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[Scottish Sin]

Really enjoyed the Mass Effect 3 MP so I'm all for this.

 

[RealMeat]

Sounds good. I wonder how the combat will hold up when you only have control of one character.

 

[adj_noun]

FAQS of life

Will Dragon Age: Inquisition have multiplayer?

Yes, the multiplayer mode in Dragon Age: Inquisition will feature action-packed, four-player cooperative quests separate from the single-player open-world story.

What does the multiplayer in Dragon Age: Inquisition include?

Dragon Age multiplayer is an action-packed dungeon-crawling four-player co-op experience that lets gamers to play with their friends for the first time in the Dragon Age franchise.

Following the success of Mass Effect 3's multiplayer mode, Dragon Age multiplayer includes fast-paced matches requiring strategic team gameplay while adding Inquisition's tactical class combat and extensive loot and crafting systems.

Was multiplayer (MP) mode created by the same team that made single-player (SP)?

MP and SP were developed side by side. The multiplayer environment gave us a perfect opportunity for testing combat, creatures, and encounter design, and since the two environments are near-identical, every improvement spread to both parts of the game.

Will playing MP be required to get the full-game experience?

No. The SP campaign is separate from MP. In SP, you have the support of three specialists who can send agents to missions. MP characters are agents. At the start of a MP mission, you will hear one of the specialists explaining the goal of your mission.

Is MP going to affect my endings in SP?

No. Absolutely not. Our goal with Dragon Age multiplayer is not to affect your SP campaign. We simply want to give our fans the chance to play with their friends for the first time in the Dragon Age universe.

Will MP have in-game purchases?

Yes. Platinum is the name of the currency that you can buy with money. Our philosophy for MP—and we are adamant about it—is that you can buy anything with gold coins, which is the currency you get from dungeon-crawling. There will be no pay wall.

Why did you decide to add MP?

We wanted to give Dragon Age fans the opportunity to play with their friends for the first time in the franchise.

There was a leak of DAI achievements with exclusive MP achievements. Is that the case?

There will be no exclusive MP achievements. Achievements are one way to keep players engaged, but with Dragon Age multiplayer, we have other ways to improve engagement.

We will have a full challenge system implemented at launch, letting you pursue and track dozens of different challenges. Completing a challenge may also give you a reward. The challenge system will also be used to implement weekly operations.

Every week, we will launch a new operation. Complete the operation, and you will receive a reward.

Will people who pay to get that extra edge online?

First and foremost, our goal is to make a fun dungeon-crawling experience that you can play with your friends. There will be no pay walls in Dragon Age multiplayer. Everything is accessible with gold coins. You can use premium currency, but you don't have to.

How long has your team been working on MP?

Over two years. After Mass Effect 3 MP's success, we created a special team with veterans from the Dragon Age and Mass Effect franchises. Our lead MP designer and lead online programmer have been on the Dragon Age franchise since Dragon Age: Origins.

The addition of designers, programmers, artists, audio, QA, and production from Mass Effect 3 MP will help us ship a really fun co-op game that suits our franchise.

Why four-player co-op instead of a full MP campaign?

In Dragon Age: Inquisition, we wanted to focus on five key aspects: Open World, Story, Characters, Visuals, and Inquisition. We also have a new engine (Frostbite 3), and we had to create many new tools to support the huge amount of cinematics and localization that a BioWare title requires.

A full MP campaign would have been another layer of complexity, and we decided it wasn't the right time for the franchise to take on that feature.

How is crafting different between SP and MP?

Dragon Age multiplayer is about mastering the fight with friends in a party-based adventure, and crafting is a key element of progression. Through crafting, you will be able to create new items that will make you better at fighting.

There is some overlap between SP and MP recipes, and some are exclusive to one mode or the other. Crafting also lets you create new armors. If you craft a set of Alchemist Armor, you unlock that character, who can then open up a lot of possibilities on MP missions. You can also craft new armors for characters you already own.

They will give your character a new special look but no extra stats. In SP you gather materials through exploration. In MP you salvage items to get them.

What kind of loot can I get in a dungeon?

You will find gold coins and items (not potions), and at the end of a mission, you can use gold coins to buy chests. They will contain a variety of different items (weapons, weapon mods, potions, runes, armor, etc.).

We are developing Dragon Age multiplayer with quick engagement in mind. We want it to be easy to play a round, acquire new loot, and jump back into the action. Now that you have new cool weapons and armor, why wouldn't you try another mission?

Is any sort of app planned for Dragon Age multiplayer?

BioWare understands that players can expend a lot of time going through their inventory and crafting new items. We also understand that when you are online with your friends, you want to get into action quickly.

With these needs in mind, we developed the Inquisition HQ. There, you will be able to access all of your MP characters and their inventory. You will be able to change your loadout, salvage items, and craft new items.

You can do all that on the go because it will run on PCs, tablets, and smartphones. We will give more details about Inquisition HQ in the following months.

Do I get to transfer items from SP to MP? Or vice versa?

In Dragon Age: Inquisition, you are in charge of the Inquisition, and in Dragon Age multiplayer, you control a few agents of the Inquisition. There is no connection between SP items and MP items on purpose.

We wanted to make sure that the two economies are separate, which will allow a stronger progression in both SP and MP. If you play Dragon Age multiplayer, you will learn how each class plays a different role in combat, how different skills work, and how your party composition can give you a tactical advantage on the battlefield. This knowledge is transferable to SP, but items are not.

How do I unlock new characters?

In Dragon Age multiplayer, changing the party composition with new characters can be the difference between failing and succeeding. You can unlock new characters by crafting their armor.

Crafting materials are acquired by salvaging items such as weapons and weapon mods. You may also get a new armor in a chest that you can buy with gold coins. Getting a new character is definitely a goal to be pursued on Dragon Age multiplayer.

How many MP characters will be available at launch?

Twelve characters, four for each class (warrior, rogue, and mage), will be available at launch. Characters from the same class can be very different. For example, let's take a Legionnaire and a Reaver.

A Legionnaire can handle a weapon and shield and plays the role of a classic tank. Generating aggro and soaking up damage are his main role in a party.

The Reaver is a two-handed warrior who focuses more on dealing damage and generating aggro, and her skills can buff herself or the entire party. The Legionnaire and the Reaver are both warriors, but depending on your party composition and your style, one may be more suitable than the other.

Can I trade items?

No. Dragon Age multiplayer won't have an auction house or another system to transfer items between players. If you are unhappy with an item, you can salvage it and get crafting materials. Better weapons give better crafting materials. You can use these materials craft new items in-game or at your Inquisition HQ.

What is the level cap for MP?

The level cap for Dragon Age multiplayer is 20. Once you hit level 20, you can promote your character, which will give you an extra attribute point for your MP characters. Promoting a character will also give you more Prestige points for the leaderboards.

Are you going to release new characters?

Dragon Age multiplayer will launch with 12 MP characters, and we will release new characters after launch.

 

[Spinluck]

Splitscreen with multiple account support?

Lol.

Not a chance.

 

[T.O.P]

This game is gonna be the shit

 

[ironcreed]

Will playing MP be required to get the full-game experience?

· No. The SP campaign is separate from MP. In SP, you have the support of three specialists who can send agents to missions. MP characters are agents. At the start of a MP mission, you will hear one of the specialists explaining the goal of your mission.

Is MP going to affect my endings in SP?

· No. Absolutely not. Our goal with Dragon Age multiplayer is not to affect your SP campaign. We simply want to give our fans the chance to play with their friends for the first time in the Dragon Age universe.

Beautiful. They have carefully covered the bases in this game and have obviously gone above beyond what you could reasonably expect. This will be a fun and sizable extra on top of the huge single player experience.

 

[Ridesh]

Multiplayer FAQ is up on the site: http://www.dragonage.com/#!/en_US/news/multiplayer-faq

Sounds great, much deeper than the ME3 mp.

 

[Grisby]

Cool, so nothing major affects the single player campaign. Crafting new armor gives you new characters, that's interesting.

I liked what little I played of ME3's mp so hopefully this turns out decent.

 

[BouncyFrag]

I'm so effing pumped for this.

 

[Amir0x]

Every time I see this I get a little excited, but I'm really concerned to let myself get overly hyped after my last experience with the series. *fingers crossed*

Glad to see it doesn't seem MP will be impacting SP. That 'galactic readiness' nonsense from ME3, no matter how relatively minor, really pissed me off. I could never get full readiness 'cause of that crap.

 

[Gxgear]

If it's anything like the ME3 mp then I'm all for it. If I had to play a game with microtransactions then the model they had was the least intrusive, and therefore the one I prefer.

 

[Vigilant Walrus]

I don't know how it will turn out but I applaud Bioware for not doing Versus Multiplayer.


Versus (competitive multiplayer) is my favorite, but it almost never works out when it is an afterthought of a single player.
The Last of Us is one of the only single player games (with added multiplayer components) that I have seen people be really into.


Most other games that add a competitive MP as a secondary, they almost always fail. So many games have just had these useless multiplayer modes. I can see this working. But can you pause the action in multiplayer?

 

[Boombloxer]

Sold.
Was going to wait, but between D3, Destiny, and this, my Arpg itch is scratched.

 

[Eusis]

Every time I see this I get a little excited, but I'm really concerned to let myself get overly hyped after my last experience with the series. *fingers crossed*

Glad to see it doesn't seem MP will be impacting SP. That 'galactic readiness' nonsense from ME3, no matter how relatively minor, really pissed me off. I could never get full readiness 'cause of that crap.

Yeah, that was a completely terrible way at trying to make MP relevant for SP. Even though in the end the ending barely fucking mattered.

This sounds almost as good as it can be (the other obviously is ALSO allowing people to drop in and control team mates ala Divinity OS), it'd be really bad if they were trying for some typical shooter-style MP thing without really thinking it through.

Sold.
Was going to wait, but between D3, Destiny, and this, my Arpg itch is scratched.

Considering what the original intent of this series was seeing it lumped in as an ARPG is kind of disappointing. Not as bad as it'd be pre-Kickstarter boom though.

 

[Xevren]

Sold.
Was going to wait, but between D3, Destiny, and this, my Arpg itch is scratched.

Yep! Won't be bored anytime soon with those to play. Can't wait for this, I put so much time into ME3 multiplayer <3

 

[Tony Redgrave]

Sounds fantastic, pretty much the exact same model from the ME3 mp without the shortcomings, if it translates well into the actual gameplay it'll be great.

 

[DOWN]

Wasn't Mass Effect 3's multiplayer really good? This sounds like it's in that same vein

Yes. People jumped on the idea negatively when it was announced, but turns out everyone thinks they did a great job now. Co-op with all free DLC is a great setup.

 

[Zyae]

I play Dragon Age for the story and characters, not for fighting

so dont play the optional mutliplayer?

 

[Eusis]

Yes. People jumped on the idea negatively when it was announced, but turns out everyone thinks they did a great job now. Co-op with all free DLC is a great setup.

Probably because what we feared was what I said: generic shooter-style MP stuff crammed in with a game that really isn't about that (doubly so for DA), but ME riffed on that about as well as it could even if it was basically Horde, and DA seems to be doing similar but more random instances. You could probably do awesome MP with almost any game type, you just have to be smart about it (I'd say RE5/6 is in some ways the worst example of that given the compromises to what prior REs had been doing.)

EDIT: Though both do seem to be failing to go where it could be REALLY interesting, and they'd suffer less than my RE example did so long as they either accepted that the lead player has primary control over what happens or it does something like Divinity at least. Though thinking about Divinity maybe even RE4 style would've worked if they went in the opposite direction (more a labyrinth you both have to work through) rather than the direction it did go (bombastic cinematic adventure!) And now I'm imagining something akin to a version of what was going on in RE1 and 2 but with actual players rather than it being scripted events, though I guess that's what the Outbreak games were going for. Would be nice with more modern controls though.

 

[Psychoward]

ANOTHER WAVE coop mode. Sounds awful, glad it isn't tied to the SP this time.

It's not wave based though.

 

[anexanhume]

FAQS of life

So standard F2P where users can buy to advance quicker. The right way to do it, IMHO. I'll never pay but some would like to so they can subsidize the rest of us at their choice. Also keeps people engaged and more likely to buy additional SP content (which I WILL do). The hard wall between the two is great. I'm ok with this.

 

[Marauder Shields]

After seeing what they did with ME3 MP, am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for now. The MP in ME3 is the only reason I have any positive memories of that game.

 

[StrongBlackVine]

This game will consume me.

 

[BouncyFrag]

Looking forward to my Qunari Berserker and Saarebas tearing things up. I also require subtle cookie humor at unexpected times.

 

[FullMetaltech]

My wife is gonna kill me with all the amount of time this game is gonna consume me with. But itll be worth it if its as good as ME Mp.

 

[Nerokis]

Ooo...sounds promising!

It's interesting to see this trend of games we'd typically look to for grand singleplayer campaigns also doing really cool things with multiplayer. ME3 and TLoU are recent examples, and DA:I seems to be following in their footsteps. We seem to be moving past the stigma where "multiplayer in our singleplayer games" is necessarily shoehorned and diminishing to the overall experience.

On a similar note, Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence is the earliest, best example that comes to mind of another game pulling this off. There are also all the classic WRPGs that showed how excellent campaigns could be shared with other people, and other examples along those lines, but that isn't quite the same thing.

 

[SGRX]

I loved ME3's multiplayer and got a few hundred hours out of it easy. I'll be picking this up day one.

 

[Sanctuary]

Ah, so now the Diabloification of the colors makes sense...

 

[Vulcano's assistant]

Read that wrong, disappointed..
C'mon, AAA rpgs have to bring back co-op campaign at some point.

 

[Etnos]

looks like it could be fun, do want.

 

[SDBurton]

All of a sudden i'm interested in this game now.

I know right?

 

[Rogue_Ledr]

Well, as long as the MP doesn't adversely affect the quality of the SP, then this addition should be welcome.

Just wonder how it all works. This description seems kind of vague.

 

[Kaname]

I actually liked the ME 3 multiplayer mode, so hopefully this turns out to be pretty decent as well.

 

[Enduin]

Read that wrong, disappointed..
C'mon, AAA rpgs have to bring back co-op campaign at some point.

I can understand the desire, but actual co-op campaigns are something I do not like at all and I don't want any part of it. If it's super simple like Tales of games where you have another player take control of one of the party members during combat locally or over the net, sure, I'm all for that. But co-op built into the main story, I don't want anything like that at all. It's way too big a feature to not have huge affects on the campaign, especially a BioWare game where the story and dialogue are such huge parts of the experience.

I grew up playing SP games with my friends. FFs, KotoR, RPGs and games of all kinds where one person would play at a time and we'd confer on what to do or where to go first. We didn't need the game to give us built in systems in order to play together and enjoy the game. So if I could just have a buddy pop into my game and control one of my companions but everything else still be the same that would be perfect.

 

[Gaz_RB]

This looks badass! I'm in.

 

[Nonentity]

How is crafting different between SP and MP?

Dragon Age multiplayer is about mastering the fight with friends in a party-based adventure, and crafting is a key element of progression. Through crafting, you will be able to create new items that will make you better at fighting.

There is some overlap between SP and MP recipes, and some are exclusive to one mode or the other. Crafting also lets you create new armors. If you craft a set of Alchemist Armor, you unlock that character, who can then open up a lot of possibilities on MP missions. You can also craft new armors for characters you already own.

They will give your character a new special look but no extra stats. In SP you gather materials through exploration. In MP you salvage items to get them.

This is the only line that gives me pause. In Mass Effect 3, the order you unlocked things was entirely random. Some weapons were strictly better than others, and you had to hope you unlocked them. There appears to be a direct progression to unlocking characters, which is nice, I just hope they don't gate weapons behind the same RNG.

 

[Last Hearth]

It's sounds like the multiplayer is hack and slash Diablo clone loot game? That's sounds pretty good if the loot system is well designed.

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

is this why it was delayed?

No.

They delayed a month.

That's not going to be enough time to create an entirely new mode.

 

[Buzzbrad]

This and The Witcher 3 will be my next year and a half

 

[fastballspecial]

So suprised and happy multiplayer is in the game. It's good that it's completely separate from the story as to not force people into it.

It's funny. I just thinking while working, not 10 minutes ago, that adding some type of end game content like an MMO or Diablo would be really cool... the multiplayer might as well be that.

 

[BeforeU]

Well that's great to hear.

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

lol at the P2W question dodge.

It's... their own FAQ.

It's not an interview.

I know that you feel you need to find fault in this, but come on.

 

[Barack Lesnar]

How good is this game going to be? So. Fucking. Good. That's how good!

 

[dragn]

200hr sp and some mp? pc preorderd :3

 

[Chaos17]

Wasn't Mass Effect 3's multiplayer really good? This sounds like it's in that same vein

This

 

[Jimmyfenix]

You know what I was undecided on this game but the multiplayer has pushed me over. Can't wait for this.

 

[anexanhume]

No.

They delayed a month.

That's not going to be enough time to create an entirely new mode.

Yeah, they're still in heavy bug crunch mode. Developers are tweeting about all of their playtests and filing bug reports.

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

Yeah, they're still in heavy bug crunch mode. Developers are tweeting about all of their playtests and filing bug reports.

My point is things like this are not just simple adds. Games don't get made in a few minutes. This was most likely in development since day one.

 

[geordiemp]

Was on the fence for this game...now I am pumped

 

[anexanhume]

My point is things like this are not just simple adds. Games don't get made in a few minutes. This was most likely in development since day one.

And I was backing it up with evidence the devs are polishing the game, not messing with MP stuff. It's a separate team that is working side-by-side, just like ME3 MP was.