During the BioWare panel at PAX Australia the developer revealed new details about Dragon Age: Inquisiton's conversation system, exploration and more.
BioWare says the E3 trailer took five or six weeks to create and included certain scenes and characters because they wanted to get a message across to fans.
Cameron Lee, the game's producer, said the development team really want players to feel like Inquisition is "our" – that is, the fans' – story.
Conversation options may depend on certain player stats or having a specific companion in your group. Patrick Weekes, one of the game's writers, said they want the best choices to be included in the game instead of binary options such as "save the baby or save the warlock."
The panel said there would be a clear effect to player choice and have rejected random chance deciding the outcome of conversations.
Weekes said they were tweaking the conversation system and added that there had been a negative reaction to Mass Effect 3's auto-dialoge options.
They also mentioned that some players had a problem with Dragon Age 2's paraphrasing system in which the dialogue offered by Hawke didn't quite match the choice people had made.
Inquisition has a broader story than Dragon Age 2 and offers the type of scope seen in Origins. The plot revolves around "an epic story of a world in chaos."
It was implied that Orlesian Empress Celene and Arch Duke Gaspard are in conflict and this will be a significant aspect of the game's story.
One scene from the trailer, which features Dragon Age 2's Varric Tethras, actually occurs in the game and sees a village wiped out as a result of the actions, or inaction, of the Inquisitor. Combat in Inquisition will be a mixture of Origins' deep tactical options and the "fluidity" of Dragon Age 2's more accesible gameplay.
Lee showed off some new environments from the game as well such as a desert, a swamp containing "hidden ruins", and an arid Qunari camp. The panel mentioned several times that the game has diverse environments so players won't be confronted by the same caves time-and-again.
One interesting tidbit is that save files will carry across to Inquisition. While this was always likely for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 the PS4 and Xbox One are incompatible with save files from earlier systems so quite how this will work on those consoles remains to be seen.
Dragon Age: Inquisition is set for release in Autumn 2014.
Source: BioWare Social Network.
Via: NeoGAF.
