We all know that Dragon Age: Dreadwolf has been in development for a good while now, but given how elusive the series has been for the best part of a decade, you couldn’t have held it against a reasonable person for thinking that somehow, some way, the game just wouldn’t come to be. And while I’m sure that BioWare won’t exactly be happy that some pretty raw-looking footage emerged the other day of an alpha build of the game, at least it reassures us that there definitely 100% is game being created here (in a way that cinematic trailers featuring dour-faced elf Solas just don’t).
The biggest surprise to emerge from the leaked footage is the combat, which looks like it parts with that used in the bulk of the series (and Bioware’s cRPG heritage) to go for that over-the-shoulder real-time style that God of War and the other cool kids of gaming utilise. Clearly, it’s going to look much better on release, but one thing from it is clear: Bioware wants Dreadwolf to tap into the mainstream, and a dynamic flashy combat system is one way to do that.
A lot of fans aren’t happy about this (and it seems to go against our Jack Coleman’s calls to make Dreadwolf’s combat a blend of the first three games), and I can understand why. At a glance, it looks like Bioware is severing itself from its tactically rich cRPG heritage once and for all, doing away with the party management, the tactical richness, and the good old-fashioned fiddliness of their older games like Baldur’s Gate, Dragon Age: Origins, and KOTOR. But based on this, other than the fact that it’s more 1:1 real-time and action-oriented, what’s to say that there isn’t a whole tactical layer to the combat that we haven’t seen yet?
Something we shouldn’t forget is that Bioware’s past is, pretty distant by now, and it’s not unreasonable for them to want to move with the times. Dragon Age: Origins’ combat was probably the last time it still felt kind of acceptable to have that timer-based, cooldown-based combat without your game feeling a bit on the creaky side (and even back in 2009, Origins waas kind of pushing its luck). Dragon Age: Inquisition’s combat, meanwhile, tried retaining some of that tactical real-time-with-pause style, but looked rather stiff, squishy, and unimpactful as a result–like an MMO combat system that really didn’t do justice to the game’s pretty visuals. Now I love my old-school isometric cRPGs with their quaintly antiquated real-time-with-pause combat systems, but there’s a case to be made that they just don’t click for modern 3D games any more.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that Dreadwolf needs to cop out and turn into a hack-and-slasher, of course, but nor does this footage really tell us that that’s what they’ve done. This is just a snippet of an alpha build after all, and it’s perfectly possible that one or two clicks away there are elements of that old Bioware tactical RPG magic, which could result in a combat system that both has that traditional tactical depth while also having that eye-catching cinematic swagger.
There are a couple of things that would be needed for this: a return of Dragon Age: Origins’ macro system, where a menu lets you to set party members’ behaviours when certain conditions are met (for example, prioritising which enemy types to attack, healing when a certain character falls below a certain health percentage, or automatically casting a spell type that synergises and stacks well with another spell that’s just been cast).
After all, despite the combat looking more God of War or Witcher than ‘classic Dragon Age,’ Dreadwolf still looks like it’ll be very much party-based, unlike the more solitary wanderings of Kratos and Geralt. By letting you set up macros for your team, Dreadwolf would allow you to strategise before fights, which means that in battle you could focus on throwing down those sweet real-time moves (and shuffle-dodging a lot, by the looks of things).
But sometimes, neither your AI companions’ artificial intuitions nor the condition-based commands you carefully laid out for them will be enough to react to emergent situations on the battlefield. To that end, even with fully real-time combat, Bioware would do well to bring back its trusty combat pause system, which lets you issue commands to your party members on the battlefield. Now, the source of the leak suggested that, unlike in previous entries, you won’t be able to directly control other party members (which, frustrating though that may be for old-timers, is fairly understandable if they’re looking to modernise and streamline things). However, they could yet compromise here, and at least allow players to issue and queue up orders for their teammates from a pause screen that keeps us in the battle; this would give Dreadwolf a unique feel that straddles the line between modern action game and tactically fulfilling Bioware RPG.
What we saw in the leaked footage is clearly so raw and early in the game’s development, that it’s way too soon to dismiss this as a cop-out, or an indicator that Dragon Age has gone full hack-and-slash on us. What I see here is potential, because there’s nothing here to suggest that the best elements of Dragon Age’s various combat systems won’t feature in the final game.
For me, Dragon Age’s combat was never really about that weirdly rhythmic MMO-style combat where your characters go into ‘attack mode’ that you then layer over with cooldown-based abilities; it was about getting your party to function as a cohesive and formidable unit, and if Dreadwolf manages to blend that with a combat system that seems to be aiming for the oomph and grit of modern action-oriented games, then it could yet be onto something really quite special–distinctly modern, but with those distinctly Bioware old-school touches thrown in.
