Dragon Age II Preview and Interview

Gameplanet has slapped up both a hands-on preview of Dragon Age II and an interview with producer Heather Rabatich for our reading enjoyment this evening.  Based on this snip from the preview, I don’t see how traditional RPG fans are going to be anything but disappointed with the character progression system:

The levelling system has also been firmly struck with the simplify hammer. You’ll still need to decide where to allocate points in attributes such as dexterity or strength, but it is your ability choices that are new.

(We cleaned up the levelling system,) says Rabatich. (Instead of being a very overwhelming hour-long decision, we separated how it branches out so it wasn’t daunting for people who weren’t RPG players. It’s more accessible and you can see what you are levelling up to.)

Unfortunately this early code ran into some more difficulties here and I wasn’t able to get a thorough impression of the new system. What I did see suggested that there are different circular trees based around particular playstyles. Rogues, for example, have a debilitation tree that concerns itself with stunning and control in fights.

And then a bit from the Q&A:

Gameplanet: What was the ultimate design decision behind reducing player choice from the original 3 races to the sole human on offer in Dragon Age 2?

Really what we are trying to do here is you are playing as Hawke, right? So Hawke is a human , this is the tail of this one person. We have given you the option to customise your Hawke, like you can change the appearance or make them male or female but what we get by giving you this one clean story is you can really get into this character in a way that you might not be able to if there were so many different options. This is the story of the human champion Hawke and that is what we are telling you in this. You still have the choice to make them who you want with what you say and what you do we have just narrowed it down to this one person.