Dragon Age: Inquisition Patch Aims to Fix Shoddy PC Controls

[Sanunes]

so yeah, I installed this patch...BIG mistake.

I've been playing on high/ultra setings and it looks like everything gota downgrade.Everyone now has shiny hair, most of the complexion options are gone (no more freckles for anyone, including Scout Harding). Some men who had stubble before are now miraculously clean-shaven...

If you can avoid installing it on PC, then do so.

You can't avoid installing it, its a mandatory patch.

 

[Juan Regular]

So, basically the new patch only fixed a few crash bugs, left the PC controls as is and only improves performance by forcing us to use low settings?
Man, I'm really happy I didn't immediatly update. I'll stick to the unpatched version for now.

 

[Mahorfeus]

I was going to ask whether the patch fixes the annoying glitch that prevents you from playing the game fullscreen...

But if the patch is as bad as some of the people here say, then I'll be staying away from DA:I for the time being.

 

[Sanunes]

I was going to ask whether the patch fixes the annoying glitch that prevents you from playing the game fullscreen...

But if the patch is as bad as some of the people here say, then I'll be staying away from DA:I for the time being.

I would suggest at least trying out the game to see how it works for you. I haven't encountered any of the problems others are mentioning here (aside from the KB/M controls).

 

[Ragsnstitches]

so yeah, I installed this patch...BIG mistake.

I've been playing on high/ultra setings and it looks like everything gota downgrade.Everyone now has shiny hair, most of the complexion options are gone (no more freckles for anyone, including Scout Harding). Some men who had stubble before are now miraculously clean-shaven...

If you can avoid installing it on PC, then do so.

You can't avoid installing it, its a mandatory patch.

You can disable auto updates, but that will mean online functions (like Multiplayer) will be disabled.

I was going to ask whether the patch fixes the annoying glitch that prevents you from playing the game fullscreen...

But if the patch is as bad as some of the people here say, then I'll be staying away from DA:I for the time being.

It's pretty bad. If you were playing on medium or low settings the hit won't be too noticeable, but anyone playing on ultra are in for a terrible downgrade. There is a reason for this. The base games options were broken forcing certain settings to ultra (even if changed to low) causing a hit to performance on mid to low ranged pcs. When they "fixed" it they seemed to have accidentally locked those settings to low for everyone (even if they are set to ultra). So basically, the issue was flipped around.

On top of that, there seems to be a serious performance hit for some folks (myself included). It took 20 minutes to load the game today (from the desktop to loading a saved game) while prior to this it only took 2 minutes max. And when it finally loaded the game stuttered frequently and sometimes froze. This was after playing everything on ultra with an average of 58fps with no noticeable drops and with nary a hiccup. So we end up getting lower quality graphics and lower quality performance.

And if you are one of those folks who play on lower settings, you will not be spared either and will probably get the worst of this patch (as this is technically working as intended). The base game had a bug which forced all shaders (or was it meshes?) to ultra, even if they were set to low in options. They "fixed" that meaning anyone playing on low settings will notice a lack of quality to their characters (various mesh features like scars and complexion are affected). So there are people who are playing the game now who have put multiple hours down with a character they created from scratch that will take a horrendous (and permanent) hit to their characters aesthetic quality. Some folk have been VERY unlucky:

Spoiler

Yeah, apparently this screws up the sliders from the character creation leading to some hilarious and infuriating "face melts".

 

[devotedsniper]

Don't suppose anyone knows if this fixes the DirectX crashes? I haven't been able to play past the first hour due to this...

 

[Zipa]

I wish more people would show some understanding for just how tricky it is to hunt down every last bug in games. I mean this game is played on millions of computers which in turn have tens of millions of different combinations of RAM, CPU, hard drive etc. From the character creator to the credits there's thousands of "moving parts" that needs to be perfect and many features after a while become so familiar to the programmers that they don't even think of it as an issue. Then it's tossed out to millions of people out there who each have their own preferences and sensitivities and will complain about different things. Even if they playtested it it won't be obvious that this or that might be a problem unless they had tens of thousands of game testers, which won't happen.

The game was functional on launch, I have logged almost 180 hours since it came out and while they were issues there were no dealbreakers overall, all features were in it that needed to be in it (no, an extra armor on launch is not a "core feature", it's a fun little extra) for the game to be enjoyable. To call the game "unfinished" because a few features among thousands was a bit clunky just strikes me as petty-minded. There, I said it, now feel free to call me a corporate whore.

If you have a game that crashes constantly just because the computer runs on an nvidia graphics card then that is not an acceptable release version.
Yes, debugging takes a lot of time and bugs are not always easy to find, but this was a problem that occured on nearly every computer using an nvidia graphics card and it happened very frequently with barely 5 hours between crashes. That's hardly a hard bug to find and it is a serious one. This is a professional company that's charging 60 euros for this game and releasing it in a state where it crashes frequently for half their customers on pc is unacceptable.

It's not that simple and you know it. Graphics cards are are not identical, each graphics card AMD or Nvidia has several different versions as well as having different companies manufacturing them like MSI or EVGA. Then add in that no two GPU chips are identical even if they are made from the same silicone wafer. The sizes they are making the die at (28nm being the smallest currently) makes it impossible to make totally identical parts.

Same thing for processors to. It's impossible to test for every hardware and software combination. Case and point , I have never experienced a crash with DAI in over 60 hours using an Nvidia GPU. My FPS has tanked in a couple of places but that's about it.

 

[Ragsnstitches]

Don't suppose anyone knows if this fixes the DirectX crashes? I haven't been able to play past the first hour due to this...

I suppose the first question is, does your system meet the minimum system requirements (which are kind of bloated)?

If your good for that then it sounds like a driver issue which would need to be fixed on ATI or Nvidias side. Did you update your drivers? Maybe try any new Beta drivers for your card?

Out of curiosity, what Graphics card are you using?

Word of warning though, even if you get the game running, the latest patch, as it is now, will likely cause performance and graphical issues (depending on your quality configuration) so I would wait for a hotfix anyway.

 

[Amaror]

It's not that simple and you know it. Graphics cards are are not identical, each graphics card AMD or Nvidia has several different versions as well as having different companies manufacturing them like MSI or EVGA. Then add in that no two GPU chips are identical even if they are made from the same silicone wafer. The sizes they are making the die at (28nm being the smallest currently) makes it impossible to make totally identical parts.

Same thing for processors to. It's impossible to test for every hardware and software combination. Case and point , I have never experienced a crash with DAI in over 60 hours using an Nvidia GPU. My FPS has tanked in a couple of places but that's about it.

Haha, it's also not that complicated, but i don't know if you know that.
You pretend like the size of each individual graphic chip makes a huge difference for coding games, which it doesn't. The reason computers are made the way they are is so that different parts don't make a big difference.
There can be bugs that only have symptoms on some system, or on some systems more than others, but this is not very common when programming applications. Additionally this just means that the bugs don't have syptoms on some systems, the bugs are still there on every system.
Your nvidia cards doesn't have any problems? Good for you. The majourity of nvidia cards still crashes all the time, which should have been discovered by the QA and fixed before release.
Their QA is absolutly awfull, exspecially for pc. Just look at the leatest "Patch" which introduced more problems than it fixed on pc.

 

[devotedsniper]

Don't suppose anyone knows if this fixes the DirectX crashes? I haven't been able to play past the first hour due to this...

I suppose the first question is, does your system meet the minimum system requirements (which are kind of bloated)?

If your good for that then it sounds like a driver issue which would need to be fixed on ATI or Nvidias side. Did you update your drivers? Maybe try any new Beta drivers for your card?

Out of curiosity, what Graphics card are you using?

Word of warning though, even if you get the game running, the latest patch, as it is now, will likely cause performance and graphical issues (depending on your quality configuration) so I would wait for a hotfix anyway.

Definitely pass min specs mate,

AMD FX8350 @ 4GHz, 16GB 2100MHz DDR3, NVIDIA Palit 780 Jetstream and it's installed on a Western Digital SATA3 Black Edition Drive.

Latest Drivers for everything and tried turning off my overclocks on CPU/GPU. I also have the latest versions when it comes to anything .net/c++ distributable related as I'm a .net developer (which rules out some fixes others have found).

The game runs great when its not crashing, but I haven't even bothered turning the game on since 2 weeks ago hence why I was asking on here.

 

[Ragsnstitches]

Don't suppose anyone knows if this fixes the DirectX crashes? I haven't been able to play past the first hour due to this...

I suppose the first question is, does your system meet the minimum system requirements (which are kind of bloated)?

If your good for that then it sounds like a driver issue which would need to be fixed on ATI or Nvidias side. Did you update your drivers? Maybe try any new Beta drivers for your card?

Out of curiosity, what Graphics card are you using?

Word of warning though, even if you get the game running, the latest patch, as it is now, will likely cause performance and graphical issues (depending on your quality configuration) so I would wait for a hotfix anyway.

Definitely pass min specs mate,

AMD FX8350 @ 4GHz, 16GB 2100MHz DDR3, NVIDIA Palit 780 Jetstream and it's installed on a Western Digital SATA3 Black Edition Drive.

Latest Drivers for everything and tried turning off my overclocks on CPU/GPU. I also have the latest versions when it comes to anything .net/c++ distributable related as I'm a .net developer (which rules out some fixes others have found).

The game runs great when its not crashing, but I haven't even bothered turning the game on since 2 weeks ago hence why I was asking on here.

Nice system, very similar to my own.

That's a puzzle. I have a 780 too though from a different manufacturer (yours is slightly better) and until the latest patch I had the game running flawlessly on ultra. Have you tried deleting the old drivers and manually installing the newest drivers? If you let Nvidia auto update drivers I've found they sometimes get borked.

But, before you try that... this might seem strange, but try playing in Windowed mode. I read a few threads of people reporting this issue and some folks seemed to have luck doing so.

 

[zinho73]

I wish more people would show some understanding for just how tricky it is to hunt down every last bug in games. I mean this game is played on millions of computers which in turn have tens of millions of different combinations of RAM, CPU, hard drive etc. From the character creator to the credits there's thousands of "moving parts" that needs to be perfect and many features after a while become so familiar to the programmers that they don't even think of it as an issue. Then it's tossed out to millions of people out there who each have their own preferences and sensitivities and will complain about different things. Even if they playtested it it won't be obvious that this or that might be a problem unless they had tens of thousands of game testers, which won't happen.

The game was functional on launch, I have logged almost 180 hours since it came out and while they were issues there were no dealbreakers overall, all features were in it that needed to be in it (no, an extra armor on launch is not a "core feature", it's a fun little extra) for the game to be enjoyable. To call the game "unfinished" because a few features among thousands was a bit clunky just strikes me as petty-minded. There, I said it, now feel free to call me a corporate whore.

Quiet, you. Games should be delayed for years while they fix every bug with the countless number of hardware and software combinations. I'd rather wait three more years for them to "finish" the game than to just a wait a few months for problems to be fixed after proper playtesting by the general population. It has absolutely nothing to do with an irrational hatred of Bioware and unrealistic expectations for extremely complex open-world games operating off of a brand new engine.

It is not only minor bugs.
The PC conttrols are terrible and tactical view useless. You can't queue orders, the only order you give the AI forgets and so on.
Also, the game has serious instability issues (that were aggravated with the last patch). The technical forums are full with people that cannot play the game (and also full of people complaining about elf's arms).

The technical issues seems to not appear for reviewers, though. And for some people that seems to think that other people's problems are not an issue. The fact that the game was functional for some (or even the majority) only means that they manage to achieve the lowest commom denominator, the bare minimum. This is not what should be expected from Bioware (or any other company, really).

Even people that are running the game are having issues like high cpu usage, GPU heating, poor framerates, weird draw distances and so on. Seriously, take a quick look at the tech forum.

Graphical glitches, missing textures and audio files are understandable. Have to disable Origin (their very own system) and tamper with GPUs to be able to play for three hours without crashing are very serious oversights. The game is very poorly optmized, and it causes random issues with various degrees of seriousness. It could easily have used a couple more months - but then they would have missed xmas.