Blank screenshot folder for Inquisition

Question

Alright, so the problem I am having is- each time I press (printscreen) and then go into my documents, into Bioware- dragon age:inquisition-screenshots, my folder is completely empty as if I never took any screens. Now in Dragon Age:Origins, I had to do a different key binding in order to take screens for that game. Is it a bug? You can't do keybinding for screens in this one..sooo am I just S.O.L.? I've looked for answers online but I can't find anything related to this problem, only Dragon Age:Origins and this is for Inquisition.

Answer 1

So full disclaimer, I don't have the PC version, but I am a programmer and know about computers so this information might be useful.

In general the printscreen button is a global key. As a programmer even if I wanted to add a screenshot ability to my program, I would never map it to the printscreen key. It's a very uncommonly used key to depend on and on many keyboards (especially laptops) it is hidden behind a function key.

As Yuuki noted in their comment, you should check your clipboard (try pasting into paint). This is not the game that copied the screen to your clipboard though, this is just the global behaviour of the printscreen key. If you press it right now while the game is not running, you will still have a screenshot of just whatever is on your desktop copied to your clipboard.

If Dragon Age games have a screenshot ability built in (which it sounds like they do from your description) I would be surprised if it was mapped by default to the printscreen key, but if it is, I would just change it and hopefully that fixes it. I would not consider it a bug that it doesn't work just cause that key is fairly special to the OS, but it is probably a bug if Dragon age is trying to map something to the printscreen key by default. For example the screenshot ability for all Steam games on PC defaults to the F12 key, not printscreen.

If the screenshot functionality is still broken after changing the shortcut to something more reasonable then perhaps that is a bug (although it sounds like a big thing to be broken). But you can use the printscreen button and paste that image somewhere as a workaround.

Some other fun info about printscreen: if you have multiple monitors, the copied image will be as big (wide) as both monitors and not fit on one screen without zooming out.

Also, if you ever want to screenshot just a single window (such as a video game) you can do Alt+(right-shift)+printscreen and it will only copy the focused window to clipboard. It has to be the right hand shift key though, otherwise the shortcut means something else and windows will ask if you want to activate "high contrast mode" (assuming you are using windows). That shortcut works on linux too though (and probably Mac). Which just goes to show there are universal expectations for what the printscreen button should do, which is why no individual program should ever use or depend on it.