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Visually, the game itself has been a mixed bag which ranges from excellent to extremely poor in places. The viewing distance on this game is absolutely fantastic – you can literally see for miles. However, at times, the textures on the ground and characters can be really low resolution, while the trees look almost like a painting. It has been quite reminiscent of The Painted World in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, but doesn’t look as nice. The issue with this, though, is the look tends to clash with the way your characters look, kind of like dropping a real life person into a cartoon. Main character models do look great – their hair though looks like shiny shaped play dough, I have also noticed that items like shields, when talking to someone and the camera is zoomed in, can also be really low resolution which took me back to the PS2 days.
The visuals at times are also quite buggy, I have seen seagulls sitting mid-air at the coast, it looks like they are supposed to be sitting on a rock or fallen tree, whilst looking through the skulls to find shards I have seen debris floating mid air above destroyed buildings, I have seen characters fall through the floor as if one leg is walking on normal ground and the other is in a trench (this makes it look like a scene from Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks). Depth of field seems to be quite messed up at times also: for one scene during the war room, it zoomed into the scout and everything behind her was blurry. Trouble here, though, is that the wall behind her was less than a foot in distance – it just looked odd and out of place.
Cutscenes have also been really choppy, the game has a mandatory 5.4Gb install on PS3 which should help when it comes to streaming textures. During the cutscenes you get really low resolution textures on characters and pop-in, voices can be out of sync and poor general performance makes the scene stutter. I am certainly hoping Bioware will address these issues sooner rather than later.
Audio is certainly a high point thankfully when it is in sync on the cutscenes and throughout the world. You do get a lot of banter between the characters in your party the same as the previous games in the series and the Mass Effect Trilogy. All of the cutscenes are voiced and you really start to gel with the NPCs in the world. Once again, though, at times this can be contrasting. As an example, returning to Haven, the sound starts up in stages. You appear outside the doors to the town and, initially, for a few seconds you will get silence. Then you will start getting a few local-type sounds from the world and then the training army sounds with sword clashes etc stream in last. I feel it can break the immersion which is unfortunate as you can see a lot of work has been put into the sound direction.
There is some decent voice talent used in Dragon Age: Inquisition, Freddy Prinze Jr (Scooby Doo, 24 Day 8), Gareth David–Lloyd (The Bill, Torchwood), Indira Varma (Game of Thrones, Rome, Torchwood) and many other voice talents that have years of experience in the games industry, including Star Trek Voyager‘s Kate Mulgrew, Danny Webb, Zoe Telford, Olivia Poulet, Stephen Campbell Moore, Don Gilet, Mark Frost, Shaun Dingwall, Peter Egan, Morven Christie, Laura Bailey and Laura Aikman. The list is immense and can be seen in full here.
Go to page 4 for the conclusions on this game.
Retro at heart and lover of all things ’80s, especially the computers, the music and the awesome movies and TV shows! Crazy huge retro gaming collection spanning the ’80s and ’90s with hundreds of tapes, discs and carts for various machines on top of a 600+ strong Steam library that is ever-growing. No I am not a serial hoarder, just a dedicated retro gamer!