BioWare’s Cameron Lee says the studio wants “to give our players a real world to explore” in Dragon Age: Inquisition.
If we had to pick one word to sum up what BioWare’s shown gamers of Dragon Age: Inquisition it’d be “big.” With multiple regions and a new focus on open word gameplay, the famed role-playing developer has made it clear that it hopes to take the choice driven gameplay of the franchise’s past and couple it with the sort of Skyrim-esque exploration experience that, in the past, has glued gamers to their screens for months. Now, with the game’s release roughly a month away, the studio has revealed new details about just how much time players can plan on spending with Inquisition.
Including side quests, gamers can expect to find between 150 and 200 hours worth of single player content in Inquisition. And while BioWare stressed that most of that will be optional, the developer hopes its mere presence will help to craft a richer experience for players regardless of whether or not they participate in all of it. “We want to give our players a real world to explore – we want to give them a BioWare story,” said Inquisition producer Cameron Lee. “A really vast, epic BioWare story. That’s what we do, and it normally takes 20 to 40 hours anyway to tell the story we want to tell.”
The extra 150 hours outside of that main story, according to Lee, will be used to help players “see your decision[s] have an impact and take shape in the world.” Lee wouldn’t go on to specify exactly that means, but it would definitely be interesting to see some of the decisions players make playing out in more grounded ways around the game’s reportedly huge world. Just speaking personally, if Inquisition manages to incorporate even a little bit of that sort of smaller scale cause-and-effect, I’d be a much happier camper than I was while playing Dragon Age 2 which kind of didn’t do that much at all. We’ve reached out to EA and BioWare to see if we can find out more details.
Source: Polygon
