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Dragon Age: Inquisition Reviewed and Benchmarked
MojoKid writes To say that BioWare has something to prove with Dragon Age: Inquisition is an understatement. The first Dragon Age: Origins was a colossal, sprawling, unabashed throwback to classic RPGs. Conversely, Dragon Age: Inquisition doesn't just tell an epic story, it evolves in a way that leaves you, as the Inquisitor, leading an army. Creating that sense of scope required a fundamentally different approach to gameplay. Neither Dragon Origins or Dragon Age 2 had a true "open" world in the sense that Skyrim is an open world. Instead, players clicked on a location and auto-traveled across the map from Point A to Point B. Thus, a village might be contained within a single map, while a major city might have 10-12 different locations to explore. Inquisition keeps the concept of maps as opposed to a completely open world, but it blows those maps up to gargantuan sizes. Instead of simply consisting of a single town or a bit of wilderness, the new maps in Dragon Age: Inquisition are chock-full of areas to explore, side quests, crafting materials to gather, and caves, dungeons, mountain peaks, flowing rivers, and roving bands of monsters. And Inquisition doesn't forget the small stuff — the companion quests, the fleshed-out NPCs, or the rich storytelling — it just seeks to put those events in a much larger context across a broad geographical area. Dragon Age: Inquisition is one of the best RPGs to come along in a long time. Never has a game tried to straddle both the large-scale, 10,000-foot master plan and the small-scale, intimate adventure and hit both so well. In terms of graphics performance, you might be surprised to learn that a Radeon R9 290X has better frame delivery than a GeForce GTX 980, despite the similarity in the overall frame rate. The worst frame time for an Radeon R9 290X is just 38.5ms or 26 FPS while a GeForce GTX 980 is at 46.7ms or 21 FPS. AMD takes home an overall win in Dragon Age: Inquisition currently, though Mantle support isn't really ready for prime time. In related news, hypnosec sends word that Chinese hackers claim to have cracked Denuvo DRM, the anti-piracy solution for Dragon Age: Inquisition. A Chinese hacker group has claimed that they have managed to crack Denuvo DRM — the latest anti-piracy measure to protect PC games from piracy. Introduced for the first time in FIFA 15 for PC, the Denuvo anti-piracy solution managed to keep the FIFA 15 uncracked for 2 months and Dragon Age Inquisition for a month. However, Chinese hackers claim that they have managed to rip open the DRM after fifteen days of work. The hackers have uploaded a video to prove their accomplishment. A couple of things need to be pointed out here. First,the Chinese team has merely cracked the DRM and this doesn't necessarily mean that there are working cracks out there. Also, the crack only works with Windows 7 64-bit systems and won't work on Windows 8 or Windows 7 32-bit systems for now. The team is currently working to collect hardware data on processor identification codes.
Thy Rod And Thy Staff.
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In regards to the Chinese cracking the DRM for Dragon Age: Inquisition, how about we support the developers of these games instead of supporting piracy. If this title is supposedly the best RPG in a decade, shouldn't the developers and everyone involved be rewarded for their hard work?
It certainly reads like one.
I got the game and played it for some 30-40 hours now, certainly did see any "fundamentally different approach" in the gameplay so far, compared to, say Kingdoms of Amalur, or Farcry 3, or the Fallout series, etc.
Not the say the game isn't fun, but not really groundbreaking either.
Oliver.
On the forums and from personal experience I can tell you there is a crash bug with Windows 8.1 64 bit with nVidia cards during cutscenes where framerates drop to near zero. Worst thing about it is it's random. I wasn't able to reproduce it with Windows 7 64 bit also with an nVidia card (albeit older laptop card).
Fortunately, I was reading the forums and there are fixes coming. They know about nVidia framerate problems, random sound dropouts (in fact, they are looking for 60+ hour saves that have this problem) and many of the crashes.
Yeah, there are some technical problems, but that happens with any launch. It honestly isn't that bad overall IMO.
What is a disaster is the PC controls. Even the VERY favorable linked review mentions this. If you put the game on an easy difficulty and play it like a console action-RPG its fine. Pound they keys, have some fun. But if you want to go tactical and have that fine control on the higher difficulties...oh god. Its horrible in that mode due to the controls.
Still, I enjoy the game overall, and it would be quite good if the controls weren't broken on PC.
The fact that they're reviewing DRM filled games on Origin at all tells me that they are aiming for a very different audience than the people who post comments.
not at all its ripe with homosexual characters.
We're not an audience.
The user metacritic scores were very low for this game, whereas the critic's reviews were pretty high. This was the first time I can remember in which I've actually sided with the critics over the users. As far as I can tell, the users were just giving it bad scores because of the DRM. Due to debacles like Sim City, people are very, very leery of EA's DRM policies, and in fact DA:I has presented some problems for people doing benchmarks and the like (it detects the hardware changes and locks you out of the game after 4 or 5 changes). That said, DA:I will continue to work even with the EA servers go down (which they have) - you just can't play multiplayer. No big deal.
The game itself is amazing. Great story, amazing graphics, open(-ish) world with non-linear(-ish) design, challenging combats (I'm playing on Hard, can't comment on other modes), and an absolute ton of side missions to do with your companions that ties in back and forth with the non-interactive missions you can send your army on across the world. I highly recommend it for anyone who likes RPGs. It's the best CRPG I've played since Fallout New Vegas.
It's interface is a mess on the PC with KB/mouse. It is visually good, but nothing groundbreaking. The game really feels like a LOTRO rip-off though, except with a lot more interface and design bugs. Best RPG in decades? It may not even be the best RPG out right now. It's certainly not the best Dragon Age. I like the game so far, but I am not in love with it, the design flaws make it hard to love.
What is a disaster is the PC controls.
Ugh. Why do so many AAA-games ship with broken controls on PCs? That really pisses me off. I was planning to buy the game, but now.. well, I've been burned by horrible controls so many times in the past that I'm just not so keen on repeating that anymore :S
They don't seem to have released it DRM free on GOG, so... no thanks. Guess you didn't need my money.
In the PCMasterRace we like to call this "consolitis." What pisses me off more than anything is the 8 quick bar slots...and when you're playing a mage by the time you hit level 24 you can have 10-15 abilities. Piss poor UI design. If they'd added a alt+ or control+ option it would have solved it right away.
Om, nomnomnom...
"Yeah, there are some technical problems, but that happens with any launch."
I don't recall that happening very often at all back in the days of cartridge-based games. You know, when the silicon was too expensive to waste with buggy code.
Too bad things aren't similarly expensive, now. The big game companies would be forced to do serious QA for once.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Who had to sleep with the submitter to get it?
(Note: I make no assumptions that the sacrificial goat in this case was female...)
"Yeah, there are some technical problems, but that happens with any launch."
I don't recall that happening very often at all back in the days of cartridge-based games. You know, when the silicon was too expensive to waste with buggy code.
Too bad things aren't similarly expensive, now. The big game companies would be forced to do serious QA for once.
The complexity was orders of magnitude less as well. And PC games in the 90s, with a much larger variety of sound and graphics hardware, were definitely not bug free on all hardware.
Looks like EA / BioWare are really on an all-out bribe offensive with this one.
Either that or a lot of "independent reviewers" magically came up with exactly the same sentences about the game...
It has a nice-looking world, but is a horrible console port with clunky controls, a bad combat system, and pretty awkward cutscenes (I mean badly animated, not just awkward in terms of story and lack of real options).
I'm a "peasant" (or rather, can't be arsed to game on a PC as I already spend most of my waking hours in front of one, when I want to play something I prefer the comfort of my couch/HDTV/surround sound and not having to mess with driver updates and such, so sue me), but I don't think it's pure "consolitis". There are quite a few gameplay changes compared to previous versions WRT combat: only a limited amount of potions available, no changing equipment mid-battle and passive abilities no longer eat a portion of your stamina/mana but are more like permanent stat bonuses (and no longer need to be toggled on/off). I think they want the player to plan ahead how they'd like to take on a particular encounter, not to have a full toolkit available for you. And I think in any given skill tree the topmost ones are quite useless on higher levels.
Now that doesn't mean that I totally agree with the design choice there, previously on consoles there was a limited amount of quick slots and the rest available via a menu which was better IMHO. But as that was how it was before, "consolitis" it is not, completely at least.
So you're just saying that you'd rather be lazy then use a PC. After all, you can use a surround sound system, HDTV, and a couch with a PC just fine. Though, comparing say DA:O vs DA:I it's a pure laziness issue, after all they could create context and sub-context menus without a problem to solve the skill problems issue right?
So yeah, it's consolitis. They dumbed down the gameplay to make it more action-rpg, then simply ignored the rest of the gameplay abilities.
Om, nomnomnom...
That's exactly what I'm saying. I want to be lazy at times. I still don't completely agree on the consolitis though, they dumbed it down on consoles as well (even from DA2, which was much more action-RPG-ish).
When they invest more in advertisement over programming this is what you get.
Their last good game was Mass Effect 3 regardless if people liked the ending or not.
It's all down hill for these guys now.
Does this game run on Linux?
Sure, but not your distro. Sorry.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I've already bought the game for my girlfriend, though it's waiting to be opened on Christmas.
I'm really looking forward to the crack so I can compare performance before and after.
"The complexity was orders of magnitude less as well."
That is absolutely wrong.
http://www.gamefaqs.com/nes/91...
There's your initial, modern way to do some ROM programming.
Bear in mind, these tools were not available back then. It was pure ASM and Hex Editing.
And ASM is anything BUT simple, sir.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I'm running Win7 64 Bit on an Intel i7-4770k 3.5Ghz Quad and an nVidia GTX 760. Not latest-greatest but it's chewed up everything else I've thrown at it so far without a hicup... except for DA: I. If I have all the graphic settings set to their maximum values I'm guaranteed that at some point either within a cutscene or a few seconds after, my screens will both go completely black for a few seconds, and then recover with an error on the screen stating that an instruction passed by the software (Dragon Age) had disconnected my video card and caused it to no longer respond. My research into the error indicated that BF4 is recorded to cause the exact same error in many cases on nVidia hardware (I don't have BF4 to confirm). I'd have to double check which three settings I changed that fixed the issue and allowed me to play for hours straight without anything save for the occasional stutter in the cutscene video (Anti-Aliasing was one of them that I had to turn off completely, the other two was setting values to mid while everything else remained at their maximum).
"The complexity was orders of magnitude less as well."
That is absolutely wrong.
http://www.gamefaqs.com/nes/91...
There's your initial, modern way to do some ROM programming.
Bear in mind, these tools were not available back then. It was pure ASM and Hex Editing.
And ASM is anything BUT simple, sir.
Hacking a cartridge binary is not the same as developing the SW in the first place. E.g. testing "Super Mario" on an early Nintendo system is orders of magnitude simpler than testing an open world game like GTA V or Assasins Creed: Unity across all the supported platforms, especially PC.
" E.g. testing "Super Mario" on an early Nintendo system is orders of magnitude simpler than testing an open world game like GTA V or Assasins Creed: Unity across all the supported platforms, especially PC."
Not even. You've got languages now days that can correct for erros. No such thing existed back then. Debugging was harder. Getting things to even work properly in the first place given the need to MANUALLY figure out the branch prediction rates and such.
None of that exists, now. You're just playing with software. Back then, we had to bug-fix hardware and software. If it did not work 100% upon release, it usually got that dev shitcanned from Nintendo's list of chosen developers. CastleVania II is a prime example. Konami almost got kicked off the favored producer list because the password system was fucked (I have one of the original USA carts that had the Japanese PW system on it.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
No, but it does run on BSD.
Forget it then, I'm going back to watching (american) football.
I was put off from buying the game because of the Metacritic comments and other "high-profile" review sites.
However, after reading conversations on reddit about how the gameplay actually is, I bought the game and I'm not sorry at all.
Yep, it's a bit buggy (crashes sometimes), and the controls are not perfect. But, it's a Dragon Age, and it's tons better than DA2. It's not DA:O, but I'll take this any day over no more Dragon Age.
To me it almost look like all the people saying bad things about the game and claiming positive reviews are EA-payed are actually payed to write bad reviews. The game is definitely not *that bad*, and is quite fun - unless you want an expansion for DA:O, which - the truth is - you won't get.
All good then. Though you are missing out on PC gaming on a widescreen TV. But I'm more than happy to agree to disagree.
Om, nomnomnom...