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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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Dragon Age: Inquisition Reviewed and Benchmarked

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  • by teranine ( 2687975 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2014 @07:02PM (#48518905)
    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?
    • by Sowelu ( 713889 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2014 @07:07PM (#48518925)

      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.

      • by war4peace ( 1628283 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2014 @07:35PM (#48519073)

        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".

      • by Anonymous Brave Guy ( 457657 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2014 @08:55PM (#48519387)

        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.

        • by Halo1 ( 136547 )

          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.

          • 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. :-)

          • Divinity: Original Sin was a Kickstarter game.
            • by Halo1 ( 136547 )

              Divinity: Original Sin was a Kickstarter game.

              So is Pillars of Eternity. Both are nevertheless AAA games by established developers.

              • I'd say by definition, if a game requires a kickstarter to get made, it isn't a AAA game. Excepting, of course, anomalies like SC. D:OS made less and a million dollars in kickstarter. From their kickstarter: "At the end of 2010, in no small part thanks to the success of the previous Divinity games, we finally earned sufficient money to start working on our brainchild on our own, and we decided to become a self-publishing studio." So they were apparently working as an independent for this game, which also,
      • by yanyan ( 302849 )

        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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by amicusNYCL ( 1538833 )

      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?

      • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03, 2014 @07:20PM (#48519001)

        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...

        • by Anonymous Coward

          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. :)

    • by nine-times ( 778537 ) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Wednesday December 03, 2014 @07:14PM (#48518967) Homepage

      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.

      • by Khyber ( 864651 )

        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

    • by khellendros1984 ( 792761 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2014 @07:17PM (#48518981) Journal
      DRM is a source of bugs. Removing it can have significant benefits beyond piracy. When games usually came on CD/DVD, it was my standard practice to download a No-CD crack after I bought the game, so that I could be lazy, and avoid digging through the CD pile to switch games.

      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.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Because they dedicate more 'hard work' to keeping people from playing the game than on the game to try and get more shekels.

    • They already got rewarded with their salaries, duh.
      • by MrMickS ( 568778 )

        And if the game doesn't make money, because of piracy, what is going to pay their salaries when writing the next game? Duh!

        • But practice shows that they're making enough money to make games that have multi-million budgets and less play value than average Tetris clone. So I'd say they get more than they deserve, even with piracy..
    • by mwvdlee ( 775178 )

      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

      • by Cederic ( 9623 )

        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

    • 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)

    by khchung ( 462899 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2014 @07:04PM (#48518919) Journal

    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.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Did you mean to write "certainly did not see any"?

    • I agree. Two weeks ago there was a submission in the firehose about the DRM endangering SSDs by incurring thousands of disk writes per minute. Why does the summary take the time to mention the DRM without mentioning this issue?
      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]
      • by dbIII ( 701233 )
        I'm busy attempting to kill SSDs by using them as temporary storage with some very disk intensive scientific software that stupidly sorts stuff on disk even when it has enough memory - thousands of writes per minute. I haven't killed any yet but performance does suck incredibly when they get close to full - a well known issue but still a shock when it goes from fast to glacial speeds with no gradual slowdown in between.
        To sum up, my anecdotal experience supports the reported tests that recent SSDs can surv
    • I have say, I've only played the game for say 12 -14 hours so far but the gameplay is very different to anything I've played for that long, before. For example, most other games I play don't involve constant freezing, crash to desktop and full reboots every hours or so, to allow gameplay to continue. Judging by the hundreds and hundreds of people complaining of the same thing, on their own forums, I know I am not alone. A very different direction to take games in, indeed!
      • by khchung ( 462899 )

        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.

    • by dywolf ( 2673597 )

      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

  • 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

    • by Anonymous Coward

      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

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

          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.

          • by marsu_k ( 701360 )

            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

            • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

              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.

              • by marsu_k ( 701360 )
                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).
                • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

                  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.

      • by Khyber ( 864651 )

        "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.

        • by teg ( 97890 )

          "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.

          • by Khyber ( 864651 )

            "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.

            • by teg ( 97890 )

              "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.

              • by Khyber ( 864651 )

                " 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

    • 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
  • Metacritic (Score:3, Informative)

    by ShakaUVM ( 157947 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2014 @08:36PM (#48519327) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • 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.

      • >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

        • 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.

  • by petergriffinismyhero ( 803004 ) on Wednesday December 03, 2014 @08:59PM (#48519409)
    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.
    • ^^ This.

      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...
    • 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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04, 2014 @02:42AM (#48520645)

    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 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

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