Dragon Age: Inquisition Reviewed and Benchmarked 91
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.
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Does this game run on Linux?
Sure, but not your distro. Sorry.
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No, but it does run on BSD.
Penny Arcade (Score:1)
Thy Rod And Thy Staff [penny-arcade.com].
Back to Footbal (Score:1)
Forget it then, I'm going back to watching (american) football.
Support the developers! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Support the developers! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the party line is that DRM is onerous and hurts paying customers, and that sometimes a legitimate owner of the game will also need to crack the DRM to make it work on their own weird computer. I don't pirate things, but I also don't buy things with nasty DRM, especially the always-online checkers, and I think many people here are the same.
Re:Support the developers! (Score:5, Interesting)
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".
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Re:Support the developers! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't pirate things, but I also don't buy things with nasty DRM, especially the always-online checkers, and I think many people here are the same.
At least one of us is. I basically gave up on AAA games after (a) DRM stuff got silly, and (b) several titles in a row had such serious bugs that they just weren't enjoyable to play, and often they were never fixed.
If the developers want to spend a fortune on these titles and fight the good fight against the evil pirates, be my guest, but personally I'll reserve my support for those who build games that I will enjoy and that don't compromise the integrity of my PC. Right now, that usually means the little guy (or at least, start-as-little-guy) who makes something innovative or even just a good puzzle game to pass a few minutes. I also have high hopes for a few of the much more ambitious crowd-funded titles, if they ever manage to ship.
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At least one of us is. I basically gave up on AAA games after (a) DRM stuff got silly, and (b) several titles in a row had such serious bugs that they just weren't enjoyable to play, and often they were never fixed.
A couple of AAA games have been/will be released on day 1 via http://gog.com/ [gog.com] without DRM: Age of Wonders III, Divinty: Original Sin, The Witcher 2 and 3, Pillars of Eternity.
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Yes, GoG is also a "positive player" that IMHO is good for the industry. In fact, that site was the main reason for the "usually" in my previous post. :-)
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Divinity: Original Sin was a Kickstarter game.
So is Pillars of Eternity. Both are nevertheless AAA games by established developers.
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The decision to integrate nasty DRM most likely always comes from upper management, so the programmer rank and file have little to no say about the issue.
That's why i pay for the programmers' salaries by buying legit copies of games, and playing with cracked, patched, and 110% working bootlegs.
I even keep my purchased copies unopened, so later down the road they'd be worth something to collectors.
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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?
Re:Support the developers! (Score:5, Insightful)
Deciding not to buy and play a game, for whatever reason, is quite different than deciding that one should be allowed to play the game without paying for it...
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Deciding not to buy and play a game, for whatever reason, is quite different than deciding that one should be allowed to play the game without paying for it...
GOG for the win. :)
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Yes they are.
If Amicus chooses not to buy or play the game, he will tell his friends about this decision and why he did it, doing his best to make sure they follow in his footsteps.
If Amicus chooses not to buy BUT play the game anyway, he will tell his friends that the game is actually rather awesome (if it is), and some of those friends may decide to buy it anyway because they don't have a beef with EA.
Oh wait, was that not the end result we were supposed to reach?
Re:Support the developers! (Score:4, Insightful)
To turn things around, I'll support the developers when they get rid of the DRM. I've had reasonably good experience with Steam and their DRM, but every other DRM I've run into recently has created some kind of problem resulting in the game being unplayable. I'm not familiar with Origin, but I've read bad things.
I actually went looking to buy Dragon Age last week, but when it wasn't available either DRM-free or on Steam, I decided not to bother.
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Go snag Dead State when it drops tomorrow. I had almost given up on RPGs of any sort until this turn-based survival RPG was announced on Kickstarter, backed, and these people actually kept stuff transparent and kept to their word on everything thus far that I'm aware of.
I love the beta (though 7 days goes by kinda fast!) and tomorrow I get to have the full glorious game in my hands, delivered via Steam.
Gonna sharpen that sling blade and split me some zombie skulls all across central Texas! YEEEEEHHHHHHAAAWW
Re:Support the developers! (Score:5, Insightful)
The equivalent today is perhaps playing a game without an available internet connection. I'm not in that situation often, but a few times a year, I am. Then again, that usually means I'll just switch to the cellphone instead.
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Because they dedicate more 'hard work' to keeping people from playing the game than on the game to try and get more shekels.
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And if the game doesn't make money, because of piracy, what is going to pay their salaries when writing the next game? Duh!
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God, you're an entitled prick. As far as arguments for not paying for software goes, your [argument] is by far one of the stupidest.
The child poster who first replied to your comment was not me, the parent poster.
To expand upon my original comment: I am not interested in paying for and using software that is tied to platforms and services that I do not want or need. In my opinion, Origin is a good example of such a platform for two reasons. The first is that it is a glorified game-launcher application. If I've purchased a physical copy of the game, I should not need to install and use Origin to simply run the game, especially if its
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Since EA started bundling their games with Origin, I have consistently chosen option (i) and will continue to do so in the future.
Same for me an Ubisoft. I liked Far Cry 1 and 2, but still haven't bought 3 because it requires Uplay and that you always be online to play.
I have plenty of other games to play (and spend my money on) that don't require painful DRM. Until enough people vote with their wallets, DRM is here to stay, despite not really stopping copying of software.
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You could do both; pay for the original version and play the DRM-free version.
Some former collegues of mine did exactly this back when some FPS came out (I think it was Doom 3); they bought the original boxes and played the cracked versions.
Most ordinary people would think this acceptable behaviour but legally it's probably a bit of a gray area.
It's like the annoying anti-piracy warnings on DVD's (and possibly BlueRay still?) you are forced to watch; pirates don't get the warning in their version and hence
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No. The DRM has worked: It's stopped me playing the game.
To be fair, it was the DRM in Dragon Age: Origins which did that. It frequently stopped me playing the game that I'd bought. As a result I refuse to buy the new Dragon Age, and I refuse to install Origin, and EA have successfully prevented me from playing their games.
They've also prevented me from giving them any of my money, but there are plenty of other game creators out there and I'm happy to fund them instead.
I genuinely don't know whether obnoxio
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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
In regards to the DRM for Dragon Age: Inquisition, how about the developers treat the customers like customers instead of the same way they treat everyone else, like criminals? Because the way this DRM thing works is that it only inconveniences paying customers. All the other users just torrent a cracked version, and they not only play the game for free, but they don't have to deal with the DRM.
It's got to the point where I won't buy any PC game [over a couple bucks] until there's a cracked torrent for it,
Slashvertisment (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Did you mean to write "certainly did not see any"?
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Correct, I missed the "not" in the most important part of the post. *sigh*
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http://slashdot.org/submission... [slashdot.org]
Here's a good critical writeup of some red flags in the game that might be harbingers of much worse things to come:
http://www.escapistmagazine.co... [escapistmagazine.com]
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To sum up, my anecdotal experience supports the reported tests that recent SSDs can surv
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I played it on a console, guess that's why I have basically no problem (only had once lost all sound effects during a massive fight) and didn't know about any of the DRM problems.
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it certainly does.
I was excited at first for the original, being an original fan of the Buldur's Gates and Icewind Dales and logging many many hours within
But I couldnt stand the first game and was horribly disappointed.
It felt like they were trying too much to copy the MMO class paradigms, with you controlling everyone, only it didnt work.
and the AI just competely ignoring any actual tank/dps/heal type play mechanics. "threat" aand "heals" basically didnt cause threat or heal anything.
"i know i should be r
This game has issues with both nVidia and Win 8.1 (Score:2)
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 probl
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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"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.
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"The complexity was orders of magnitude less as well."
That is absolutely wrong.
http://www.gamefaqs.com/nes/91... [gamefaqs.com]
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.
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"The complexity was orders of magnitude less as well."
That is absolutely wrong.
http://www.gamefaqs.com/nes/91... [gamefaqs.com]
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.
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" 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
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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.
Metacritic (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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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.
It is a big deal. The game comes with a built-in expiration date, which is a mystery. When EA is done with it, you're done with it. And to rewind...
it detects the hardware changes and locks you out of the game after 4 or 5 changes
This is why I don't give money to fuckheads like EA and Ubisoft, and why you shouldn't either, and why I think you're an asshole for doing so. You're helping fuckheads be fuckheads.
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>It is a big deal. The game comes with a built-in expiration date, which is a mystery. When EA is done with it, you're done with it. And to rewind...
The multiplayer may very well come with an expiration date. EA is pretty horrible in that respect.
The single player works even if the servers are down, and single player is the focus of the game.
>This is why I don't give money to fuckheads like EA and Ubisoft, and why you shouldn't either, and why I think you're an asshole for doing so. You're helping fuc
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But as I said, the DA:I DRM isn't as mind-bogglingly stupid as SimCity's.
Sure, but is there anything in gaming which is more ridiculous than the last SimCity release? It's not like the franchise was strictly honorable before, but that was purely pissing on gamers for money.
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weird I am using my 4 year old nvidia video card and other than some places getting lower FPS it runs ok.. In 30 hours I have played it so far, hasn't crashed once
LOTRO clone, but with more bugs (Score:4, Insightful)
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The interface is terrible. It's a very clear console port. For the first time in a BioWare game, the interface with kb+mouse is completely different and pretty universally regarded as worse. I can live with it, though. The constant crashing, on the other hand...
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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.
It is not just the controls. The PC port is broken. Here is the official thread on their forum: http://forum.bioware.com/topic... [bioware.com] acknowledging the issues (4000 comments!), and here is the unofficial thread collecting the bugs: http://forum.bioware.com/topic... [bioware.com] (long list)
Though it is not just the PC port that is broken. For shit and gigles check the last-gen thread of issues: http://forum.bioware.com/topic... [bioware.com]
Slashvertisement (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
Lots of complaints, did people actually play this? (Score:1)
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 cl