Inquisition's Battle Tactics

Bioware’s main presence at E3 this year was a focus on the newest Dragon Age title, Dragon Age: Inquisition.

In Inquisition, a game that seems to take the franchise in a darker direction than before, you take control of an Inquisitor, but exactly what that means isn’t quite clear. It seems that your main character’s drives and backstory are still to be revealed. What we did get to see though was a healthy dose of the game’s combat. With several companions in tow, we got to see the party take on a high dragon, and the detail that truly made that fight interesting was the ability to jump into different members of the party and take direct control over the weapons and abilities.

This made for what seemed to be a pretty exciting battle, but when Bioware revealed the next feature of their battle system, it made the game even more interesting. According to the development team, before entering an engagement, you can go into a tactical screen that pauses the world and lets you lay out how your team behaves and where they go. Based on what I understand of this system, you could set everything up and then spectate the fight. Theoretically, because of the added instructions, your party members can handle the opponents much better than generic instructions given in a standard squad-command setup, and the ability to jump between the characters should mean that you can take direct control over how the character is fighting if it isn’t quite going how you expected.

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Bioware also hinted some about their new Mass Effect title, but what was said was mostly vague comments about new characters and new locations. The development group did say that the worlds you get to explore would be bigger and much more in depth. While Bioware didn’t say a lot about the next ME game, it was still far more than the other title they only hinted at. All that was really said was that it was an original IP and they were taking a lot of time to design everything from the ground up.