• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Dragon Age: Inquisition Review Thread

Status
Not open for further replies.
J

Jira

Member
tmespe said:
Because it's been implied for a long time that if you want strategic gameplay you should play at hard difficulty. Is it too much to ask that reviewers at least try out playing at the harder difficulties when you can change the difficulty real time? If you find the combat to be too easy, this is a small thing to check first.
Click to expand...

Yeah that is really baffling.
 
MaddenNFL64

MaddenNFL64

Member
Spacejaws said:
Not true for everyone. I loved ME1 and ME2 and a few hours into ME3 I couldn't stand it. 100% the first 2 games but I'll be damned if I'll play ME3 again. I know the DLC is supposed to be great but I will not fund what should have been stellar content included with the damn game. They just got greedier. (I surprisingly enjoyed the multiplayer)


So yea I'm wary about critical acclaim. Assassins Creed 3 got rave reviews. Halo 4, Dragon Age 2, majority of Call of Duty, Titanfall all sitting on quite nice metacritic numbers and I can't stand the lot of them. So for me the numbers don't mean very much it's what they actually say the game plays like...and I'm still reading reviews so I don't have an opinion yet!

But I do know Mass Effect 3 sucked and it was very clear while playing.
Click to expand...

Well I get that people don't like it. But i'm a guy who played ME3 like 8 or 9 times (once on insane, mostly on hardcore), with 3 different classes. So ya i'm biased. And the Citadel DLC is awesome.
 
L

Lord of Castamere

Member
KePoW said:
I don't think reviewers should be expected to play at game at its highest difficulty level, that's not realistic.

If I was a reviewer, I would play every game at Default difficulty for review purposes. Why should that not be the case?
Click to expand...

Should they be 'allowed' to say a game is too easy if they play it on the easiest difficulty though? Especially if effort was put in to make them stand out like The Last of Us?
 
Krappadizzle

Krappadizzle

Member
Scottish Sin said:
Yep, you'll be able to play six hours of it on Thursday.
Click to expand...

adj_noun said:
Six hours, starts Thursday.
Click to expand...

tumblr_mpd1fkQjW31qbt742o1_500.gif


Awesome. It's a fucking amazing time to be a gamer right now.
 
T

tmespe

Member
Dawg's review says the combat the combat is challenging and strategic, and I trust him more than these other reviewers because I know he's tested the harder difficulties.
 
T

toastyToast

Member
toddhunter said:
Eurogamer:



That was pretty much what I was looking for and... oh well.

Sounds like this is about as AAA as it gets really.
Click to expand...

Looking at previews led me to believe something like that which is why I've felt tepid towards this game. Especially the mage auto-attacks. Looks boring as heck.

Gonna wait for you guys to tell me how Nightmare plays.
 
MaddenNFL64

MaddenNFL64

Member
Scrooge McDuck said:
Speaking strictly of plot, I don't think any Bioware game dating back to Baldur's Gate has that good of a plot to begin with. I play them for the characters.
Click to expand...

Dah Reapers tho. Thinking about it, the main plot of the games isn't great I guess. But the writing within it is always good.
 
J

Jack cw

Member
henhowc said:
So weird seeing reviews in advance. Was starting to accept that we would never get reviews early. There is hope!
Click to expand...

Bioware knows what they have and were confident the media would appreciate it. I hope Ubisoft will get their fair share of mediocre reviews today, after the shit PR talk for Unity.
 
R

Rats Off To Ya

Banned
TimeEffect said:
What's the difference? Does hard open up new options? How is it compared to DA1?



Lord!
Click to expand...

Enemies will die faster and do less damage, so you won't need to try very hard. BioWare games are always piss easy on Normal, but I find them satisfyingly fun on the max difficulty.

Dawg's review says the combat is strategic and challenging on higher difficulties. All I need to hear.
 
Y

Yeul

Member
I have so many tabs open of reviews right now. I'm really proud of them I can't wait to play!! Seeing the OT with everyone's inquisitors is going to be so good.
 
M

MHWilliams

Member
Our reviewers aren't done with the game yet, but they did have lengthy thoughts.

I've been so up and down on this game throughout this review process. At times I really love it and I think, "BioWare really knocked this open world out of the park." But it can also feel so clumsy at times.

So I might as well get it out of the way and say that I have real reservations about one of the core mechanics—Power. In story terms, it makes sense since it's meant to represent the Inquisitions growing influence over the world, and it's accrued by setting up camps, conquering enemy fortresses, and completing sidequests. But in essence, it's really just there to gate your progress, which makes a lot of the other content feel more like bloat than it should since you have to grind a lot of Power to unlock story quests. Just as an example, the average rift or camp yields between 1 and 3 Power, but one of the latter story quests takes 40 Power to unlock. And power also has to be spent to unlock new areas. At times, it comes off as padding.
Click to expand...

I've come around to the story. You alluded to your dislike for the characters a little earlier, but I think Inquisition has a stronger roster of characters than Dragon Age II overall, even if it doesn't quite reach the heights of Mass Effect 2. And the story really shifts into high gear around Act 2 following a particularly great battle that actually does impart some sense of scale to the Inquisition.

For the most part, Dragon Age: Inqusition is one of those games that gets better as it goes along, which is definitely something I would not say for its sequel.
Click to expand...
 
wolfhowwl

wolfhowwl

Banned
ISee

ISee

Member
I know this is a review thread, but as a 'junior' I can not start a new thread so I'll post here and
-i'll be quick, I promise. Maybe someone could make a new thread?

PCgameshardware.de posted first PC benchmarks for the game. (with unoptimized drivers!)

Game seems to be very CPU demanding. Players with a modern Intel Quad Core with around 3 GHz should be fine, older or weaker processors with outdatet performance-per-clock ratio, however, may have problems.

An I7 - 920 @ 3,8 ghz seems to have troubles to reach 30 fps on max settings.

Some Benchmarks for graphic cards with max Settings. (DX11 only?)

GTX 750Ti ~ 17
R9 270x ~ 28
GTX 770 ~ 37
GTX 970 ~42
R9 290 ~45
GTX 980 ~48
R9 290X ~50

Mantle seems to improve performance
A bloomfield Intel CPU like the I7 920 gets a boost of ~ 45% with mantle and a R9 290x
Even a modern I7 4970k gets a 10% boost with mantle.
 
J

Jira

Member
ISee said:
I know this is a review thread, but as a 'junior' I can not start a new thread so I'll post here and
-i'll be quick, I promise. Maybe someone could make a new thread?

PCgameshardware.de posted first PC benchmarks for the game. (with unoptimized drivers!)

Game seems to be very CPU demanding. Players with a modern Intel Quad Core with around 3 GHz should be fine, older or weaker processors with outdatet performance-per-clock ratio, however, may have problems.

An I7 - 920 @ 3,8 ghz seems to have troubles to reach 30 fps on max settings.

Some Benchmarks for graphic cards with max Settings. (DX11 only?)

GTX 750Ti ~ 17
R9 270x ~ 28
GTX 770 ~ 37
GTX 970 ~42
R9 290 ~45
GTX 980 ~48
R9 290X ~50

Mantle seems to improve performance
A bloomfield Intel CPU like the I7 920 gets a boost of ~ 45% with mantle and a R9 290x
Even a modern I7 4970k gets a 10% boost with mantle.
Click to expand...

It should be noted this is with 4x MSAA.
 
L

Lemondish

Member
KePoW said:
I don't think reviewers should be expected to play at game at its highest difficulty level, that's not realistic.

If I was a reviewer, I would play every game at Default difficulty for review purposes. Why should that not be the case?
Click to expand...

It's not that that shouldn't be the case. It's a logical way to go. I'm just not sure if it's a universally accepted choice and I think clarifying it would be beneficial to some.

I'm also not certain there's any objective insight to be gleaned by saying that the one difficulty you played wasn't challenging enough. None of these reviews explain what difficulties they played on or whether they were all relatively easy. Given what I've seen from games journalism, particularly with regards to hands on previews, I'm not convinced anybody writing these reviews is a sufficient analog for my own gaming tastes vis a vis difficulty. By that I mean most of the time they're terrible at whatever they're doing and it shows.
 
A

Ark

Member
ISee said:
I know this is a review thread, but as a 'junior' I can not start a new thread so I'll post here and
-i'll be quick, I promise. Maybe someone could make a new thread?

PCgameshardware.de posted first PC benchmarks for the game. (with unoptimized drivers!)

Game seems to be very CPU demanding. Players with a modern Intel Quad Core with around 3 GHz should be fine, older or weaker processors with outdatet performance-per-clock ratio, however, may have problems.

An I7 - 920 @ 3,8 ghz seems to have troubles to reach 30 fps on max settings.

Some Benchmarks for graphic cards with max Settings. (DX11 only?)

GTX 750Ti ~ 17
R9 270x ~ 28
GTX 770 ~ 37
GTX 970 ~42
R9 290 ~45
GTX 980 ~48
R9 290X ~50

Mantle seems to improve performance
A bloomfield Intel CPU like the I7 920 gets a boost of ~ 45% with mantle and a R9 290x
Even a modern I7 4970k gets a 10% boost with mantle.
Click to expand...

Nooooooo. I can run BF4 maxed at 90+ fps on my 970 & I5 3670k 3.4ghz, I was really expecting similar performance for DAI.
 
S

Shinjica

Member
Jack cw said:
]Bioware knows what they have and were confident the media would appreciate it[/B]. I hope Ubisoft will get their fair share of mediocre reviews today, after the shit PR talk for Unity.
Click to expand...

Or maybe they have give reviewer some kind of limitation in their review if they want to publish it early. Is not that strange.
 
K

KePoW

Banned
tmespe said:
Because it's been implied for a long time that if you want strategic gameplay you should play at hard difficulty. Is it too much to ask that reviewers at least try out playing at the harder difficulties when you can change the difficulty real time? If you find the combat to be too easy, this is a small thing to check first.
Click to expand...

Implied by who? I'm a longtime GAF member, which by definition means we're all more interested in video games than the mass casual person. And I didn't know or hear about this DAI difficulty implication.

Granted I have not read many DAI threads before this point. But for professional reviewers whose job is to play every single new game... do you really expect them to do heavy deep pre-release research into all games under development? Or should they play a game "fresh"?

Personally I think the latter is better, and that's how I would review games.

Lord of Castamere said:
Should they be 'allowed' to say a game is too easy if they play it on the easiest difficulty though? Especially if effort was put in to make them stand out like The Last of Us?
Click to expand...

I didn't say Easiest difficulty. I said Default.

If a reviewer plays on literally the Easiest difficulty, then criticism against that reviewer is valid. But Default is perfectly fine, and what they *should* play on for reviews.

I mean... do you expect all reviewers to play every game on absolute max Difficulty setting? Games like Ninja Gaidens, Bayonettas, DMCs? That would be completely unrealistic for reviewers who have to play all types of games.

(I've never played TLOU, so I don't know what that example refers to.)
 
Krappadizzle

Krappadizzle

Member
ISee said:
I know this is a review thread, but as a 'junior' I can not start a new thread so I'll post here and
-i'll be quick, I promise. Maybe someone could make a new thread?

PCgameshardware.de posted first PC benchmarks for the game. (with unoptimized drivers!)

Game seems to be very CPU demanding. Players with a modern Intel Quad Core with around 3 GHz should be fine, older or weaker processors with outdatet performance-per-clock ratio, however, may have problems.

An I7 - 920 @ 3,8 ghz seems to have troubles to reach 30 fps on max settings.

Some Benchmarks for graphic cards with max Settings. (DX11 only?)

GTX 750Ti ~ 17
R9 270x ~ 28
GTX 770 ~ 37
GTX 970 ~42
R9 290 ~45
GTX 980 ~48
R9 290X ~50

Mantle seems to improve performance
A bloomfield Intel CPU like the I7 920 gets a boost of ~ 45% with mantle and a R9 290x
Even a modern I7 4970k gets a 10% boost with mantle.
Click to expand...

There ya go.
 
J

Jira

Member
Ark said:
Nooooooo. I can run BF4 maxed at 90+ fps on my 970 & I5 3670k 3.4ghz, I was really expecting similar performance for DAI.
Click to expand...

As I said earlier, they have 4x MSAA enabled which will cripple performance. You can hit 60+ if you turn it down or off, don't worry.
 
J

jb1234

Member
My PC isn't great but it at least meets the minimum (and almost the recommended). AMD FX 6300 and a 650 Ti. Hoping it'll run okay... This game looks amazing and at first, I wasn't looking forward to it after 2.
 
Black_Stride

Black_Stride

do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
Wasnt on my "this year list" but now!
Damn might just have to eat ramen for another few weeks.


Curious about PC vs Console.
Ive still got a GTX570 and dont know if ill be able to enjoy it at a reasonable level with my old card.
I imagine a 2500K OC'd is still enough though.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 will have a voiced main character
News Game Dev
23
1K
ungalo replied
  • Poll
Dragon's Dogma 2 | Review Thread
Analysis Review 11 12 13 14 15
731
66K
DavidGzz replied
[Grain of Salt] Dragon Age Origins Remake in the works at Bioware
Rumor 2
70
3K
cartman414 replied
Is Bioware the most disappointing dev of the past 10 years?
2
78
5K
Johnny Concrete replied
LTTP: Dragon Age Origins (PS3)
21
1K
Regginator replied
Top Bottom