How BioWare plans on improving conversations in Dragon Age: Inquisition

BioWare revealed some new tidbits about Dragon Age: Inquisition, including a greater degree of choice in the dialogue system and how your decisions will influence the world.

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Dragon Age: Inquisition will introduce an overhauled dialogue system, one that offers more depth than simple binary choices.

Speaking at PAX Australia, the company described the efforts being made to improve conversing in the game. The gulf between the dialogue options and what your character actually says, for example, is being addressed. Your choices will also play a bigger role in influencing the events of the game.

The BioWare forums transcribed most of what happened at the panel (via OXM). For example, stats and active companions in your party will influence your dialogue choices. BioWare also hopes to make this game offer more exploration and environmental diversity, with land types like desert, swamps, mountains ruins, and winterscapes.

Inquisition is due 2014.

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  • reply
    July 21, 2013 1:00 PM

    Steve Watts posted a new article, How BioWare plans on improving conversations in Dragon Age: Inquisition.

    BioWare revealed some new tidbits about Dragon Age: Inquisition, including a greater degree of choice in the dialogue system and how your decisions will influence the world.

    • reply
      July 21, 2013 3:12 PM

      Pretty easy to improve. Don't made a DLC piece into a full game by copy and pasting areas to beef up the content and then having the audacity to charge $60 for it.

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        July 21, 2013 3:45 PM

        Your constructive criticism would be on the mark if they were saying on how they plan on to improve on the game on the whole compared to previous games in the series instead of how they plan to improve on a component of the overall game compared to the way said component was in the previous game.

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        July 21, 2013 4:34 PM

        It was really interesting playing Mass Effect 1 after this game. The big thing I noticed was almost every side mission was a copy/paste job of a similar zone. It got to the point where I could run through the levels and know almost exactly where the MacGuffin to complete the quest would be at. I suppose that Dragon Age 2 was kind of the natural evolution of that.

        So glad that ME2 did NOT go down this route.

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        July 21, 2013 4:41 PM

        [deleted]

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        July 21, 2013 5:22 PM

        Thing is Dragon Age 2 had better dialog and character interaction then the first one. It just had some other dire flaws.

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          July 22, 2013 10:06 AM

          The dialogue in DA2 was terrible imo but I guess that's the thing about opinions; everyone has them.

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      July 21, 2013 11:21 PM

      What they really need to do is get away from their obvious hub designs where they wall off a section of the game, give you a few objectives that you can do in any order and once you complete them all then you move on to the next hub. The main problem with this that it really doesn't matter which order you do the objectives in and the choices made to meet one objective don't impact any of the other objects in the current hub.

      Their games need true story branching.

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      July 21, 2013 11:59 PM

      My name is Hawke and this is my most favorite shop in the Ferelden.

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      July 22, 2013 12:03 AM

      [deleted]

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        July 22, 2013 1:36 AM

        No, it's just a really bad game.

        With DA:O they created this vast, amazing world with a rich history and detailed sociopolitical past. Then in DA2 they put you in a shitty town where you occasionally went to a generic forest setting to move the sham of a plot forward.

        Also, 10 years you spend there, and the only change to the town? One statue. That's it. I mean ffs, one of the characters inherits a haunted house that's a fucking tip and in 10 years he can't be arsed to clean it up? It doesn't change one bit during the whole game!

        Lazy, bad, sloppy game.

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          July 22, 2013 2:24 AM

          Bullshit. It's not a bad game. Gamers are just whining faggots most of the time.

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            July 22, 2013 2:56 AM

            Uhhh nope. The hate is justified it was a sloppy piece of shit.

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        July 22, 2013 2:47 AM

        It's pretty nice! The reused environments were silly and clear corner-cutting, but the focus on one city was far more interesting than that 'save the world you're our only hope' bollocks.

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          July 22, 2013 3:32 AM

          Now it's 'save our city you're our only hope', which was really refreshing.

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            July 22, 2013 3:36 AM

            That was only towards the end, really. You're mostly building a name and fortune and helping pals for a long time.

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          July 22, 2013 6:12 AM

          I agree with this. If the game hadn't had that 2 at the end it wouldn't have near the hate it gets. As a sequel it was Highlander 2 to Origins' Highlander. As a standalone game, it was pretty fine other than the tacky shortcuts it took.

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          July 22, 2013 7:18 AM

          That was the worst aspect of it in my opinion. The city its self just wasn't interesting enough to carry the whole game, and I found myself sorely missing the more varied environments of the first game.

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          July 22, 2013 10:10 AM

          The changes in the dialogue system, reused environments, and lazy combat scenarios involving repetitive waves of enemies were failures far too large to be made up for by any of the other aspects of the game.

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        July 22, 2013 4:37 AM

        [deleted]

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        July 22, 2013 5:00 AM

        i was just annoyed that they abandoned the character i built up in Dragon Age: Origins. i thought the whole deal was that it was gonna be an epic fantasy franchise where i took that character through the whole time, like with Baldur's Gate.

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          July 22, 2013 5:20 AM

          I'd love to see a series do something like that, except let you build a legacy with a bunch of different characters over several games, and then have them all come together in a final epic conflict, possibly on different sides.

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            July 22, 2013 6:07 AM

            having multiple protagonists works fine in books (thinking Game of Thrones) but it's problematic for games, for both technical and artistic reasons.

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              July 22, 2013 6:30 AM

              GTA V seems to be doing it. I'm thinking something like that.

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              July 22, 2013 6:40 AM

              Why couldn't a series do something like Half-Life/OpFor/Blue Shift?

              I mean, having multiple protagonists in a game world (they only briefly touched in a couple places, namely the main portal chamber) has been done before.

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                July 22, 2013 6:56 AM

                Several JRPGs have done this to a small extent, like Breath of Fire 4, Star Ocean 2, and the soon-to-be-released Tales of Xillia.

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      July 22, 2013 12:52 AM

      Not bothering with another dragon age game. Bioware is gone forever. I know a former employee there and he's confirmed it regarding the corporate culture.

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      July 22, 2013 9:03 AM

      I'm really hoping that they can mash the good bits of both games up and add new elements and hopefully this game could make us forget about the bad taste that Bioware put in our mouths recently. Of they may do that then end it with a pick a color coded ending......

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