Dragon Age Keep is an online feature

Dragon Age Inquisition, the third instalment in the series, is due out on 21 November (a few days earlier in America for reasons that are unknown and annoying).

Sometime, perhaps a month, before its release it is planned for Dragon Age Keep to be released.

The Keep is a means to allow players who are new, or who are not, to create the world state and import that to Inquisition. In previous games decisions of varying degrees of importance were made, and Keep allows you to import these regardless of whether you’re changing platforms or playing for the first time. Each decision will be explained, and you can alter as much or as little as you want.

Dragon Age Keep will be an online feature, for which you will need an Origin account.

I have some mixed feelings about that. Whilst my PS3 is internet connected and it won’t affect me, I know lots of people have patchy internet access or none at all. Making the Keep browser-based enables it to be expanded and used for future Dragon Age games, but also means that if you don’t have access to the internet on your chosen console then you’re out of luck.

Of course, there will be a pre-set default world state, but in Mass Effect 2 (where I lacked the comic despite some effort to acquire it...) I found the default world state made every damned decision differently to me.

The reason for not having it as part of the Inquisition game is that save files from Origins, Awakening and DA2 have some issues. They work just fine for the games, but when importing to later versions there are inconsistencies and errors, which rather defeats the purpose of such an import.

It sounds like it’s possible importing to the Keep might come about, but I do not think importing a DA2 save file to set-up Inquisition’s world state without the Keep could happen.

From what I’ve seen, the Keep looks pretty good and I’m looking forward to its release, but I wish there were an alternative for those without online capability. Even in America there are a huge number of people who don’t have it for consoles, let alone in Europe and further afield.

Thaddeus