If, like me, you spent forever deliberating over whether to insult the pixie, release the kraken, or save the rainforest in Dragon Age 1 and 2 - real choices replaced for the sake of spoilers - you'll be very glad to hear that your efforts to shape Ferelden have not been in vain. In a talk at PAX Australia (thanks, GameSpot and Eurogamer ) BioWare producer Cameron Lee revealed that your decisions will "absolutely come across" to Dragon Age Inquisition , although he stopped short of explaining how.
When asked about saved game imports, Lee replied that "We know what we want to do. It will absolutely come across - your decisions carry [and] will matter," implying that saved games can be imported into Inquisition - something that should be a trifling matter on PC, but would obviously be fairly tricky between generations of consoles.
"The goal," BioWare writer Patrick Weekes added, "is that you can have an equally rich experience no matter which platform you're playing on." Which could suggest some sort of interactive comic distilling the choices of the previous games, a la the PS3 version of Mass Effect 2.
BioWare were obviously non-committal when the prospect of the Grey Warden's return was brought up, but community manager Chris Priestly did reveal that "there will absolutely be some ties to some of the previous games, maybe some of the books or that sort of thing that you'll recognise if you've played the previous games, but they're not going to be reliant on the previous games". As long as the citizens of Ferelden remember how I dealt with those werewolves, I'm golden.
Interestingly, Weekes went on to explain how Inquisition's dialogue system may have evolved from BioWare's previous work. "The good news and bad news was when you looked at the persuades [in Mass Effect 3], the highlighted red or blue text, the joke became 'oh, complex moral situation! Wait, does it have blue or red text? OK well then that's how you win'."
"What we want to do, at least on Inquisition, is we want to be aware of that. That doesn't mean we never use anything like that, because the idea of having some kind of pre-requisite-based dialogue option that allows you to get a more optimal outcome is cool. Whether that is something you get by putting points into a stat, or by having someone in your party, or by making choices earlier in the game that unlock that dialogue option - that rewards the player playing the game. I like that.
"What we don't want to do is have every difficult moral decision rendered moot by the presence of brightly glowing text."
