The developer of Dragon Age: Inquisition shares a cheeky gameplay mechanic that is hidden from the players

As we eagerly await the release of Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, interesting news is coming out for Dragon Age: Inquisition. The game has been out for nine years, and while that’s enough time to beat it multiple times and romance everyone at the party dozens of times, there’s still more to learn about Bioware’s fantasy game. It turns out that a feature we’ve all used to get around faster doesn’t work at all.

The feature in question is sprinting on horseback. While you can activate sprint while riding a horse, it makes no difference how fast the horse is moving. It’s all a lie Developer John Epler, creative director of the Dragon Age series, has posted a number of threads on how sprinting works in Inquisition. Responding to a fan question, Epler said that sprinting couldn’t work effectively due to Frostbite, the engine the game runs on. Basically, the engine wasn’t able to load levels fast enough to accommodate the sprint animation.

To get around this, the team simply added speed lines for the horse and played around with the camera to make everything feel faster. So when you sprint on a horse, you don’t get any faster than a trot. However, riding a horse is still faster than running on foot, as the characters show.

It’s all even more amazing when you consider that the game has a horse racing quest. Your task is to drive around a course as fast as possible. Now that we know that sprinting isn’t really a mechanic, it would be interesting to see how long the course takes when you “sprint” compared to when you’re not. However, it is unclear if this option only works for horses.

Aside from horses, there are several mounts in the game. Along with your horseman friends, you can also find buds, dracolisks, and deer. Sprinting might work as intended for the other creatures, but Epler wasn’t sure if that was the case.

We’ll have to wait and see if sprinting is a feature in Dreadwolf.