Gamescom 2014 Info

A new trailer was shown at the EA Press Conference on Wednesday, August 13. Links to the press conference are under the trailer below. The press was able to get their hands on a playable demo on the floor that day, and fans could do the same on subsequent days. There are a couple of people who blogged about their experiences playing the demo; those are listed in the article list below. There was also a second demo livestream by IGN.

Screen shots: Page 1 ~ Page 2 ~ Page 3

Here's the trailer!

As for the demo at the press conference, it was fantastic. They showed the character creator, some of the player attributes, skill trees, and actually "purchasing" a skill. Dorian and Cullen were both heard speaking for the first time. They also showed one of the quests, some combat, and the tactical cam in action. Once again we're left wondering what the PC UI will look like - they were playing on Xbox again. I don't mind so much, as it's probably easier to play on it for demos since that's apparently what they are used to using - I'd just like to see what the UI will look like on a PC just once.

Here are the different recordings of the press conference - Dragon Age: Inquisition is first up in the full recordings, noted below:
Twitch recording (I've heard it cuts off the end, so you might want to go with the one at the EA site)
Recording on the EA site (Full conference)
IGN's recording on YouTube (Full conference)
And here it is in 1080p (this one is as short as the Twitch recording, so may cut off as well)

Gameplay demo (without a bunch of people talking, so you can hear the companion voices a lot better):

Other videos
IGN Livestream Demo #2 (also on YouTube) Screen shots from it are in the bottom half of the first screen shots page.
Some German footage - some additional things in this video such as inventory.
DA FAN has put up two more Hidden Gems videos on the Enemy of Thedas trailer and the Gamescom demo.. give 'em a look!

AbilityDrain's trailer and demo video analysis

One thing you may notice in the new trailer is that Hawke comes running up at a certain point. That really is Hawke from Dragon Age 2 - Mike Laidlaw confirmed it; he also said that if our old player characters were to show up that we would be able to customize them. The warden next to Hawke was initially thought to be The Warden, but Mr. Laidlaw Hath Spoken that it is NOT. Repeat: That is NOT our Warden from Origins. Please see the news post from this morning for relevant tweets.

Some points out of the demo:
There are millions of face combinations creatable in the character creator
There are 21 different combat trees
There are over 200 spells and abilities
You can create and name weapons

Articles

*No offense intended toward the original posters - I'm glad and grateful they blogged about their experiences.. however, personally I can't take real small fonts and overly-color-clashing web pages, so I reblog or copy/paste into another program in order to handle reading some things.

A word about crafting from Allan Schumacher:

Quote:

So it looks like "Crafting" the weapon creates a Base item that you can slot in additional upgrades, which makes the Armor system make a lot more sense, as I assume the "Armor" upgrades will be things like Gauntlets and Boots.

Allan replies:

You can craft items and these items have upgrade slots. These upgrade slots can be found or crafted as well (just like items).

The various component slots of crafting are a particular type, and materials provide a different benefit depending on what type of slot they are being put into. Same goes for upgrade components that are crafted. With the right crafting materials (of sufficient quantities) you can make items that really "go deep" on a particular benefit. Or you can spread out the benefits to make something more balanced to a variety of situations.

Screen shots from the 2nd demo contain some images of the advisor tarot cards, and Matt Rhodes made a comment about them:

I'm glad these are finally starting to make an appearance. These cards (and many, many, many, many more) appear throughout the UI and will also be made into the tarot deck that comes with the "Inquisitor's edition". As these were all lovingly painted by members of the concept team, I wanted to toot their horn for them. Specifically:

Nick Thornborrow
http://nthornborrow.tumblr.com/

Casper Konefal
http://theworkofcasperkonefal.blogspot.ca/

Ramil Sunga

(and I did a couple)

The artwork is beautiful! These artists are truly talented, and I wish I'd been able to get a copy of the Inquisitor's Edition of the game so I could have a set of the cards.

On the conversation system shown in the demos (these were not full cinematics), Mr. Epler explained them a bit further:

Quote:

I liked it, but I am worried about the conversation system. It zooms in a tiny bit, but will all conversations while questing be like that? And will the camera not look over to our companions when they make a comment (looked that way in the demo shown)? I want to be able to look at the people that are talking closely and see their expressions.

I hated that most convos in ME3 had you just standing there and not have a proper dialogue mode when talking to your squad mates on the Normandy. Looks like they are doing something similar, only it doesn't even matter if there are dialogue options for you to choose

. If it's the same way for the romance content I'm going to be extremely sad :/

John Epler replies:

Simple conversations (the name of the system) exist to complement full conversations, not replace them.

They're used almost exclusively for light dialogue, usually lore-focused and for light exploration-focused quests. Some of them are more complex in animation than the one you saw, though they're intended to be focused on giving the player ways to engage in dialogue that don't pull them out of the world and into full cinematic scenes.

To be clear - conversations that are simple conversations exist because that system exists. They give our writers the ability to add content that the player can engage with at their own choosing without it having to be compensated by cinematic design time. They're easy to implement, easy to interact with and easy to disengage with at the player's choosing.

The conversations we saw in the demos were not intrusive at all; they seemed more natural than when we go full cinematic. I think these will be a nice way to augment the longer/more in-depth conversations we'll have.

On the war table missions, a twitter user asked about the timer on some of them and Mike Laidlaw answered a bit on how it works:

User
@Mike_Laidlaw I noticed a timer for some of the war table missions. Is it gonna be real time? Or is it faster than real time?

Mike Laidlaw
The war table is real time, but there are ways in the game to speed it up. Those ways are NOT "money", before anyone asks.

User
Real time as in it will complete even if the game is off, or is it real time as in it takes that amount of play time?

Mike Laidlaw
The former.

Also, Allan chimed in on this here:

Okay, so a programmer saw me talking in this thread and helped get me some info.

It's completely offline, and just uses system clock.
Some of the times I mentioned may not be accurate as they're being tweaked. Really short stuff might not exist.
Anything that opens up a new piece of content to be experienced in the game is done instantly
Your advisors are still available to talk despite being "on mission." In context, this often makes sense because many of these missions describe a larger scale organizing event rather than, for example, Cullen stating "i'm definitely going to go there myself, specifically, to spend the next X hours talking to the person."
Some of them are done to help with resource acquisition (Mike hinted at this), be it gold, crafting materials, and so forth. There may be flavour differences between advisors, and some advisors may be better than others at certain tasks (usually shorter time, but hey, if Josie is on something else it may be worth sending Cullen instead even if it takes 30 minutes longer)
Most interestingly (to me), is that some of them have story narratives to them. Some missions are only available to certain PCs, and how you choose to proceed with the missions (or rather, how the advisor you send deals with it) can lead to different consequences/paths for these more story heavy missions. Upon completion of these missions, a new mission will be unlocked if appropriate to continue that story arc.*

* Note that the last point I haven't seen in game, so hopefully I didn't recall that wrong. i.e. safety language in case I made a mistake but I'm pretty certain I didn't.

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Gamescom 2014 Info