Dragon Age: Inquisition - Now Working

[Maigrets]

Well, as I said I pre-ordered the game and am I surprised that it doesn't work....no I'm not. It won't even start past the Bioware logo, a bit of music and the auto save message. But I have some info about why.

The official forums are inundated with the same issues and complaints. Bugs, sound issues, lots of crashing, quests that can't be started and some that can't be finished, dialogue bugs, and save corruption to name a few, and that's for the people who actually get it running.

This is just one thread and might I say the devs moderator who posts on the forum is a little more than borderline rude.
http://answers.ea.com/t5/Dragon-Age-Inq ... -p/3998635

Now, there are a lot of people who say they have run the game with a Dual Core successfully and I have a Triple Core so I doubt that's the issue. Even if it was the game should start as others have managed it with older PC's than mine and play for ages...until an update was delivered and now they can't even start their game again.

Origin released an update that caused the players who have actually been able to play to not be able to start their game again...at all. Maybe if I had gotten the game last week before the update I might have actually been able to get to the main menu at least.

Suggestions are to disable Origin in the game, disable Cloud saving, running as Admin, verify game files, update drivers etc...all the usual stuff and still doesn't work. I spent four hours troubleshooting this, reading the forums and trying their suggestions and still nothing. I did manage to get further as if it's about to start but now I have a sound loop that stops the game getting to the Main Menu...as do tons of other people.

The thing is it's not only PC players who are affected. XBoxOne and PS4 users are also having these bugs. I'm going to leave it for awhile and see if they patch it or at least fix the Origin issue.

If I ever get into the game I'll let you know. In the meantime I may as well watch some videos on Youtube.

[Maigrets]

I may never get the game to work on my system, but since console players and people with top of the line PC's are having the same issues despite trying all the given solutions are having the same problems I wonder.... I more or less expected this but considering all the issues the game has for people who could actually play, I think waiting until all the issues are fixed...ie bugs, wouldn't be a bad idea. By that time I may be able to upgrade.

Far Cry 4 has had a lot of controversy due to bad dual core support and it seems they have fixed it. I did like Far Cry 3 but am not that interested in FC4, or I might be if I knew for certain it would run, so maybe there's hope that Bioware might do something.

[Fessels]

Well it is very sad of course to hear you and many others have such problems with Inquisition, seems something went horribly wrong on the side of BioWare!? This shows that Ubisoft is not the only one with problems. ( Because of their problems with Assassin's Creed: Unity. )

[Gork712]

How bizarre, it works perfectly for me.
I hope you get it to work soon!

[Fessels]

How bizarre, it works perfectly for me.
I hope you get it to work soon!

How is the game so far?

[Maigrets]

How bizarre, it works perfectly for me.
I hope you get it to work soon!

What is your system Gork712?

I'm currently reading a thread that is 93 pages long and people with 4, 6 and 8 cores can't run the game and have the issue I described. The EA Community Manager is posting there with a lot of BS, suggesting all sorts of things and nothing has helped any of those people.

Perhaps they should get someone from Bioware, the people who actually did the programming to answer these questions instead of a mouthpiece from the Publisher who probably doesn't know what he's talking about according to the responses he's received, and basically tells people to ask for a refund which is out of the question for the majority. The thread is marked as solved with a few useless suggestions considering the thread continues into the 90's.

As far as dual cores go this post says it all. The game should at least start but not just sit at a black screen like everyone in the thread with PC's that more than meet the requirements seem to have. The person mentioned called Dave is the EA Community Manager and he seems to ignore the questions put to him about triple core systems, of which there seems to be a lot.

Dave you're trying to help, but this is endemic and not a requirements problem, there's something failing in the display adapter and it appears to be widespread. Not meeting minimum CPU specs does not produce a black screen, overworked processors produce other artifacts. (Please note that while minimum requirements are just an estimate by necessity, if you get the game working and hear audio crackling and popping stop playing, because THAT is from having a CPU not able to do the work and possible OS corruption isn't pretty).

It also appears to be across NVIDA and AMD, as I just updated to the beta AMD drivers and have the same problem while others have updated their Nvidia cards and have it. As far as I know I also have the latest Dx update, those MS has made it harder to be certain.

Sorry you're on shift duty right now but you can stop fixing a problem you simply aren't going to solve and tell the dev team they've got an interesting bug they missed. It may be due to AMD processors, whether they meet the requirements or not. Will check the Dxdiags that people have posted. Edit - Nope, not surprised, shouldn't have been after all.

Hopefully a patch will be incoming within a day or three. If you want to tell the devs something it the engine that's not responding, whatever's rendering the opening, 3rd party video library stuff is fine but whatever call is being made for the full 3D stuff is messing up somewhere.

There's more to this than not meeting the system requirements when players with top of the range PC's can't play the game and many of those are very savvy on how to fix problems. And interestingly my CPU is AMD as the above poster mentions.

[Gork712]

I have a GTX 660Ti (soon to upgrade to a GTX 970) a intel 2550k processor, and 8 gigs of ram and the game works just fine in high for me. Hopefully the issue you are having is just a small issue a simple patch will fix.

Also @Fessels the game is fantastic and assuming you don't have any issues running it i highly recommend it.

[Fessels]

Also @Fessels the game is fantastic and assuming you don't have any issues running it i highly recommend it.

That is great to hear Gork712, but I will wait for a few things. Bug fixes ... a lower price for the game and most importantly enough money to buy a new computer. I am eye balling a certain computer at my local Media Store but it costs 800 euro's so it will take some time before I can buy it.

[Maigrets]

There's some speculation that it's the new DRM causing the problems and this post from an actual Bioware employee in another thread mentions that he played it on an office computer that's dual core and not hyperthreaded at that, so cores isn't the issue. Also note he is using a video card with 512MB VRAM which is the minimum requirement.

EDIT:
**This bloody incredible. The pirates have made a patch that works for INTEL CPU's to play with dual core that actually works, but Bioware can't or won't acknowledge the issue, at least publicly. Even so, apparently the fps is terrible but it proves that the game can work. I don't want to even try a 3rd party patch and besides from what I gather it's only for INTEL and not AMD or others. By the way I got this info from the official EA forums thread which has now grown to 98 pages. **

Another interesting point is this game has an XBox 360 version, which only has 3 cores, so I should be able to play it.

I wouldn't be surprised if it is the DRM since it's supposed to be pretty heavy and impossible for the pirates to crack. Considering that many people have been able to play and now cannot, as well as the rest of us who can't even get to the main menu, all with the exact same issue, it's got to be something like that.

"For those asking dual core - one of the min-specish dual core workstations I have does indeed run the game, and not too terribly. I haven't played all that far though, and I'm not sure if we'd officially support it, so your mileage may vary.

It's a Xeon 5150 2.66GHz, with an 8800GTX (512mb), 4GB RAM. "

Notice that not only is this Xeon a dual-core, but it only has two threads. It is becoming clear to me that the

issue has nothing to do with the number of threads nor cores, unless the stupid DRM needs an extra thread and

this employee was playing a version of the game without the DRM.

[Fessels]

Pirates already at work on the game ... shjees that did not take long!

But some can indeed play the game, I just watched this video of Inquisition on Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vpq8zsMv6c

The world itself looks pretty nice, but the characters look odd to me ... to shiny and such!? Also the HUD looks like it could belong in a SciFi first person shooter to me!? Hopefully by the time I can buy and play the game some one already made a mod to change the HUD. That is if mods can be made for Inquisition.

[Maigrets]

Pirates already at work on the game ... shjees that did not take long!

But some can indeed play the game, I just watched this video of Inquisition on Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vpq8zsMv6c

The world itself looks pretty nice, but the characters look odd to me ... to shiny and such!? Also the HUD looks like it could belong in a SciFi first person shooter to me!? Hopefully by the time I can buy and play the game some one already made a mod to change the HUD. That is if mods can be made for Inquisition.

Apparently the Frostbite engine is unmoddable so don't expect a mod for the UI..

I don't know why but last night I tried the game and was able to get to the starting splash screen...once. But, this game has more issues than the bug that's stopping me and 1000's of others from even getting to the main menu.

Besides quests that won't trigger, voices that change gender, and other interesting bugs, some fatal, one of the main issues seems to be crashes during cut scenes, in dialogue and in menus. For a game to crash in a menu and cut scene it seems obvious that that's one of the things they should be looking at. Whatever the case, even those who could play now, with high end systems, can't for some reason.

Ages ago Bioware said themselves that the new DRM would most likely cause lower fps for most people due to the way it works, so the speculation that that is causing issues is possibly correct as well. When all of the consoles are having trouble as well as PC, it has to be a coding issue.

I find it amusing that a large number of people on Metacritic...users not the "paid" reviewer, compare the game to a MMO and in particular Kingdoms of Amalur, which to me isn't a bad thing.... I guess it is if you're expecting a Dragon Age style game though, because apparently the combat and almost everything else is nothing like the game you are currently playing.

Many of the complaints also mention the character's lack of emotion, plastic appearance, awful camera on PC and the UI. The game is also capped at 30fps, but I believe that can be changed somehow. A lot say it's better played with a controller.

Anyway, here's the Metacrtic page if you want to browse just a few of the complaints. It will probably reinforce your decision to wait. Most say the same things, but there are some that expand on the writing and other stuff that makes up a good rpg. One day I might see for myself...

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/drago ... ews?page=0

NOTE: I don't give any credence to reviews and it was proven that EA paid for good reviews in some of it's recent games, but sometimes it's worth looking at actual player opinions just out of interest sake.

[Fessels]

Well usually I do not decide to buy or not to buy a game based on reviews, but that thread has a huge amount of negative player feedback. That combined with the what you mention about the Frostbite engine does not make things look good for Inquisition.

[Maigrets]

Well usually I do not decide to buy or not to buy a game based on reviews, but that thread has a huge amount of negative player feedback. That combined with the what you mention about the Frostbite engine does not make things look good for Inquisition.

It's "interesting" how the ones posting negative feedback nearly all describe the issues, and the same ones at that, but the positives just say "awesome game" etc with no details.

The thing I don't get is how all the main review sites haven't mentioned anything about the problems. Did they get a version to play without the new intrusive DRM, I wonder? I think we all know why they don't mention any negatives.

Anyway, until something changes and a giant patch is released, which will be a long while I gather, I'm not going to post any more complaints. It may not ever work on my current system, but for the people with well above necessary requirements and have issues, I hope they get to play at least. Not to mention again, the consoles having problems.

One thing...I did see on the forums in the last couple of days that EA and Bioware have practically admitted there's something wrong with the game engine, so there's hope yet.

[Fessels]

Because of the shady reviews I normally do not decide on buying a game or not, but Inquisition has been getting bad reviews all over the world from the start. As for EA and BioWare ... well they do not have a choice I think. If it where only a few people around the world with problems playing the game then they could say it is a problem on the computers of those players, but not any more with so many posts from players mentioning problems. They have to step up now.

[Maigrets]

I'm not advocating it in any way, but the Chinese have cracked the "uncrackable" DRM already, and they are doing some checking into the variations of CPU's that have issues so they haven't released anything yet. There's even a video on Youtube showing how it's done which I would imagine will be removed pretty soon although I guess someone has to report it first. I had a quick look, but it's in Chinese so I got nothing from it and I wouldn't understand it even if it was in English...

I found this out by Google searches about the current issues and see what people are saying besides on the official forums. I can't help myself..., I want to play the game if at all possible, preferably with a patch from the developers that addresses the other bugs.

EDIT:

Wow, I don't know how true this is and it might be BS, but I've seen it on other sites which probably just copy and paste the same info. Apparently because of the way it works the Denuvo DRM can damage a SSD and also HDD's. The other game known to have this DRM, Lords of the Fallen, also having issues with fps and crashes, but a lot of that is supposed to be the programing.

People are also debunking this info because it came from a Russian site. OK, so the Russians are known for piracy...however they aren't the only ones and there are plenty of people willing to use the cracks etc they produce free of charge.

Denuvo comes from the same people who made the insidious Star Force and Securom DRM and we know how everyone loved those (/sarcasm) and the problems they caused.

There's a lot of scare mongering going on about this game and it's DRM and I don't know what to believe but I really don't know if I do want the game to work now as I already had a failing HDD that died, although it was a manufacturing error, and I really, really don't want that again. New HDD's may be cheap but you still have to have the cash to buy one.

Threads have been closed on the Bioware forums discussing this and a lot of people discount that it can happen, although many agree it can lessen the life of an SSD and possibly a HDD. A Bioware employee posted this but they would deny it wouldn't they, even if it were true.
http://forum.bioware.com/topic/519257-d ... ?bioware=1

I'm not particularly anti-EA or Bioware as I've only ever had one of their games before and that was many years ago, but I don't automatically believe everything that comes out of a business person's mouth either, or the fanboys that always rally round when something they don't like is discussed. They all lie when it suits them and it's up to them to prove otherwise.

Info page: Reddit maybe isn't the most reliable source, but it's all over the Net now.
http://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/co ... en_dragon/

translated from the article:

"Want to know how many times the average of the code LoF.exe being transferred from HDD to memory and back in one hour? 150000 retry copying records. This is 10,000 times greater than normal. DRM continuously decodes the game code into memory and encrypts obratno.Eto one of the most idiotic use of encryption techniques, which I have ever seen. Despite the fact that the small pieces of code (maximum steam kilobytes per entry), are stored in one memory block. Playing the game for 4-8 hours (depending on the quality SSD) means that the unit can be c goodbye forever. "

basically, Denuvo does massive damage to SSDs and HDDs. Apparently it increases hdd/sdd read/writes by about 50%

This is on top of the 10% performance hindrance that denuvo causes.

Not really surprising seeing as how Denuvo comes from the Starforce/Securom people (drm that oldschool pc gamers should remember in their most horrific nightmares)

source:

http://gamemag.ru/news/drm-zashchita-dr ... hdd-101753

if you can't read slav then google translate it, you should still be able to get the jist of it.

Something has to be done about this.

[Fessels]

Piracy is indeed not limited to Russia alone, any one who insists that is dead wrong indeed. ( The Chinese have proven that already by cracking the DRM already. ) As for possibly damaging a SSD and/or HDD ... I guess that could happen. An SSD is much more sensitive then an HDD so it would happen with a SSD sooner I guess, but with a HDD it would take 2+ years ( If some one would play the game every day. ) I guess because they can handle things better.

And as for the information on Reddit ... well everything on Reddit should be taken with a truckload or 20 of salt, because the absolute you can find there almost every day is unbelievable. Does not mean that you can not find any good threads there but still.

[Maigrets]

And as for the information on Reddit ... well everything on Reddit should be taken with a truckload or 20 of salt, because the absolute you can find there almost every day is unbelievable. Does not mean that you can not find any good threads there but still.

Yeah, I know, and it's on a lot of other sites now as well and I think some of those are just sensationalizing a "possible" problem.

I just read on the Bioware forum that some people are suggesting to upgrade to Windows 8.1 because that fixes the performance problems. Or at least for the few people who responded to the suggestion it seemed to work. Unfortunately, having to upgrade to a new OS is a bit much to expect for one game.

Anyway, whatever the case, I going to uninstall because it's taking up a lot of room on my HDD for something I can't use. Maybe in a few months or a year, and a giant patch...who knows. By then though, as with THIEF, I probably won't care and I'll put it down to another bad purchase decision and it can stay in my cupboard with the rest of the failures.

I'm back playing Dark Souls 2 on the next hardest level and really enjoying it, so in Feb when the enhanced edition comes I'll have plenty to keep me interested for ages. And I'll probably replay KOAR. I haven't personally experienced anything of DA:I so I'm not missing anything...

[Fessels]

Buying Windows 8.1 in order to play the game is bull ... you pay 50 to 70 bucks for Inquisition and then would have to pay another 100+ bucks to buy Windows 8.1. ( If that indeed solves the problems? ) I bloody well do not think so.


As for Dark Souls 2 ... have fun.

[Maigrets]

Buying Windows 8.1 in order to play the game is bull ... you pay 50 to 70 bucks for Inquisition and then would have to pay another 100+ bucks to buy Windows 8.1. ( If that indeed solves the problems? ) I bloody well do not think so.

I paid $89 Australian for the game and that was the no frills edition because I only wanted the game as I don't care about the extras. I think the Premium edition was somewhere around $200. Games are a lot more expensive here than the US...don't know about European prices.

I saw one of the Moderators...or at least that's what I assume they are because they have large EA Avatars...also tell someone it was a good suggestion to upgrade his OS. All I can say is all that's going on is not doing EA or Bioware's reputation any good. Not surprising they were voted worst company in America 2 years in a row.

As for Dark Souls 2 ... have fun.

..yes, I'll go jab some poor unsuspecting enemy with my spear of death. The finishing move for pole weapons is one of the most satisfying I've seen in a game. Looks very painful though.

[Fessels]

I paid $89 Australian for the game and that was the no frills edition because I only wanted the game as I don't care about the extras. I think the Premium edition was somewhere around $200. Games are a lot more expensive here than the US...don't know about European prices.

Wow 89 Australian dollars? The PC version of Inquisition costs 55 euro's here in the game store, and it was 60 euro's at first. ( A drop of 5 euro's ... yeah that will make people buy it!? )
As for Windows 8.1, well if I where to buy it on line then the price would be 108 euro's, but usually the on line prices are cheaper compared to buying software in the store.

I saw one of the Moderators...or at least that's what I assume they are because they have large EA Avatars...also tell someone it was a good suggestion to upgrade his OS. All I can say is all that's going on is not doing EA or Bioware's reputation any good. Not surprising they were voted worst company in America 2 years in a row.

Oh EA has been seen as a company with a bad reputation for longer then that, but I guess that the past 2 years more and more people are actually admitting it. As for BioWare, I hope they can get their reputation restored because I always liked the games of them that I played.

..yes, I'll go jab some poor unsuspecting enemy with my spear of death. The finishing move for pole weapons is one of the most satisfying I've seen in a game. Looks very painful though.

Well I do not know how the finishing moves are in Dark Souls 2 so I will take your word for it.