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 on this thread.
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 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 on the current direction of things.
