Dragon Age: Inquisition main storyline playable, new screens and assets released

Dragon Age: Inquisition has been ticking along nicely for the past few months, and BioWare has released details of its progress to date, including a fair whack of new assets to drool over.

Writing on the developer's blog, franchise executive producer Mark Darrah said the team is finishing off a "holiday build" - a BioWare tradition of getting a version of the game as complete as possible, presumably so team members and other BioWare staff can take a look at it during their days off.

The Dragon Age team intends for its Inquisition holiday build to have "the main storyline completely playable from beginning to end", so it can work on pacing and spacing and "all of the gameplay systems working together".

It's also starting work on voice overs and music, balancing classes so they feel unique, and most excitingly, locking down tech and content. To this end, check out images of a tarnish shader, trees, corpses, outfits, faces, and environments. Locations are quite important to Darrah, and he even released a sequence of work-in-progress shots for one location.

"As you can see, an initial screenshot is critiqued and altered to show the goal for the area. This gives the level artist the specific direction needed to take the area to the next level (so to speak)," he said.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is expected on PC, PlayStation 3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One in the latter half of 2014. Elsewhere at BioWare, Mass Effect 4 has also produced a playable end-of-year build.