At 29:12:
"Dragons in Inquisition are one of the last things we're going to talk about today...and they are fundamentally something we put a ton of work into for the entire team. We want to make sure that dragons are handcrafted and incredibly, challenging battles.
There are many of them scattered throughout the game. They are all optional. But each one is designed to push you to your limits."
Thanks, Mr. Laidlaw. Glad to see the team is hard at work on completely optional elements, when the title of the game has "Dragon" in it. Let's not associate the main plot with anything to do with a Dragon. Let's also hope that all that work has been completed, and this completely optional stuff is just icing.
Now, it could be that, since slaying Dragons are optional, it could translate to some later payoff in a main plot point. Seems reasonable, and the DA team doesn't want to reveal anything story relevant. I'm hoping it's something like that.
But let's look at the past. In much the same way Dragon Age 2 could've been simply titled "Kirkwall Nights: Tales of Hawke" or something even remotely about whatever Dragon Age 2 was about in relation to it's predecessor, this series and its focus on...well, whatever its point is anymore, it all leaves us rather lost. An optional dragon in the Bone Pit optional quest was holding a piece of the Champion's set, the armor, I believe. How this got there had nothing to do with anything relevant. (Bioware: games need loot...Chamption Kirkwall loot...hide it in a dragon? Don't explain anything? Do it.)
Dragon Age: Origins, the original, was about stopping the Blight, which was anthropomorphized as a giant, evil Dragon. Now, that's not to say every Dragon Age needs a giant, evil Dragon as The End Boss™; but if you're going to make a series with a title in it, there better be some relevance as to why there's now Dragons running around in a series of Ages, and they're all just optional FF7 Ruby/Emerald/[InsertGemstoneHere] Weapons. We know Cassandra comes from a family of Dragon Slayers, so this is apparently a common thing. But now, the sky is literally torn with evil demons running around, which kind of makes the point of stopping the Blight in the first game rather moot, when there are now a whole bunch of random dragons just destroying the country. Or are they?
So if Dragon Age: Origins was to stop a mythical Dragon from coming about and destroying the world, and now we've got all these static dragons running around just patrolling their areas, killing any poor sap who comes by...what's the point of Dragon Age now? Well, we have dragons again. The Blight dragon had a purpose: destroy everything. But DA3's Dragons? They don't seem to give a crap. So what's the point of DA? Are these Dragons: Blight Light™, but just really dumb? Do they eat hordes of cows?
DA was a hero's journey of uniting the country to stop an evil that would threaten everyone, while teasing Claudia Black or exercising your gay card.
DA2's main theme was to show the divide between Mages and Templars, and how retarded and meaningless it was all at the end, with even more gay.
DA3 is apparently about wanting to be Skyrim. I'm assuming Sassy Gay Friends.
I like mine:
"Dragon Age: Insert Rising Action Here: What are we doing again? -- Bioware©"
