Dragon Age II Interview

Dragon Age II lead designer Mike Laidlaw has once again tackled a fistful of questions about the RPG sequel, and this time it was for the editors at NowGamer. A little something to get you started:

So you’re leaning more towards greater skill customisation this time around?

Well if you have Mighty Blow or a specific rogue kind of backstab ability, instead of taking a new ability when you level up you can choose to enhance them. These enhancements are pretty significant as they can add new properties, increase damage, widen radius and so on.

So as the player, you can choose between going a more general route and saying, ‘˜Well I’m going to take a ton of different spells so I’m like the everyman toolbox.’ Or, you can be more of a specialist and put every point you have into specific spells because you want them to be absolutely maximum in terms of what they can do. So I think this offers a lot more variety in terms of how you level up.

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We’ve heard a lot of gamers prefer Dragon Age: Origins on PC, mainly because they felt the keyboard and mouse system was more responsive. Was this something you were aware of going into development of Dragon Age II?

We’ve definitely put a lot of work into it. What we’ve done for the console versions is made sure that abilities in the PC version of Origins that didn’t make it into the console builds such as telling your archer, ‘˜hey, move to the high ground’, actually made it into the console versions of Dragon Age II this time. So that brings the two builds into parity, but we had to do it in a way that the interface plays to both strengths. So the console versions still work off a radial menu while the PC build runs off a quick bar along the bottom.