The upcoming fantasy role-playing game Dragon Age: Inquisition is not necessarily an open-world game, like BioWare's Mike Laidlaw made clear in a recent interview. Instead of a huge open-world, there is a world of Inquisition of several large regions that can be freely explored. On the question of whether the developers from BioWare consider the game as open-world experience, Laidlaw said in an interview with RPS:
"Open world I think is a really loaded term, because everyone immediately thinks of Skyrim and assumes everything will be exactly like Skyrim. In our case, there are extremely large regions you can explore."
"It’s a multi-region game, which means that you’ll travelling with a world map. You’re travelling across this chunk of the continent in which the game is set. And each of the regions is purposeful. It has a reason you would be brought here. It ties back to the story, or at least to the overall themes of the game. 'These are my enemies and they’re very active here. I should find out why.'"
"That kind of stuff. That means that they aren’t necessarily laden with story, because story is the antithesis of discovery, right? It tends to lead you along. But when you’re discovering things, you should feel like they’re part of the overall game and not random. I would say that it has elements of open world for sure, but it’s something closer to the feel we had in the Baldur's Gate games or in Origins, even, where it’s larger areas, big spaces, and the chance for you to move around and see a wide variety of different terrains and locales and so on."