Dragon Age: Inquisition’s open-world is “pretty ambitious,” according to BioWare general manager Aaryn Flynn.

Speaking with CVG at E3 last week, Flynn said the team took quite a lot of feedback from Dragon Age 2 into consideration, and wanted to give players “a lot more exploration.”

“That’s one of the reasons why we chose Frostbite as an engine, because we went through a big review of that,” he said. “We knew that our own engine Eclipse that did Dragon Age Origins and Dragon Age II was getting pretty long in the tooth. Continuing to develop on that engine would’ve taken a lot of investment and time. But when we lined up a lot of the opportunities for engines, one of the things that we loved about Frostbite was that it did terrain streaming and big open environments quite well.

“So we thought that if we could take that and then layer on beautiful open-world systems and quests, that would be a pretty killer combination. That was a big priority for us.”

Customization is also key in the game, and since the player will be leading the Inquisition, the team wanted players to “put their choices on that character in terms of customisation and stuff.”

“It’s not just a stock character – we want people to have lots of freedom in terms of what they play as and how they play,” said Flynn. “What I can say is that with the new technology we have in Frostbite – not necessarily the next-gen stuff… the systems we have built in to it do allow for a lot of really deep customisation for all of the characters in the game. That’s really important to us.

“We want to make sure people feel that it’s their character and that it’s what they want it to be. So we have to empower the player a lot to do this – that’s a big priority for us.”

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The team also wants to “respect the investment that people have made in the first two games,” but Flynn didn’t have any comment on how it plans to incorporate player choices made in the previous outings.

“It’s become a really big ‘BioWare-ism’ to do that so want to keep it going,” he said. “We just don’t know how we’re going to do it yet so we can’t comment.”

Dragon Age: Inquisition will release in fall 2014 on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.