14 DAY TRIAL // Mike Laidlaw, the lead designer of Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2, recently left the PC gamer fans of BioWare in dismay after declaring that there would be no modding tools and strategic camera coming with the PC version of Dragon Age 2. The aerial view was left out because of financial concerns, as it needed a different kind of texture work than the third person camera.
Many fans declared themselves disappointed with the company, accusing the developers that they over-simplifying one of the best role playing games in years. These snippets were take from an interview with French magazine Joystick. Apparently they were poorly translated, as Laidlaw went on to clarify some of these statements on the official forums of BioWare, trying to quell the fans' protests.
Laidlaw wrote about the modding kit that, “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.”
The designer was not so clear, however, about the strategic camera that many PC gamers loved, the author of this article included. “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,” Laidlaw wrote. Dragon Age 2 will be released in March 2011 on the PC, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360.