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A preview of what's to come, and a small bit of news for Dragon Age fans

I got a ton of great interviews over the long Summer Game Fest weekend, but, upon arriving home yesterday, I also discovered that I got Covid.

I’m not feeling too bad now, but I do think it’s best for me to postpone today’s newsletter. You’ll get the next edition tomorrow, I hope. Friday, worst case.

(If you’re someone I saw at SGF, I hope I didn’t get you sick. If I did, I deeply apologize.)

Top of the list of Covid frustrations is that I can’t hug my kids. But also high on the list is that I can’t start sharing with you the mountains of material I got from the trip.

In the coming editions, look for impressions of a wide range of games—from Astro Bot to Zoochosis.

You can also look forward to what I hope has become a Game File signature: a who’s who of interviews, including….

• a wide-ranging chat with the makers of the next Assassin’s Creed

• the first interview I’ve ever done with an interviewee who communicated with me in American Sign Language, in which he showed me how he helped create a brand new form of sign language for an upcoming game (I’ll have some video for that interview, so you can see how the new language compares to ASL)

• one surprise conversation with someone I’ve been trying to get all year

• and a lot more…

P.S. I can’t resist sharing at least one tidbit with you today. It’ll be of interest if you’re a Dragon Age person.

After watching a demo of the exciting but very linear “prologue mission” for EA/Bioware’s upcoming fall 2024 adventure, Dragon Age The Veilguard, I asked the game’s creative director, Jon Epler, about the full game’s structure.

Was it all as linear as what we’d been shown?

“Once you get past a certain point, the game opens up dramatically,” he said.

I asked if it would be comparable to the previous game in the series, Dragon Age Inquisition, which had discrete, explorable zones.

“Dragon Age Inquisition was very much an open world game, and this one isn’t. And that’s partially because we wanted to make sure all the content mattered and was a more structured, sculpted experience for the player,” he said. “That said… there’s exploration. There are opportunities to go off the beaten path. There are some spaces that are fairly wide.”

I asked if there was “a table,” a reference to the war table in Inquisition from which players conduct missions and help advance the story.

“There is a table,” he said. “Now, whether it works the same way as the table in the previous game…”