[General Article] Dragon Age: Inquisition: How BioWare Tells Their Tales

SBFord · December 2014

Despite protests and endless traffic we made it into Brooklyn this past Thursday for the NYU Seminar on storytelling in Dragon Age: Inquisition. The panel included Creative Director Mike Laidlaw, Lead Writer David Gaider, and actor Freddie Prinze Jr. who does the voice of Iron Bull. The panel ran the full two hours and surprisingly the crew on hand gave a ton of information and advice to the students and press in attendance.

Read more of Garrett Fuller's Dragon Age: Inquisition - How BioWare Tells Their Tales.

Battlerock · December 2014

I just picked this up for the xb1, can't wait till it arrives, I started reading this entry but then quit, was afraid of spoilers. I skipped to the last paragraph, I am glad to hear there is more in store moving forward.

Etherignis · December 2014

Great game

Mange1 · December 2014

David Gaider the queen, I mean king, of DA story. The stories are decent but the homosexuality is starting to get a little force fed.

Yamota · December 2014

Originally posted by Mange1
David Gaider the queen, I mean king, of DA story. The stories are decent but the homosexuality is starting to get a little force fed.

Really? I thought this gay thing was optional. So it is no longer I guess?

Eladi · December 2014

Originally posted by Yamota
Originally posted by Mange1
David Gaider the queen, I mean king, of DA story. The stories are decent but the homosexuality is starting to get a little force fed.

Really? I thought this gay thing was optional. So it is no longer I guess?

Its not force-fed to incl anything else then hetrosexual behavior, its Normal social life to encounter it, what is not normal is to think that gay or Trans* or other forms of behavior/preferences is " weird, not normal"

Its the shallow sheep way of thinking, just coz western sociaty choose to ignore it for about 500 years aint meaning its not normal. before that time it was well known and accepted as normal.

during the middleages the western world lost a lot of knowlidge and was ruled by fear, a exsample: romans had gods for gay and trans* people, everyone before the middleages knew the world was round.. there drawings and calculations many years BC proving the world was round.

For almost 100 years it was weird to have long hair as a male .. yet before that time (before the ww wars) it was seen as normal and even a sign of masculinity and strenght to have long soft flowing hair we only lost that way of thinking due to the wars and soldiers who had to shave hair becoming role models for honor,strenght, manhood.

anyway point is.. something that is human nature can not ever be forcefed if you have the choise not to engage into said things and DA:i gives that choise much as in reallive

Khebeln · December 2014

Well if you do Dorian Side quests you cant really skip that + he talks funny that way.

Khebeln · December 2014

What i didint like tho was that you have more gay options than female ones for romance lol

LuposDavalte · December 2014

I just finished the game on Sunday and I'll admit this was one of the few games that left me feeling truly sad once I had finished the main quest. The storyline and deep companions were that engrossing that I found myself spending hours upon hours in skyhold simply exploring the myriad of conversation paths. The sadness was really a result of all that fantastic banter and dialogue being completely over! I would of liked to have seen more interaction between companions outside of questing banter but I'm amazed at how far Bioware have come with the Dragon Age IP. Also when you finish the main quest line, your characters don't really speak to you anymore... I think Bioware could of left a few little nuggets of character development to keep us wanting to explore the world and our companions even after saving it from utter destruction!

I'll admit that whilst I think its fantastic that Bioware recognizes sexual orientation and identity, I found it somewhat irksome that as a heterosexual male, my character really only had a few choices. That being said, I found characters like Dorian and Sera extremely intriguing and were probably my preferred companions.

Bioware have always taken baby-steps in their overall storytelling formula. i.e. meeting companions and storing them at a central camp, castle, space-ship and whilst they haven't completely broken that mold, this feels like a huge step forward and I'm impressed that EA hasn't gutted their spirit for delivering quality RPGs.

For the future, I'd love a Dragon Age that has an optional first person mode and a co-op that truly involves any friends that I choose to bring along with me as a shared story. Throw in Occulus Rift compatibility and I may fuse myself to my chair!

Nemesis7884 · December 2014

For all the homos. Prolly the hetero stuff feels force fed too...im not really sure about the whole romance thing...never added for me to the story

JeroKane · December 2014

My biggest gripe with the game so far is the whole Power point system!

The Story is fantastic, but due to the Whole Power point system it feels very disjointed, because you are constantly side tracked from the main story line, forced to do side quests to rake in enough Power Points to unlock a New area or unlock the next stage of the story.

Up until Skyhold, the amount of PowerPoints you needed wasn´t all that much (15 for the final part leading up to Skyhold, and 4 PowerPoints for each stage before that).

But once you are unlocked Skyhold, it really starts to become a grind, having to do tons of sidequests to rake in 20 PowerPoints per Story stage / area unlock!

This you don´t read anywhere in the reviews (most likely they didn´t came that far during the review process) and should have affected the overal score!

As this is just lazy game design! Pure and simple!

I don´t mind doing side quests, as in Skyrim for example, the Companion questline was absolutely amazing! But if you wanted, you could solely focus on the main storyline, without being constantly side tracked and slammed out of the story... forcing you to do tons of side quests, just to move on again with the Main storyline, like is the case With DA:I !

There is just a lot of grind in DA:I that I don´t like, simply because you are forced to do it.

Just to artificially inflate the hours it takes to Complete the Main storyline and boast about it! /shrug

bobfish · December 2014

Originally posted by Khebeln
Well if you do Dorian Side quests you cant really skip that + he talks funny that way.

Dorian is a fantastic character and brilliantly written. I may have no romantic or sexual interest in him (ignoring the whole sprite/pixel thing for a moment), but I'd happily count someone like that as a dear friend.

BioWare gives you a world, with an array of interesting and unique characters. What you make of that world is your choice, but it is nice for a change, that a developer is "inclusive" of all, rather than just giving us another jarhead space marine bullshit brown world that only appeals to a specific type of person.

jbombard · December 2014

Originally posted by Eladi
Originally posted by Yamota
Originally posted by Mange1
David Gaider the queen, I mean king, of DA story. The stories are decent but the homosexuality is starting to get a little force fed.

Really? I thought this gay thing was optional. So it is no longer I guess?

Its not force-fed to incl anything else then hetrosexual behavior, its Normal social life to encounter it, what is not normal is to think that gay or Trans* or other forms of behavior/preferences is " weird, not normal"

Its the shallow sheep way of thinking, just coz western sociaty choose to ignore it for about 500 years aint meaning its not normal. before that time it was well known and accepted as normal.

during the middleages the western world lost a lot of knowlidge and was ruled by fear, a exsample: romans had gods for gay and trans* people, everyone before the middleages knew the world was round.. there drawings and calculations many years BC proving the world was round.

For almost 100 years it was weird to have long hair as a male .. yet before that time (before the ww wars) it was seen as normal and even a sign of masculinity and strenght to have long soft flowing hair we only lost that way of thinking due to the wars and soldiers who had to shave hair becoming role models for honor,strenght, manhood.

anyway point is.. something that is human nature can not ever be forcefed if you have the choise not to engage into said things and DA:i gives that choise much as in reallive

It depends on how you look at it. Far more people are heterosexual(or bi) than homosexual. So if you define "normal" as average, than the average would be heterosexual. I am not sure how often most people run into homosexuals during their daily routine, and actually realize it, because chances are you aren't going notice most of the time unless they are incredibly flamboyant or right up in your face. So when they are right up in your face in a game it comes off odd to people who don't experience it in their normal everyday life(which I expect is a lot of people). Personally I could give a shit less whether they are in my games or not, but I can see why people may feel it is forced.

sumdumguy1 · December 2014

I was/am disappointed with the female choices when you play as a male character. I didn't realize how much it bothered me, but it does. Neither option of the female choices makes me want to pursue a romance in Dragon Age Inq. In Dragon Age 2, while not a great game, the ability to pursue Isabella was the reason I stayed with the game. In this respect, dragon age inquisition dropped the ball big time IMO.

Gretelda · December 2014

not sure if i commented on DAI game before or not but i am taking a break from work so w/e:

in my opinion DA:I is one of the best written RPGs in modern days at least. Morrigan, Flemeth, Leliana and Cassandra all have their own unique personality (well most of the gang does, just giving female examples), with lots of emotional moments, from the main story to side stories. also i like the fact that Cassandra and the advisor chick weren't hot as hell, (compared to leliana and morrigan at least) and i like how they included some details for Cassandra from the anime movie (the movie wasn't good though) also i still prefer the white haired Cassandra !! also of course no game is perfect. i mean there were some questionable writings as well that felt like a parody. the ending was great though although last fight felt a little rushed but the villain never felt awesome to me to begin with so they might want to show that he was desperate and how awesome the inquisitor really is.

bobfish · December 2014

Originally posted by sumdumguy1
I was/am disappointed with the female choices when you play as a male character. I didn't realize how much it bothered me, but it does. Neither option of the female choices makes me want to pursue a romance in Dragon Age Inq. In Dragon Age 2, while not a great game, the ability to pursue Isabella was the reason I stayed with the game. In this respect, dragon age inquisition dropped the ball big time IMO.

Agreed, whilst I like the characters themselves, neither were particularly interesting from a romance perspective. I actually found the romance in DAI to be quite shallow, especially compared to ME2.

Caldrin · December 2014

Been erally enjoying this so far.. maybe put just over 30 hours into it.. I think its one of the best AAA titles I have played in a long time and I was surprised as well because I read a load of bad posts about the PC version being horrible in the control department.. but I have had no issues with it at all.

Think there is a big patch coming this week as well.

AlBQuirky · December 2014

You mean the old image about how BioWare's RPG Chart is no longer valid?

Senadina · December 2014

Originally posted by sumdumguy1
I was/am disappointed with the female choices when you play as a male character. I didn't realize how much it bothered me, but it does. Neither option of the female choices makes me want to pursue a romance in Dragon Age Inq. In Dragon Age 2, while not a great game, the ability to pursue Isabella was the reason I stayed with the game. In this respect, dragon age inquisition dropped the ball big time IMO.

Funny, as a lesbian those words could come right out of my mouth also. In fact I said almost exactly the same thing to my friends. LOL

Senadina · December 2014

Originally posted by bobfish
Originally posted by Khebeln
Well if you do Dorian Side quests you cant really skip that + he talks funny that way.

Dorian is a fantastic character and brilliantly written. I may have no romantic or sexual interest in him (ignoring the whole sprite/pixel thing for a moment), but I'd happily count someone like that as a dear friend.

BioWare gives you a world, with an array of interesting and unique characters. What you make of that world is your choice, but it is nice for a change, that a developer is "inclusive" of all, rather than just giving us another jarhead space marine bullshit brown world that only appeals to a specific type of person.

I just want to give you a "hear, hear, well said". I'm afraid I get far too emotional and vitriolic while discussing this topic, so....see above for my thoughts also.

Yamota · December 2014

Originally posted by bobfish
Originally posted by Khebeln
Well if you do Dorian Side quests you cant really skip that + he talks funny that way.

Dorian is a fantastic character and brilliantly written. I may have no romantic or sexual interest in him (ignoring the whole sprite/pixel thing for a moment), but I'd happily count someone like that as a dear friend.

BioWare gives you a world, with an array of interesting and unique characters. What you make of that world is your choice, but it is nice for a change, that a developer is "inclusive" of all, rather than just giving us another jarhead space marine bullshit brown world that only appeals to a specific type of person.

Can you gay bash him?

If not then no, I guess you dont have the choice to do as you want. And before someone says that it would be immoral. Please, you are murdering people so the immoral thing wont fly.

Quaglia · December 2014

"The" Iron Bull.

Thanks.

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