical reception of the last game impacts the team's newest.


With Inquisition making the leap to PS4 and Xbox One, which lack backwards compatibility, how will people's past games be integrated?

Mike Laidlaw: We recognised that a core problem we were going to face is that there will be a big block of people who have jumped from Xbox 360 to Xbox One, or PS3 to PS4. We started some early explorations about how we could do that. What we realised very quickly was that an external solution was the best way to do things. So we built something called the Dragon Age Keep, which is currently in beta. It allows you build up three-to-five world-states. You craft them to say "this is a world where Alistair is King and the Warden was a Daelish elf, etc," covering the events of Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2. You can build it up either through an interactive story, a bit like Pottermore.

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Alternatively, you can go straight into what we call The Tapestry, which is where we show you all the things that we're tracking and you make the choices you want. If your choices invalidate things -- for example, Alistair can't be both King AND dead -- it'll tell you and you have to resolve it. Then in

Inquisition you log in with your Origin account and it grabs that for free, instantly. That's the world that


Inquisition inherits and you play in. If you start a new game you pick a new world-state for it to grab, as you see fit.

Mark Darrah: It even helps players who haven't played the previous games at all. If you really feel like you need to understand what's going on, the game is designed to bring you on-board so that you know what's going on all the time, but if you don't want to jump into a series at the middle then this is a great way to learn about what happens in the first two games.

The reaction to Dragon Age 2 was perhaps not what you would have wanted. What have you learned from or responded to most from that?

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MD: Criticisms of weight is one. Weight is a big, huge thing we've changed. Now you're not swinging a six foot foam mallet, you're swinging six feet of steel when you're a two handed warrior.


ML: It has a lot more impact. We've tried to keep the pacing and responsiveness of the second game, but some things are deliberately a bit slower. Being able to cast a fireball and have it go bang, but then having your enemies run away from the area of effect before it hits -- that all works really well. Talent trees were very well received from DA2, whereas in the original it was like "here are four dots and you can buy rank four after rank three". People were bored by that. The second had trees that you could customise and go down different paths, and that was well received. So those are elements we've taken from both games, the skill trees from DA2 and the combat weight from

Origins.

MD: It's also much more difficult than

Dragon Age 2.

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ML: It is more difficult and the tactics are different. You might pause combat to go into tactical mode, see a sniper up on a ridge, order an archer to go deal with it and a mage to support them. You can even have the entire battle in tactical mode, although the PC was the only format that had it in

Origins. So, that's a huge change. It meant we had to colour our powers and abilities to work in both modes, so that you can read the telegraphs and so on. People were saying "how will you perform an evade in tactical cam?" Well, you press evade then put a marker on where to evade to and then confirm that. Your character does that when you start time again.

The team was behind it. I know our lead combat programmer was very keen on it. We've got guys who worked on real-time strategy games who could tell you everything about top-down battle views.

The end result is a combat system that I think takes the best of both games and makes them universal.

Is it striking a balance between action and thinking time in combat? Does it favour any particular type of enemy?

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MD:Yeah, the important way to think about it is a tool in a toolbox. When you're in a hard fight, you can take direct control of your followers, or you can set your tactics up so that they go off perfectly. Or you can over-level the combat so that you're better than them, or you can bring awesome gear. You can do all of those things. It's up to you which you choose to do but as you go up in difficulty you're going to have to use more tools. If you're on Hard mode you might have to use three different tools but on Nightmare mode you have to bring it all, using tac-cam and tactics, micromanaging the whole thing AND bringing awesome gear AND over-levelling the fight AND using your talents efficiently.

Is having a more significant challenge something integral to the Dragon Age experience?

ML: I think it's important to have scaling challenge because there are players who I feel play Dragon Age for the wonder, story and exploration but wouldn't enjoy getting their butts handed to them. We do still have easy mode -- it's not a pure story mode in that there's zero combat, but it's not super-challenging. We have normal mode, which is a lot like

Dragon Age 2. That had some interesting ideas, where you had too many quite weak enemies that were one-shot killed, but that didn't quite hit what we wanted which was more like a pitched battle. If you just trade blows, there are more of them than you and they're going to win. We've always seen our games as being quite ability-driven. It's your spells, your moves, those are what really turn the tide. They're game-changers.

MD: We want normal mode to be a little more challenging than DA2 because sometimes that felt trivial.

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The problem there is that if it feels trivial and then you hit a boss, you haven't developed any skills for handling tough enemies.

We want normal mode to teach you things, like to recognise when an enemy's telegraphing a move and you should not be under his giant club-arm, because he will crush you. Easy will be more forgiving but on normal you'll have to dodge, but it won't be hard to dodge.

The team will also help. We took a look at some of the changes our guys made in Mass Effect 3in terms of how characters interact, and we thought that we could make things more challenging but also keep them fair with things like telegraphs. They also go faster on the higher difficulties. If a guy roars and holds his arm up for a couple beats on normal, on hard he just goes "wham!" and you need to be dodging as he lifts. You can't afford that wait.

How open is Inquisition's world?

MD:It's multi-region open world. Each of the regions is as big as some of the open-world games out there and what that allows us to do is have desert, bog and mountain areas without wondering what a desert-y bog-mountain looks like when those three are right next to each other.

Going back to Dragon Age 2, the Metacritic score remains pretty strong but the fans seemed to react in a broadly negative way. How did that impact

Inquisition?

MD: When you look at the narrative that's formed around Dragon Age 2 in hindsight, I think you see that the biggest mistake was that it tried a lot of new things.

It had a different story, told in a new way, on a smaller scale and different passage of time. We wanted to get more identifiable silhouettes so we didn't have the ability to change the armour on your followers. Basically we had this laundry list of new things we wanted to try. The real negativity came from that, not that it was bad but that it was different and expectations were not met. They expected an apple pie and we gave them hamburger.

ML:There were also some objectively bad things.

MD: Yeah, at the end of the day the game was smaller than it should have been. Maybe 25% of the areas were missing that it should have had. There are weaknesses in the game.

When we try new things in Dragon Age: Inquisition, it's more focussed. When we made it about exploration that was one big new thing. It's not twenty small-to-medium new things. The thread's a little bit easier to see.

ML:On a more personal level it is difficult when people are reacting negatively to your game. There are a couple of things you do though. First, you remember that this is coming from passion and they're doing it because they care. If they didn't care, they'd be ignoring you. If they care and they're angry, then there's something there. You need to do a lot of soul-searching and see where you think it's coming from. That's something we've done very aggressively, getting feedback.

What's the public response been like on

Inquisition in comparison then?

ML:We went to PAX to say "these are the things we think we screwed up" and for the most part, those are the things that made people say "yeah, you did screw up!" So our response becomes "okay, those things we'll not do again!" Of course, you also get the classic fan dichotomy of "Why are you asking for help?


Don't you know what game to make?" versus "Why aren't you listening to us?"

I remember I volunteered to stand up and talk to the crowd about what was coming next. It was kind of fun. We had the crowd in there and we were terrified. We didn't know how things were going to go.

It was 9pm on the third day. It wasn't exactly a prime slot but they opened the door and there was a horde! Apparently we turned away four hundred people and we were in a twelve hundred person room. We realised it was either promising or terrifying. I got up and they all burst into applause and I thought things would be alright. The mood was up and we showed people early concepts of what we were going to do with Inquisition and everyone responded really well. We're going to try to keep having that good communication with Inquisition.