Unconfirmed: No Aerial Viewpoint or Toolset for Dragon Age II

According to a post over on the official Dragon Age II forums, the latest issue of French magazine Joystick features an interview with Mike Laidlaw that supposedly dashes any hopes we may have had for a toolset or a Baldur’s Gate-like aerial viewpoint in the RPG sequel. We’ll file this one as “unconfirmed” for now, but it doesn’t sound good:

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

It is written that DAO II was made thinking of console users (the biggest sales are on console) and as a consequence, they worked on the game with console in mind.

Two consequences :
– 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, M Laidlaw confirmed there will be no tactical Baldur’s gate like camera view (isometric view). (*1)
– no toolset (hey, no mods on consoles after all, and more sales for official DLCs maybe?) I thought I’d cry when I read this. (*2)

Feel free to discuss this. I’m personnaly quite disappointed. No toolset means no mods. That’s terrible. They spent 6 years making DAO I, now, they’re rushing to do the second when the first one is still very lively. I don’t understand the rush and the no toolset decisions. Modders are such a big part of our community, so many of us are from NWN for instance. Hum…

* EDIT: More info, what Mike said precisely in this interview is this (I quote and translate) “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. With an aerial view [isometric] we should cover much more ground and so create other textures. Now, the game mainly sold on console, so we’re going the way of the audience”

He does not say though if it is because the game engine could not handle all the zoom out with highly detailed textures. Isometric view means more informations on screen after all.

EDIT (2*) : Quote and translation on the toolset part

[Joystick] Will you release a toolset for DAO 2?

[Mike Laidlaw] To be short, DAO 2 will not have a toolset. I think that DAO I toolset is very powerful but very complicated” [Then they speak of the fan made campaigns possibility for DAO 1 (too little time since last November to create full campaigns, it usually takes years (so only “simple” mods have been produced so far, but this is about DAO I and not DAO II). Once again, Mike Laidlaw does not give any detail on the reasons of this decision.]

Thanks, Gartar.