Last-gen Revisited: Dragon Age: Inquisition

As part of an ongoing effort to analyze the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 versions of recent “cross-gen” titles, Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry has published an article on Dragon Age: Inquisition. As you might imagine, both versions suffer from generally poorer performance, dramatically pared back graphics and longer loading times, but it sounds like the core gameplay is preserved intact.

An excerpt:

Frame-rate is another area where Inquisition falls a bit flat. The current-generation version of the game delivers a very solid performance on both consoles, but last-generation machines don’t fare nearly as well. While exploration manages to hold a reasonably steady average frame-rate, major battles see dips well into the low 20s and sometimes into the teens. On PS3 the game uses a triple buffered v-sync setup that completely sidesteps any tearing issues. It doesn’t feel great, due to the serious dips the game often suffers, but it’s actually better on average in comparison to most of BioWare’s PS3 output. Xbox 360, however, produces some rather grim results with frame-rates just as low as PS3 in most situations yet, thanks to an adaptive v-sync setup, we see near-constant torn frames during normal gameplay. A sub-30fps frame-rate combined with heavy screen tearing just isn’t acceptable in 2014 and definitely impacts the fluidity of the experience.

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With stripped-down visuals, long loading times and relatively poor performance, it seems like it would be difficult to recommend these versions of the games, right? Well, for many users, that’s definitely the case, but if you really look back over this past generation it certainly seems that the game should be quite playable for many people. You see, open-ended Western RPGs have become rather popular in the last several years yet, in nearly every case, the console versions of those games have run at unstable frame-rates with lots of detail pared back. Compare Inquisition to something like the previous Dragon Age titles or one of Bethesda Softworks’ games and it doesn’t seem so bad. In fact, in many ways, the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of Inquisition actually look and run a good deal better than Dragon Age: Origins.