(UPDATE) Dragon Age II: No overhead view on PC, no toolset, audience is on consoles

As many feared Dragon Age II is changing from a PC franchise to a console one, and with it are coming some big changes that are going to upset PC gamers.

French Magazine Joystick (Sept. issue) interviewed Mike Laidlaw - lead designer on DAO II.

In it Mike reveals that DAO II was made thinking of console users first (the biggest sales are on console) and as a consequence Dragon Age II will be doing away with some of the biggest features PC gamers have expected. 

- Making textures just for the PC Baldur’s gate aerial view (as opposed to 3rd person console view) would have been too expensive compared to the targeted audience. So say goodbye to that feature. Laidlaw confirmed there will be no tactical Baldur’s gate like camera view (isometric view) on any version of DAII.

- DAII is doing away with the toolset. No more mods. It seems perhaps BioWare wants to sell you expansions instead of having the community make content for the game. 

(UPDATE)

Mike posted an update on the BioWare forums on the whole situation:

Hey folks,

Victor managed to hunt me down, and I wanted to clear up a few things with regards to what I’m seeing as the two major concerns.

First off, let’s talk about the toolset issue. Obviously in this community there’s going to be some concern that we wouldn’t release a toolset, so let me clear the air a little: The tools exist, the ones 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. They’re not identical, as we’ve made a few in-house improvements, but they’re almost identical. As such, there isn’t a new toolset to release, per se.

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 to the subject of tactical view, 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.

On the PC, however, we are still working with the camera to keep the key elements of the tactical experience there. I was actually playtesting some new camera code when Victor found me, in fact, so I can give you the latest news on that front.

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. So, this means you can still maneuver the camera around the battlefield and issue orders from a remote location, just as you could in Origins.

As you can probably tell from my phrasing, all of this is a bit in-flux right now, so things may change between now and ship, but I wanted to update you guys by correcting and detailing the current direction of things.

Nice to get a clarification on the whole thing. But it seems that PC gamers won’t be getting the exact same camera as DAO. Hopefully it’s good enough. 

Via: BioWare Forums