During yesterday released material which is said to be from an alpha version or a pre-alpha version of the title. It has ended up on Twitter (see link above) and many other places. We get to see a short clip of a Gray Warden swinging a sword. It looks like an evolution of the battle systems from Dragon Age: Inqusition and Dragon Age 2. It’s dark and it looks like we’re in the underworld. The characters exclaim that something worse than the Darkspawn is coming. We also get to see a picture of the menu system.
It is not fully established yet if it’s a real leak or if it’s fake, take it with a grain of salt. The Reddit user who claims to have seen this version live is also the origin of this possible leak (see text link above). The material has been taken down on Reddit and is still listed as unverified. A few points that stood out from the Reddit thread are the gameplay. Thread creator revanchisto writes the following:
- Combat is completely in real-time and similar to a hack and slash. I’m told the guiding reference point was the God of War (2018), and that shows.
- Player has their regular combo attack and then their abilities as well as a special bar which generates allowing you to pull off a special move. I don’t really understand the comparison to FF15’s wheel. It’s the standard Dragon Age ability wheel.
- There was no party control demonstrated. I think it’s a safe bet to say you won’t be able to directly control your party members in the game. That said, you will likely be able to tell them to execute certain abilities. But apparently that was locked off in the Alpha.
The template for the gameplay according to this seems to be a more action-oriented approach to the battles. In comparison to the more tactical setup in the first title. It is also unclear what role we will have for our allies. According to the Reddit post, we will potentially order our allies to perform special attacks, a bit like in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. However, we may not be in full control like in previous iterations of the series.
