UPDATE:

IGN has some story details related to a questionnaire leaked last month.

“The empire of Orlais is riven by civil war; the Chantry is divided; the Templar order has broken away; the Mage circles have rebelled. Some unseen force is manipulating events, bringing about disorder and destruction. Out of this confusion emerges The Inquisition.”

The leak says you will be playing as the leader of this Inquisition and will be able to play as a mage, a warrior, or a rogue, in typical Dragon Age (and RPG) fashion.

Here are some more details:

“Set up your crew from up to ten complex companions to lead them against those who attack you by systematically spying on, revealing and destroying them.”

Sounds really good.

ORIGINAL STORY FOLLOWS:

We’ve all been expecting this for some time now, with more than a year having gone by since Dragon Age 2’s release, but it’s still always good to hear good news.

BioWare has announced on its Dragon Age website that they’re officially working on a new Dragon Age title. The third game in the series will be called Dragon Age: Inquisition.

“Inquisition” means an investigation related to political or religious matters, so it’s pretty obvious that the game will be picking up where Dragon Age 2 left off. The story will likely be centered around the conflict between the Chantry and the Templars and how things ended at the end of the second game. This also means that Hawke will probably be a major part of the story.

Also, good news for haters of Dragon Age 2- Mike Laidlaw, the executive producer of the previous, very controversial entry in the series, is not a part of this project. Mark Darrah, the lead programmer of the previous games, has taken over.

“I am pleased to confirm that we are, in fact, working on the next Dragon Age game,” he wrote on the webpage linked above. “Not a big surprise to most of you, I know. We have been working on it in some way for about two years now with the bulk of our efforts ramping up about 18 months ago.”

He says the team has been listening to fan feedback so they shouldn’t have a reason to worry that the game won’t be up to scratch. “We’ve visited message boards, read reviews, and we’ve gone to events to have direct face to face conversations with some of our most passionate fans,” he said. “We’ve been listening, and we will continue to listen.”

He didn’t elaborate much though, and gave very little information, especially about the story. However, he did say that the game might hint towards what it means. It does indeed.

Darrah confirmed the game is being made by much of the same team that’s been working on the series to date, and will also include new talent.

BioWare has also developed a new engine specially for the game, so that they can provide for “a more expansive world, better visuals, more reactivity to player choices, and more customization.” Darrah also revealed that the team started working with DICE’s Frostbite 2 engine to lay the foundations.

No other information was given out. No release date, no systems, nothing. But we’ll keep you updated.

What would you like to see in Dragon Age 3? Tell us in your comments below.

Speaking to CVG in an interview, BioWare co-founder Ray Muzyka said that the development team working on Dragon Age III has a lot of great stuff planned for the game. They are hoping to delight all fans, and they’re planning to make DA3 the perfect marriage between the first two Dragon Age games, in an attempt to please both ends of the pole.

“I think the team has actually got a great plan,” he said, while reminding us:  “we’ve not announced Dragon Age 3 formally or anything.”

 “I think the team are going to have some things that will surprise and delight both set of fans – our core fans and our new fans – with a marriage, best of breed from both games, Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II. We’ll look forward to talking more about that,” he said.

“One of our core values at BioWare is humility and that means we take feedback really seriously. We know that the core fans who were expecting more Dragon Age: Origins [from the sequel] – we have to listen to them. We have to respond to that.

“We’re not going to ignore it. We’re going to take that head-on. But we also have an obligation to our new fans, the ones who we surprised and delighted with some new approaches, accessibility and intense action combat.

“What we need to do as a developer is take the feedback from both sets of fans to heart and see about marrying that in the future games in the Dragon Age franchise.”

However, Dragon Age II undid almost everything that the first game managed to accomplish- it was a heavily dumbed down, “casualized” and “consolized” RPG with more focus on action than on elements that all RPGs should have. But BioWare have admitted the fact that Dragon Age II was greatly flawed, and that Dragon Age III will be much better than its predecessor.

But what exactly must be done to make Dragon Age III a good game, and not a disaster like Dragon Age II? Given below are seven things we think BioWare must implement in their third Dragon Age game. Without further ado, let’s begin!

Graphics shouldn’t suck

The game would have looked great 6 or 7 years ago.

Dragon Age II looked bad- bland and blunt textures, a lot of pop-ins, rough edges… overall, the game was hideous. Not just that, bad art design, repeated environments (we’ll get to that later) and poor draw distances were pretty bad too. The game would have looked great if it was, say, a PS2 game. But in today’s day and age, when games like Mass Effect 2, Uncharted 2, Battlefield 3 and Crysis have set new standards, we expect a lot more of a game of this caliber. BioWare should, ideally, build a new engine for Dragon Age III, and they should work extra hard on the visuals part. Bad graphics have always been a problem with the Dragon Age games, so BioWare might want to change that with DA3.

Give us a proper overarching, coherent story 

Dragon Age II often felt like a collection of DLCs that were completely unrelated to each other.

One of the biggest problems everybody had with Dragon Age II was that its story was very loose, very unfocused. There was no overarching plot throughout, no main purpose that we were playing towards, and the game just felt disjointed. Yes, the political setting was interesting, and yes, the plot did kind of come together in the end, but it still was a huge put off. What we want BioWare to do is make Dragon Age III along the lines of Dragon Age: Origins, or any normal, conventional game with a story focus, for that matter. We want a proper, overarching, tight and coherent storyline that keeps us hooked and actually makes sense. While Dragon Age II did set stage for DA3 pretty well, we don’t want to see a repeat of that again.

Improve the level design, environments and focus more on exploration

The extremely linear nature and repeated environments of the game were probably the biggest flaws.

Dragon Age II was set in one city- Kirkwall, and its surrounding areas. Some could say it was probably because of that the environments felt familiar, but simple things like different houses were exactly the same from the inside, many dungeons and corridors were exact copy-pastes of other areas we’d visited before. Most of the times, we kept visiting the same are again and again, because of the fact that Dragon Age II didn’t even give us an entire world to explore, rather just a single city. Then there was the fact that environments were very linear, and they didn’t even have tiny little branching paths for chests. You just had to keep walking down a single path until you reached your destination. Most of the areas didn’t even pretend to be expansive. All these things made Dragon Age II feel like a very rushed title, and most of all, a very restrictive, linear title. We want Dragon Age III to have a vast world to explore, beautiful, un-repeated environments, awesome sprawling dungeons with tonnes of branching paths, like a true RPG should have. That’s the least BioWare can do for their fans after the debacle that was Dragon Age II.

]]> https://gamingbolt.com/seven-things-dragon-age-iii-must-do-to-redeem-the-franchise/feed 9 38562 https://gamingbolt.com/bioware-on-dragon-age-ii-polarized-opinions-better-than-apathy https://gamingbolt.com/bioware-on-dragon-age-ii-polarized-opinions-better-than-apathy#comments Tue, 02 Aug 2011 16:48:48 +0000 http://gamingbolt.com/?p=38405

Dragon Age II receives a lot of hate, that is true, but there are also some rabid BioWare and Dragon Age fanatics that still say Dragon Age II is, after all is said and done, a good game. BioWare writer David Gaider and the entire Dragon Age II team (according to him) find the “polarized” reactions really “surprising.”

“If there’s anything that’s surprising it’s just how polarized some of the reaction has been,” said Gaider in an interview with Gamasutra. He said that it was hard to please everyone, so they decided on what the game would be like and stuck with that vision, and keeping that in mind, made the game as good as they could. “

“There’s a lot of love for Dragon Age among our fans, and that love can translate into passion.

“In my opinion, that’s better than apathy, even if it forces you to filter out the extremes. However, the criticism should not be dismissed as simple nostalgia. There are fans who felt disappointed… and there’s a feeling [on our team] that we want to improve from the groundwork we’ve laid down.

“At the end of the day, Dragon Age can’t be everything to everyone – so we simply have to pick a direction and make it the best experience we can.”

BioWare announced that they were already working on Dragon Age III some time ago, and they acknowledged that Dragon Age II had faults and that they would fix those with the next installment.