Dragon Age: Inquisition developer shares cheeky gameplay mechanic hidden from players
It’s all smoke and mirrors.
Scott Roepel 
Image via Bioware
While we eagerly wait for the release of Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, interesting news for Dragon Age: Inquisition is giving us something to chew on. The game’s been out for nine years, and while that’s plenty of time to beat it multiple times and romance everyone in the party dozens of times over, there is still more to learn about Bioware’s fantasy game. It turns out a feature we’ve all used to get around more quickly doesn’t actually work at all.
Related: How to play the Dragon Age games in timeline order
The feature in question is sprinting on horseback. While you are able to activate sprint while riding a horse, it doesn’t make a difference in how fast the horse moves. It’s all a lie. Dragon Age creative director John Epler posted a series of threads on how sprinting works in Inquisition. Answering a fan question, Epler stated sprinting couldn’t work effectively due to Frostbite, the engine the game runs on. Basically, the engine wasn’t able to load in levels quickly enough to accommodate the sprinting animation.
To work around this, the team just added speed lines for the horse and messed with the camera to make it all feel faster — so engaging sprint while on a horse doesn’t make you go any faster than trotting along. However, riding a horse is still quicker than running on foot as the characters.
It’s all even more mind-boggling when you consider the fact the game has a horse race as a quest. You’re tasked with riding around a course as fast as you can. Now that we know sprinting isn’t an actual mechanic, it’d be interesting to see how long the course takes while “sprinting” versus when you don’t. But it’s unclear if this option only works for horses.
There are multiple mounts in the game aside from horses. Along with your equestrian friends, you can find nugs, dracolisks, and harts as well. Sprinting may function as intended for the other creatures but Epler didn’t know for sure if that was the case. We’ll be on the lookout to see if sprinting is a feature in Dreadwolf.
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