“While we likely won’t pull as far up as we did in DA:O, I have always felt that the key to tactical play was actually freeing your camera from the character you’re controlling to issue precise orders, which is what we’re tuning now,” Laidlaw wrote. “On the PC, however, we are still working with the camera to keep the key elements of the tactical experience there.” “I can confirm that we will not be doing a tactical view on consoles, though we are looking into some expanded party control that I think will make console players quite happy,” he continued. “While we won’t be releasing a toolset update in tandem with Dragon Age 2, we ARE investigating what it would take to update the community toolset to match ours, along with providing DA2 content in the future.” As such, there isn’t a new toolset to release, per se,” he explained. They’re not identical, as we’ve made a few in-house improvements, but they’re almost identical. “The tools we’re using to make Dragon Age 2 are very, very close to the tools you guys have used to make your mods for DA:O. The response from the fan base was predictably intense, eventually leading Laidlaw himself to respond to the furor on the BioWare forums.

“I think that DAO 1 toolset is very powerful but very complicated.” “To be short, DAO 2 will not have a toolset,” he added. He also revealed that BioWare doesn’t intend to release a toolset for Dragon Age 2. Now, the game mainly sold on console, so we’re going the way of the audience.” “With an aerial view we should cover much more ground and so create other textures. “For budgetary reasons, we focused our work on a 3rd person view, that asks for very detailed and nice textures so that the player can admire the game with a close-up view,” he said. In a translated interview with French gaming magazine Joystick, Dragon Age 2 Lead Designer Mike Laidlaw said the new game won’t offer the “ Baldur’s Gate-style” aerial camera that gave players a commanding view of the battlefield in Origins. But those key features have apparently been eliminated from, or at least changed in, Dragon Age 2, which is being designed first and foremost for console users. The console versions featured more action-oriented, up-close-and-personal combat, while the PC release was intended to be more of a tactical experience and included a toolkit and extensive mod support. Unlike most games developed simultaneously for consoles and the PC, the two versions of Dragon Age: Origins featured numerous design differences intended to take advantage of each platform’s unique strengths. Mod support and the aerial camera in Dragon Age: Origins may be dropped from Dragon Age 2, as BioWare says the game sold mainly on console so it’s “going the way of the audience.”

Dragon age origins camera mod