Dragon Age III Impresses With Latest Trailer

BioWare has released a new trailer for the third entry in their Dragon Age series, Inquisition. This trailer focuses mainly on showing off the new world they’ve built using EA’s new Frostbite engine. It seems to be directly aimed at fan criticisms of the second game. There’s also some new information in the blog post.

Dragon Age was an attempt by BioWare to merge classic RPG’s like Baldur’s Gate with more modern gameplay mechanics and visuals. The second entry however, was largely met with widespread criticism due to the dearth of environments and ruddy art direction. Since then, BioWare has assured fans that the next entry in the series would address the concerns expressed about the direction of Dragon Age II.

That said, this latest trailer does seem to give hope that they’ve taken the criticism to heart. For the first time, Dragon Age will feature an open world with a real time weather system that can actually form natural puddles on the ground. They mention serious effort into making the world feel alive, with things like spider webs that can blow away into the wind, and how each area will have it’s own ecosystem including predators and prey.

On the more human side, each location will feature various factions which will respond uniquely to the player. A significant goal of the game being to spread the influence of your “Inquisition”. Think of it in terms of the Crusades. They claim that your actions in specific areas will change how the local population responds to you and that environments and people will react naturally to each other as well. Meaning bandits can attack towns and animals will react in the way you expect of hunter/prey.

No official release date has been announced beyond Fall 2014. However, we expect to see much more of this game in the coming months, so stay tuned.