Dragon Age: Inquisition?! Why not Dragon Age III?!

EA has explained the decision to drop the III from Dragon Age: Inquisition. While the game was announced as Dragon Age III back in September, the number was noticeably absent from EA’s press conference at E3 last week. In an interview with IGN, EA Labels president Frank Gibeau told us why.
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Inquisition is an all-new chapter inside of the Dragon Age universe, as opposed to people expecting a follow-on to Dragon Age 1 and 2 in a literal, linear sense.

“I think there’s always this debate over numbers versus no numbers, what works, what doesn’t work,” Gibeau told IGN. “We felt like we wanted to bring more attention to the word Inquisition, because that’s more the story arc of what it’s like. There’s a whole bunch of gameplay and features and big story choices related to how you go through this Inquisition that happens in the world.”

“It’s a tactical marketing decision,” Gibeau continued. “There wasn’t anything that strategic about it, to be blunt. We just wanted to draw more attention to the fact that Inquisition is an all-new chapter inside of the Dragon Age universe, as opposed to people expecting a follow-on to Dragon Age 1 and 2 in a literal, linear sense.”



Gibeau also explained the decision to expand Inquisition to next-gen despite it originally being announced for current platforms.

“Just the raw capabilities of Frostbite 3 and gen 4 features,” Gibeau told us when we asked about the advantage of adding PS4 and Xbox One. “We’re going to have PS3 and Xbox 360 and PC versions of Dragon Age III, so there will be a very broad-based experience there, but the new platforms are giving us the opportunity to tell stories in much larger worlds with more features and more things. From our perspective, we didn’t want to launch a “current-gen” game in a next-gen market. We took the opportunity to add resources, add time, and we brought in new technology. Frankly, we’ve raised our expectations.”