Foreword

Three and a half years ago, Dragon Age’s executive producer, my boss and friend Mark Darrah, said to me: “I want the next Dragon Age to be somewhere between 20 and 200 hours. Get on that.” What he meant was that he wanted a game that would scale, that you could play the way you wanted to.

A challenge to be sure, but a few months later I was standing in front of the team pitching the idea of a shift to activity-driven gameplay. Rather than major story moments leading directly to more story moments, our mission became giving the player a goal to achieve and letting him or her decide how to achieve it.

In doing so, we would present a wide variety of activities available in a vast world that encouraged true discovery. After achieving that goal, the player could dive back into rich story content, with the hope that different players would be able to share stories of how they got there, and have each be different.

Add to all this a shift to a spectacular new graphics engine, the next generation of console hardware and online exploration, cooperative adventuring for the first time in the series, and it would be understated to declare Inquisition “ambitious.”

The team rose to every challenge: the art and animation team’s attention to detail, programmers building an intricate tapestry of systems, designers assembling all the pieces, producers scheduling thousand-hour projects, and the testers who have hammered on this massive game day after day. I could go on, but all that needs be said is that it was an honor and a privilege to work with them on an undertaking so grand as this.

Here we are, at the end of a very long road. I have been playing the game for months and I still find something new on each pass. You’ll have an edge on me, though. You hold in your hands an exhaustively researched guide to Inquisition’s story, characters, and massive regions. Caves to explore, ancient mysteries to uncover, loot and gearing, and perspectives from the developers—I hope you enjoy it as much as we have truly enjoyed crafting the game.

— Mike Laidlaw, Creative Director