For me, personally, Dragon Age games have always been about getting deep into role-playing my character and making choices, but I can see the appeal of playing parts of the game with friends. BioWare obviously can as well, and will be introducing a four-player co-op mode in Dragon Age: Inquisition.
No, you won't be voting on the single player story choices MMMORPG style. Instead the co-op mode will feature special combat missions separate from the main story, a
BioWare FAQ says.
The multiplayer is described as an "action packed dungeon crawling experience" and compared to the multiplayer mode in Mass Effect 3.
The multiplayer will:
- Have in-gamer purchases through a separate currency called platinum that can be bought with real money. BioWare promises everything can still be bought with gold earned through dungeon crawling, though.
- Not have separate achievements. Good for those that like achievements, but want to skip multiplayer.
- Have challenges and new weekly operations.
- Have a similar crafting system to the single-player mode, but with some unique recipes.
- Have a loot system where you get gold coins and items at the end of the missions. You can use the coins to buy chests with (apparently) random items inside.
- Have a support app called The Inquisition HQ.
- Have 12 characters at launch, with some of these needing to be unlocked by playing the game or buying the chests.
- Not allow transferring items between SP and MP.
- Not allow trading items between players.
You want honesty? I've played a lot of crummy free-to-play mobile games, and some of the elements of the Inquisition multiplayer reek strongly of crummy free-to-play mobile games. The separate real-money currency, the challenges, having the player spend gold to buy randomized loot as if they were pulling a virtual slot machine, all of these are the hallmarks of money-sucking, player-hating mobile games, including the ones published by BioWare owner EA. It's very disappointing to see them in a full-priced AAA game.
But I'm reserving judgement until the final product is out. Even if it is bad, at least there's still single-player.
