Reading this, however, makes me want to play it even more.

The world of Dragon Age: Inquisition is big. Really big. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to Inquisition. It’s big enough, in fact, to fit all of Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 into it several times over. As you might expect, it’s crammed full of quests, fights, diversions and memorable moments, but there’s also some stuff in there you might never find. It’s not hidden, per se, there’s just no great big quest arrow pointing at it, which is exactly how Creative Director Mike Laidlaw wanted it.

“In each level, I wanted there to be at least one cave, one dungeon, one something that no-one tells you to go to,” he explained to me. He said that his design team had to “break some old habits” as they were creating the enormous open world that would become Inquisition. Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 both made sure the player knew about every last thing they could possibly do, and Laidlaw wanted to make sure not everything was quite so obvious. It meant that there might be content in Inquisition that might never be seen, but it also meant that there was a point to exploring the game’s stunning locations beyond just hitting the next point of interest on the map.

Don’t get me wrong…BioWare make excellent RPGs. But one thing that has been notably absent from most of their offerings — from Neverwinter Nights on, really — is the sense that the world in which the game is set is open to exploration. Even massive set-pieces like…say…Orzammar really don’t offer much in the way of exploration potential; area design in most BioWare games has tended to be oriented toward progressing the player to the next goal/conversation/quest. So it was already a departure, for BioWare, to structure Inquisition in a more open way.

This additional little detail — the understanding that one of the key features of an open world is the ability, and indeed the incentive, to explore and find hidden things — gives me a bit more confidence that they’re going to be delivering something magnificent come October. (Not, mind you, that I was expecting them to flop this game.)