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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.
Should they be rewarded for their hard work? I don't know, I remember a couple years ago that I had my mind made up that I would not be buying the last Dragon Age because of the behavior of EA. You don't think I've forgotten that, do you? I was angry enough at EA then to decide that I wouldn't buy any more of their games, even though I had a lot of fun with the first 2 Dragon Age games, so why would I open my wallet to them now? What, because a couple years have gone by?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Exactly what happened to me when I tried installing Sacred on my PC years after it was released. I had bought the original CDs and errors galore. Turns out the DRM was unable to work on the newer OSs, so I had to slam a crack in it. After mentioning that on their official forums, a moderator there sent me a PM saying "yes, we know about the issue, no, we can't help you but yes, we're okay with you using the crack as long as you bought the original game".
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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).