Dragon Age Keep allows users to “customize a historical world state” and import into Dragon Age: Inquisition

By Stephany Nunneley

Dragon Age Keep has been announced by BioWare which will allow Dragon Age players to “customize a historical world state” to their exact specifications.

Within the Keep, players will be able to customize as much or as little as they wish and import the saved world state into Dragon Age: Inquisition at the start of a new game.

“Very early in the planning of DAI, we began to think about how we were going to address the issue of importing save game files,” said Mark Darrah, executive producer of Dragon Age. “We were dealing with a brand new game engine, plus the next generation of consoles. It was a priority that our fans be able to have their decisions carry forward, regardless of their past or future platform.

“We realized that in order to make this work, we’d have to look into a cloud-based solution. Moving to the cloud allows players to take their unique world state into any platform (present or future) and even other media. For existing fans, an advantage of being in the cloud is that (if you are ok with spoilers) you can fully explore what-if scenarios, and become aware of events and consequences in our past games that you may not have known were possible.

“You can then fire up the previous games and go exploring for those moments. Even if you don’t go back and re-play the previous games, you can still establish that scenario as part of your world state, and import it at the start of a new DAI game to see the consequences of your actions.”

Darrah said the team is still investigating how players will be able to import saved games and how they can be used to “populate the initial world state of the Dragon Age Keep.”

Starting today, players can visit the Dragon Age Keep and register for its beta, set to kick off early next year

The Keep will be available to everyone a few months before DAI gets released, in order to give fans “plenty of time to experiment with scenarios and make their history exactly how they want.”

More information on this will be provided in the months to come.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is out in fall 2014 on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.

Thanks, hives.