According to a preview from Playstation Official Magazine, Dragon Age: Inquisition will introduce a new metagame system to the series revolving around castle keeps.

Keeps serve as focal points in each of Orlais’ many varied regions. Each one the player captures unlocks new quests for their character.

With players serving as the Inquisitor, keeps also allow you to assign varying amounts of Inquisition agents to maintain it and its surrounding region once in your control. The more agents you assign to a keep, the more you can put it to work for your hero.

For example, you can have agents build a mine to bring in more cash.  Or you can make your agents rebuild a colossus to improve keep morale incase it finds itself in conflict with invading forces at some point. This leads me to believe that keep defense will also play some role in this new metagame.

The OPM preview also draws a parallel to Assassin’s Creed in some ways with this new feature, and I have to agree as it sounds a lot like the Kenway Fleet or Brotherhood building aspects from the more recent games. Either way, it looks to add some much needed gameplay depth and variety to this third chapter in Bioware’s epic medieval fantasy.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is slated for a Q3 2014 release on Xbox One, PS4, Xbox 360, PS3, and PC.