Dragon Age Inquisition Review Pc

1. Dragon Age Inquisition Review Pc
2. Dragon Age Inquisition Review Pc Cheats

BioWare haven’t just been treating Dragon Age: Inquisition as a chance to make up for missteps made with Dragon Age II; the studio’s been attempting to woo PC gamers, as well. Made for PC gamers by PC gamers became like a mantra as the game came closer to release.

It wasn’t all hot air, thankfully. Inquisition, for the most part, feels like a game made for PC, from the broad range of graphics options to the resurrection of tactical combat. It feels more at home on the platform than even Origins.

Combat is probably Inquisition’s weakest suite, a blend of Dragon Age 2 hack and slash and Origins’ more considered tactical action that offers pyrotechnic fun, but never quite feels as smart and deep as the best RPG battle systems.

Tested on a Intel i5-3570K @3.40 GHz, 8 GB of RAM, GeForce GTX 670, Windows 7

The last few months have seen quite a few games with exceptionally demanding system requirements launch. Some of them have been bloated and not in the least bit representative of reality, while others simply suffered from poor optimisation. Inquisition falls into neither category, with reasonable system requirements that allow it to run on a broad range of machines.

The list of tweakable graphics options is long, offering up 13 different features that can be fiddled around with, from tessellation quality to multisample anti-aliasing, the latter of which – if you’re an Nvidia user – only becomes available if you get the latest driver.

Consistency and detailed explanations come as a welcome surprise. Most options share the exact same ranges: low, medium, high and ultra, and each option comes with text that breaks down how exactly it will affect the game.

On my increasingly modest PC, I ran the game with a mix of ultra, high and medium settings, getting an average of 45fps, which dipped down to high 30s in towns. When not using FRAPS, I honestly didn’t notice the low points, and a few changes – mainly to texture quality and post-process quality – could have allowed me to achieve 50 – 60 fps everywhere.

Cranking everything up to ultra came with a significant performance cost, but in the wilderness I was still hitting a 40fps high. It was very inconsistent, though, and too stuttery to be properly playable.

Using the high preset, the game still looks lovely – BioWare’s done an excellent job with the art, and the texture quality is impressive, a far cry away from the hideously muddy textures of Origins – and the frame rate went back to being more consistent, though still dipping slightly in busy areas.

Turning off all the bells and whistles still leaves the game looking acceptable, and obviously has a dramatic impact on performance, allowing me to get 60fps or higher in towns.

Dragon Age Inquisition Review Pc

Elsewhere in the options, BioWare allows players to change the UI, which is a godsend. Inquisition’s UI is massive and a bit ugly, so turning it off or changing it so that it’s contextual is a massive boon.

Possibly more important than any of that, given how much people hated Dragon Age II’s combat, is the return of tactical elements to the fantasy brawls. Zooming out or hitting the hotkey seamlessly switches a fight to an almost bird’s eye view of the battle, where everything is paused and orders can be given out individually.

It’s a tad fiddly at first, as moving the camera is done using the WSAD keys, and feels a lot like it was designed with a controller in mind. Beyond that niggle, it’s great. When a character is ordered to attack an enemy, that information appears above the enemy’s head. So if Solus is casting some frost magic on an enemy, and Cassandra’s going to smack them with her sword, that information is clearly presented.

Dragon Age Inquisition Review Pc Cheats

Playing through the entire game just using the tactical mode is completely viable, though I found that I enjoyed mixing the action and tactical modes. Attacks feel powerful, and following a mage around as they unleash hell on foes is just good fun.

Origins and Dragon Age II’s action combat always felt like a bit of a misnomer. It was just more focused on individuals and witnessed from a different perspective. In Inquisition, it feels more like an action RPG. Characters react quickly, are highly mobile, and can be commanded to continuously attack by holding down the mouse button or the R key, not unlike Diablo.

Overall, it’s quite the turnaround, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t grab the PC version if your PC has the minimum requirements.

Passed

The truth about the Dragon Age franchise is that it has struggled to find its footing from the very beginning. Dragon Age: Origins garnered a good amount of followers, but never accumulated a large fan base. Dragon Age II, while popular among some players, was received with mixed reviews by both players and critics. It feels like Dragon Age: Inquisition suffers from the same issues as its predecessors – feeling and playing like a different game instead of the next installation in a series.

Honestly, Dragon Age: Inquisition feels more like Mass Effect 3 than anything. The game follows a heroic protagonist that must rally the forces of the in-game world to amass an army capable of taking on the greater evil of the land. In addition to this, you gather legendary heroes to add to the Inquisition, similar to building your team in Mass Effect 2 and 3. It feels like BioWare decided to go with what worked for Mass Effect, while still attempting to inject some new dynamics into the game, but the game mechanics felt like the first game in a series instead of the third.

With all that being said, BioWare did attempt to do some things that were completely different for the Dragon Age series. First and foremost, setting it in an open world. This has been a long time coming for the Dragon Age series, with Dragon Age II feeling completely closed in and Origins having its linear feel. The open world of Inquisition gives you the ability play for the objectives you wish, without requiring you to play through the main story. Of course, advancing through main story missions will progress the game and open up new areas, but there is still plenty to do in terms of side quests and collecting. This portion of Inquisition seems to draw some inspiration from the Elder Scrolls series in regard to its open setting.

Next, a revised combat system has come into play. Not as straightforward as previous games in the series, this combat system diversifies how you can play the game fairly dramatically, if you wish to use it. For the most part it will seem familiar, powers and/or attacks are mapped to face and trigger buttons on your controller, while items and inventory are controlled from sub-menus. The true difference of Inquisition is its Tactics mode gameplay. This gives you the ability to see the battlefield from above, assigning orders to your characters while controlling the progression of time. Basically, you move time forward by holding down the right trigger button, giving you the ability to issue orders to characters on the fly or from a paused moment in the battle. This can be extremely useful, albeit boring, in combat.

I found myself only using this functionality in the direst of circumstances, instead letting AI programming take care of my counterparts and playing as my avatar. As I said, this does open up the combat gameplay quite a bit, but it wasn’t particularly fun.

However, in true BioWare fashion, you can customize your character to match your fantasy experience. Character creation was a “gimme” for this game because without it, it wouldn’t feel like a BioWare game. Just select the character archetype you are used to and roll out. Don’t worry though, if you need some variety in the gameplay later on you can switch between characters in your party easily enough. I’ve always been partial to the Fighter/Warrior/Barbarian/Whatever character in any fantasy game, so I went with that. Skill trees are used to progress your digital hero, corresponding to your class of course. As you might expect, leveling up gives you points to spend how you see fit, so choose wisely early on.

From an overall gameplay standpoint, Dragon Age: Inquisition does well enough to keep the game engaging, but it’s not going to set any trends either. You may find the exploration and collecting mechanics relatively engaging for a while, but they will wear thin soon enough, at least they did for me. I found myself moving from story point to story point pretty quickly, with little regard for side missions if they were at all out of my way. However the shear breadth of content available is enormous, giving those who wish to complete it a ton to do in Inquisition.

The gameplay is supported by visuals that, to me, weren’t particularly impressive. With the processing power of the current generation of consoles and PC’s, I saw way too many visual errors in my Inquisition experience. It was truly odd. It was like the character models and environments were from the last generation of consoles, with a fresh veneer of visual effects laid over them. For example, shadows and lighting effects were excellent and functioned near flawlessly, but the character animations were stiff and uninspired, showing detail in some situations and looking lackluster in others.

Add to that screen tearing between cutscenes and gameplay sequences, as well as odd world glitches (I literally saw NPC’s falling from the sky to land on their designated spots in the world at several points) and what you have is a game that could have been visually breathtaking, but falls just short.