Just wanted to share that I picked up Dragon Age Inquisition for $19.99 USD and its probably the best $20 spent on a game in a while. I am out of work right now due to messing up my left knee at work stepping down from a machine in which I landed on my left foot and twisted my leg and damaged tearing the meniscus when my knee popped and buckled. Getting MRI tomorrow and then likely surgery, but needed something to help pass the time and bored with the games I already own. So I had to go get ibuprofen anyways so I went to nearby electronics department and looked over the limited game selection at walmart and Dragon Age caught my attention because I played the first 2 of them and enjoyed those, and this newer one was a much larger game and good reviews and over 100 Game of the Year awards I figured the $19.99 price tag was worth giving it a try.
Installation was 4 DVD discs, and reinstalling my Origin account on this clean build gaming system. After installing the 4 DVDs, the game then needed a almost 3GB patch, and a few other updates to Origin and when finally installed consumed 29.4GB of my SSD.
Game Requires Minimum Requirement of Quadcore 2.5Ghz or faster CPU and 4GB RAM, and 8800GT or better video card.
I decided to install it on my older gaming system that uses less electricity than my 8-core system to see if its performance would be acceptable. On the following spec system it runs flawless and loads fast thanks to the 128GB SSD.
Athlon II x4 620 ( Overclocked from 2600 to 2728Mhz )
4GB DDR2 800Mhz Corsair XMS2 ( 2 x 2GB Dual Channel )
128GB Toshiba SSD SATA3 running on SATA2
Biostar MCP6PB-M2+ ( AM2+ Motherboard - Maxed out on 4GB RAM )
Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium
Geforce GT 730 2GB 128-Bit Video Card
I was surprised that the game running on this hardware didnt load heavily on it and I can run FRAPS and record gameplay with only a small amount of occasional quick freeze frames when game is accessing the SSD to load map files etc and the SSD is busy writing recorded game content.
The game if you want to play it to rush to the end, you can play that style. Myself I like to explore and test the boundaries of the game. The game gives you a feel of a live world environment where you can wander off the road and go exploring which is a big plus for me because I just about never follow a road in a game and attack monsters and enemies from the front. Instead I love to explore and attack with strategy to thin out a mob before aggroing a boss or elite so that the fight is more controlled when I can as well as this game has hidden objects and materials scattered throughout. I found for example off the beaten path when scoping out an area that is off the one main linear objective of the game a group of monsters hanging out at a fire. I walked around to scope out the area and decided to go after them with the group of assist coop like characters that help you who are part of the story line. From a programmers point of view, there is usually reason as to why some monsters were tucked away off the beaten path. Why are they there?
So I went up against them and killed them off. And when I got to the fire they were huddled around I found a sack of coins spilled out on the floor and grabbed that, but even better was finding an Amulet that is a cheat death type of amulet. Wearing it, if your character was to take on a ton of damage beyond that of our health pool, this amulet will shatter when worn around your neck and +50 your HP so you can cheat death as long as you going get hit again taking 50HP or greater.
Buildings on fire you can go inside and also find hidden objects to use. Oddly though you can stand in a wall of fire in a burning building though and I didnt see any damage to myself as a result of being in there. I almost didnt go in for fear that I would go in and burn to death, but walked in quick ready to run out and didnt see any damage taken so I then went snooping around inside to scavenge for materials and hidden objects to use. Glad I did because it had a number of items inside materials and coins as well as a leather helm to increase my armor rating.
While I waited almost hour and a half to install the game from DVD's and then the 3GB patch and some smaller Origin patches I went looking at youtube videos to give me some insight as to gameplay, character creation, etc. One guy said the game is very addicting. Well I have played it for just an hour and YES, I am enjoying it and feel that urge to go back to playing it as I share info about it here, however I filled up my SSD with recorded game play and now VirtualDubbing the video into smaller AVI files to a USB stick and using my electron sipper workstation to be here on CH with the 25 watt Kabini 1.3Ghz CPU.
Graphics are very good, characters in game lifelike, objects and environment realistic. They have extensive character options for your character appearance and you can go with a base character appearance for male or female of 4 races or you can specify a race and then highly customize male or female characters with color of skin, all other facial attributes you could just about ever think of including adding make up to the faces and controlling how defined on contrast the make up is. As one youtube reviewer stated you could make a drag queen if you wanted to with how highly customizable the character appearance can get if you want it to be looking that way.
The other feature of the game that is impressive is that the story line isnt just a bunch of guys with females sidelined from major roles in the game. So many games have just a group of guys on a mission and the females are the NPCs that just wander around and work in an inn etc. In this game there is a definite balance of gender. It starts off with a female in charge for example and later its a mix of both genders as the story line builds.
Additionally this game is almost a mix of so many other games. Other than the core of what Dragon Age is from playing the first 2 games prior to this, it has hints of Rift, Fable, and Dungeon Crawlers/Grinders for hidden objects and loot, and I even felt as if I was playing in the snowy area of Lich King - World of Warcraft, yet also has the feel of a MMORPG even though I am only playing the single-player mode now, they do have a multiplayer cooperative game play which I will try out later so that I dont get paired up with very skilled gamers and myself stand out as a noob. I will give the multiplayer part a try after I have mastered the single-player mode.
Im happy that the game is only the cost of the game off the shelf and rest of the game play is free. You connect to Origin and then game server that as of right now, I am thinking all content for single player is local on the hard drive so its probably just an anti piracy feature to require connecting to a server to play single player.
Lastly they have a Dragon Age Keep Feature which allows importing of content from prior Dragon Age games to this game. Myself I decided to just go with the default and start fresh vs being bound by decisions and rep I made in the prior versions. More info on the KEEP here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_csmpaPapkWith a true review you need cons with the pros. So here is the very few cons I have.
In the character creation on the first screen, the gender of your character is an option that can easily be overlooked. I when making my first character last night went through the customization and got to a point that I was like, I know you can create female characters, but where is that option. I didnt see it in the menu of options when creating the character. So today I started a new character. This time I was more careful to look around before just clicking to what was center of the screen. Sure enough top left of the screen had a gender option that didnt stand out sharply to me and I was then able to select female. So with a user interface for character selection, they probably should have placed this gender choice in a location that it is not overlooked, possibly after selecting the race you want, a new screen of gender, and then class, etc.
I wish this game had an offline mode so that I can play single-player on my laptop when traveling someday without having to keep an internet connection to play.
Left Click on mouse shares ability to tilt camera angle as well as attack targets or such as with my Female Human Mage, when adjusting the camera angle because I am walking up a hill and dont want to look at the ground up instead look up hill to see what I am going to get myself into, I send lightning bolts out in front of me and this can aggro something by accident and this is the controls by default. I found that both the left and right mouse click can control the tilt of camera view and if you avoid the left click and instead hold the right click instead you can safely move the camera angle tilt and not throw out random lightning bolts ahead of you.
While warned about this last con in a youtube video figured Id share it here to complete the review I have on it, but while you have so much diversity in changing appearance of your character, you are not given options to change height and weight of a character so the characters features other than the head is everyone gets the same body from the head down from whatever race and gender.
Well I think thats it for now. Will add more later if its important to share on this. The videos are done encoding to AVI's and so now to delete the 30GB of video files which were turned into about 3GB of AVI files, grab lunch, and get back to playing Dragon Age Inquisition.
Lots of videos on youtube to check out if anyone is looking for a lengthy game like this and wants to see gameplay before buying. I bought it blindly not having seen the gameplay prior to this and just based it on my satisfaction with the first 2 releases of Dragon Age + sticker on outside of the case stating over 100 game of the year awards and only $19.99 and no monthly fees to play it was a good purchase on my part. One Youtube reviewer stated that if you rush through the game you could get in done in about 80 hours, but plan on about 300 hours of play. Myself with the fact that I like to wander off and look around for stuff hidden in the game, I will probably play it more than 300 hours before finishing it for that one character, and then go play a different race and class type. I went with Mage because I like ranged, but they have a Melee Rogue and a Ranged Rogue that are calling to me as well as for I have played as Rogue in other games and love the sneaky and swift deadly abilities they have and martial art like pristine deadly motions to slice n dice the enemy. Aion and World of Warcraft were the better Rogues I played as assassin rogues as well as assassin/sub in WoW for years.
