Dragon Age 3

[Fafnir]

Got it at 00:00 but was sleeping, staring it up now..

 

[Hawkwind]

will play this evening after work.

 

[Fafnir]

will play this evening after work.

Been play at work since 7am..

 

[Zarjazz]

How are the controls? Seems like there have been enough complaints they are having to patch the PC version - http://forum.bioware.com/topic/521697-pc-community-concerns/

I guess I'll find out later how good or bad they actually are

 

[pikeh]

nm!!!!

 

[Hawkwind]

One annoying thing is that during easy fights when I want to stay real time I manage to change mode easily and accidentally. Other than that, controls are fine

 

[Zarjazz]

My initial opinion after 8 hours of play.

PROS:

Overall the game looks amazing. Some of those vistas, wow.
So much content, this game is HUGE!
Every part of it all feels very polished. A lot has gone into the design, voices and general game details.
No plot bugs encountered (yet).

CONS:

The controls in tactical mode are awful, bordering on unusable.
A few camera annoyances - (combat) view occasionally obscured by trees, sometimes hard to view the rifts in the air.
The whole ping / loot collection thing is stupid.
It's a Bioware game. The hair & beards are still laughably bad.

 

[Mabs]

Right. So. ~20 hours in and lvl 9.

is it better than DA2 ? fuck yes. but not exactly hard
is it better than DA1 ? imo, yes. its very good, very polished etc as @Zarjazz said. but more shiny graphics, and so on, its basically Dragon Age 2; What It Should Have Been

you get all the companions quite early on, depending on where you go. i got all of them by lvl 6. 3 mages, 3 rogues, 3 warriors.
the open areas are good, as hubs, with localised quests. there are some "filler" quests collecting mats adn so forth from mobs. you can also do these off the War Table.
you can clear areas and put up "camps" in the open zones, give you port-to locations and rest/restock points aswell as quest hubs in some cases

War table allows you to deploy, find, unlock etc. DLC is on there if people havent worked that out as instant complete quests
playing Build My Base is very NWN2-esque. Do u want better equiped troops ? go do this quest for an ore vein. and so on. Not sure how it pans out later [trying to avoid spoilers]

Combat is changed, i prefer it but some oddities;
no healing on mages, use limited pots (you can get +amount carried gear and upgrade, +aoe effect, +amount healed etc if you research, see Build My Base ^ )
no macro control of AI either. you cant do "Use X when surrounded by Y enemies". - limited to : 1- Follow/defend X 2-Reverse % mana 3-% health to use heal pots at 4- min number of heal pots (ie if you set 2, once u reach 2, AI wont use any more)
its odd, but it works .

Some people from previous games appear at war table to help with quests, give info ,etc. but are not party members. Lilliana is one of these, rest u will have to wait and see, but its fucking mint

tactical camera has some issues, but they are patching it apparently ?
you have to be on top of stuff to Use it, its click-at-feet, not click-walk-over-use which is a bit annoying

if you are sitting on the fence - buy it
if you arent sitting on the fence then you already have it so its fine


/edit
knew i forgot something:
1- you can now JUMP, which is fucking mint, more roaming
2- you get access to horses, its very Skyrim, fast zoom around mode
3- you can respec for a tiny cost (300 something) in camp - winning !

 

[Moriath]

I am only an hour in and liking it so far

 

[Mabs]

trying to avoid spoilers, and i dont know how long it is - but you only get some of your crafters in what im calling "act 2", youll know it when you get there, its recommended lvl is 8-14 i think
before that you cant "enchant" stuff which is a bit annoying

 

[TdC]

damn you Mabs. I bought it and this is ALL YOUR FAULT

 

[Mabs]

damn you Mabs. I bought it and this is ALL YOUR FAULT

what is your Origin account name ?

 

[TdC]

@Mabs same as my steam one. I are creative, me


I've noticed a few things:
- the NPC's think my burly man avatar is a she. wtf?
- the cutscene voice acting is woefully bad (and I've heard this game be described as "good"!).
- a 4.5GHz CPU + GTX 780 Ti is ***NOT ENOUGH*** to keep this game > 60FPS on a 1440p screen.
- cutscene renders at 30FPS. wtf?
- I was listening to Totalbiscuit winge about dropping below 60FPS with his hexacore + SLI'd GTX 980 rig on 1080p, WTF IN CAPS.

Other than that, fun times!

 

[Mabs]

mines staying playable, was running over 60 fps for ages

and youll need to be more specific

or add me : Lindraskada / Mabs :X

 

[TdC]

near unplayable atm. loads of DirectX crashes with this message:



This also happens if I run at a lower rez, or with AO off. I already have Origin off in-game. Oh well, now to try windowed mode :-/

 

[Mabs]

fucking odd
i play borderless window but fullscreen was fine

you got the new-as-of-2?-days-ago driverS ?

 

[TdC]

yeah. My drivers are fully up to date.

I already did :
* Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 Update 4 repair
* SFC /SCANNOW in an admin cmd console

Just now I went in to [DA:I game install path]\__Installer\directx\redist and re-ran DXSETUP.EXE. I got a message popup telling me that the installed components are now ready, or words to that effect. Gonna test again.

Also it seems the gender swap thing is actually an issue according to this

 

[Mabs]

http://answers.ea.com/t5/Dragon-Age-Inquisition/DirectX-Error/m-p/3988847#U3988847

 

[TdC]

yeah, uh, no joy

DXDiag says no problems in all screens. Running that DXSETUP thing now results in the window turning white and freezing rather than having the meaningful popup occur.

 

[Mabs]

really odd
ive just hit 32 hours played with no crashes, 670 on most recent drivers

 

[TdC]

I've been reading that some people work around it by lowering the game settings. Atm I have everything on ultra/high. I'll start lowering things and see where that takes me.

 

[Zarjazz]

I've had that same crash once early on after a few hours. From the website it may not be completely fixed until Bioware release a patch. However I've not had it crash again since I'd did the following:

Got the latest DA:I specific Nvidia drivers 344.75, they also increase the FPS.
Applied the GeForce Experience DA:I settings. The main thing it does is turn off MSAA. It's an absolute FPS killer and increases GPU usage.
Disable Origin overlay in game. I also shutdown Steam "just in case"
I also had MSI Afterburner running to start with. Stopped that too.

- the NPC's think my burly man avatar is a she. wtf?

Known bug, wait for patch. There is a workaround but only when creating your character (switch sex a few times)

- a 4.5GHz CPU + GTX 780 Ti is ***NOT ENOUGH*** to keep this game > 60FPS on a 1440p screen.

No it's not. Probably need at least a 970 or SLI for that at Ultra settings. I've got a 690 and mostly Ultra with a few High options, it runs at 1440p @ 60fps. If it drops I've never noticed.

- cutscene renders at 30FPS. wtf?

It's capped in game, they had voice & animation sync issues without it. Something related to the Frostbite Engine. Again, looking to remove the cap with a patch. There is a command line option to remove the lock but it causes problem. We're stuck with it for now.

 

[pikeh]

Yeh turn off all background shit, turn of MSAA - Ive heard of lots more problems with Nvidia Cards than AMD.

Loving the game - still early on but its brill. Nightmare is a challenge and all!

p.s Glad you got it @Mabs !

 

[pikeh]

Also, constant 50-60 fps down to 40 odd in combat, but it feels like it should be less - do you reckon this is the hitching issue that people are complaining about? I know fps counter isnt borked as its the in game overlay one and does stay at 30 in cutscenes (which is surprisingly annoying!)

 

[pikeh]

Scratch that, seems Mantle was causing the issue - whats the dealio?! Thought it would be better!

 

[Zarjazz]

Scratch that, seems Mantle was causing the issue - whats the dealio?! Thought it would be better!

You running the latest beta driver? That's supposed to help a lot with AMD performance and especially Mantle in DA:I

 

[TdC]

Got the latest DA:I specific Nvidia drivers 344.75, they also increase the FPS.
Applied the GeForce Experience DA:I settings. The main thing it does is turn off MSAA. It's an absolute FPS killer and increases GPU usage.
Disable Origin overlay in game. I also shutdown Steam "just in case"
I also had MSI Afterburner running to start with. Stopped that too.

Yeah chum I had all that down and it still crashed. Then I turned *everything* to the absolute minimum and gave it a test. Game looks like The Bards Tale, but it played without a single crash. Every hour or so I bumped the in-game rez up by 25% and just now turned it up to 100% and the game crashed again (lol). That was with everything off/lowest settings, except the in-game rez.

 

[Zarjazz]

... Every hour or so I bumped the in-game rez up by 25% and just now turned it up to 100% and the game crashed again (lol).

Well that sucks. Supposedly some cards are affected worse than others, I guess I've been lucky. Hopefully they release a fix soon.

 

[Zarjazz]

On a positive note I've been ill all this weekend (?!) which has meant I've been able to put in the hours into this. At lvl 10 and still not finished the first area, still not got all the characters available and still not got the other crafters. Fuck knows what @Mabs has been up with his speed run

I was impressed by the scale of it early on, I'm even more so now. This isn't Skyrim big with boring open landscapes and cut & paste dungeons. I honestly can't think of any location I've seen that has felt repeated. Everywhere is unique. It's like every tree and every rock has been placed by hand with care.

 

[TdC]

Well, I turned the game rez to 1920x1080, borderless window, ingame rez to 80%, and turned everything else back up to the highest it would go, with the following tweaks: no AO, no MSAA and no Tesselation and got game time since my last post up to just now when it crashed again. We'll see how it goes.

Re your scale remark, I quite agree, although that said I kind of like Skyrim's landscaping ;-)