‘Dragon Age Dreadwolf’ Footage And Images Leak Online As New Gameplay Details Emerge

Leaked video and screenshots from BioWare’s upcoming video game Dragon Age Dreadwolf have found their way online. EA has done its level best to delete and suppress the leaked footage and images, though I fail to see why. This is a great, organic way to build hype for a game that we’ve learned next to nothing about. Leaks—if they’re not too serious—can be great viral marketing, after all. (Unless they give away important story bits, which is always a shame).

Via Insider Gaming, the below footage was first leaked onto Reddit. You can follow this link for screenshots of the game as well. As you can see, reports that Dreadwolf would be more of a hack’n’slash game (as opposed to pause-and-play) appear to be true. This is very much a more action-oriented looking game than any of its predecessors:

The Reddit poster explains the gameplay details (click through to get more of the background on the video) in bullet points:

• 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 standard Dragon Age ability wheel.
• There was no party control demonstrated. I think it’s a safe bet to say you will not be able to directly control your party members in the game. That said, you likely will be able to tell them to execute certain abilities. But apparently that was locked off in the Alpha.
• The most immediate thing you noticed is that animation quality has DRASTICALLY improved. Like, for any other AAA title it’s probably not that big a deal. But we’ve never seen animation quality this good in any BioWare game. I didn’t actually play it, but I can tell it probably feels really good to control your character. No more stiff animations, it’s all very fluid and seems also very responsive.
• Jumping has also been retained. So, rejoice if you enjoyed jumping a lot in DAI.
• As the character was a sword and shield dude, he was able to parry attacks from enemies and follow up with counters. It’s hard to tell their exact abilities, they only had two on hotkeys along with a special. But one appears to basically be a drop kick and the other a charged sword attack. I’m not sure exactly what the special attack does.
• The UI is similar to DAI, but this is also Alpha and UI is the last thing finalized in any game. Character has a chest slot, a helmet slot, a primary weapon slot, and a shield (secondary weapon?) slot. For accessories, one amulet slot, one belt slot, and two ring slots.
• Oh and the player character’s hair looked glorious. I mean, it was clipping right through their helmet. But it was flowing and bouncing as they moved. Finally, no more stiff ass hair. Now, let’s hope we have more than just two black hairstyles.
• Enemies were pretty much just variations of darkspawn, except the dragon, but again they seemed to have Red Lyrium powers.

As Jason Schreier reported in Bloomberg, the game used to have multiplayer components but was scaled back to a single-player only campaign, which should come as good news to anyone worried that a ‘live service’ model might ruin the RPG.

Tom Henderson at Insider Gaming reports:

Two sources have revealed that some of those multiplayer components are still ‘sensed’ to some degree in the current build of the game – with one source saying “the game felt a bit like Destiny with a central hub where players could probably regroup before heading into the next mission”. The games hub, though, will still play a vital role in Dreadwolf in its single-player format.

Dreadwolf follows a similar gameplay loop to its predecessors, which will involve recruiting and growing your crew, whom you’ll encounter by completing missions. Your recruited crew will populate your hub, where you can give them different pieces of equipment and modifications as your progress throughout the game. It’s understood that you’ll be able to move from your hub to missions by passing through a mirrored portal.

As for combat, one source, who recently played the game, suggested that it was more akin to a hack n’ slash compared to past games, and the game’s combat wheel is similar to that of the one in Final Fantasy 15. As for your crew, it was said that you currently cannot control them and only select the ability they can cast in combat.

So the next Dragon Age is borrowing heavily from God Of War (2018) and Final Fantasy 15 in terms of combat and gameplay and will be quite vastly different from what’s come before, for better or worse. I’ve never been a huge fan of the pause-and-play party control, preferring action or turn-based rather than the weird hybrid, but this could also change the DNA of Dragon Age pretty majorly. We shall see. There’s no release date yet, but it could be later this year. More likely, 2024 or later but anything is possible. I do miss Dragon Age. Hopefully this is good . . . .

P.S. I keep accidentally typing Dragon Age Direwolf instead of Dreadwolf. This, I suspect, will be a problem for me down the road. Sigh.