14 DAY TRIAL // With the official launch date a little more than three months away, the leaders of the development effort of Dragon Age 2 have talked about how choice is integrated in their game and how it will have wider ranging effects than those made in the first title in the series, Origins.
Mike Laidlaw, who is the lead developer working on Dragon Age 2, has said in a new developer diary that, “Where Origins really shone by having this huge epilogue with thousands of variations based on the choices you made, we’ve instead moved that into the gameplay.”
He added, “People you have interacted with at the beginning of the game are going to have their situations profoundly affected by their interactions with Hawke – your character. You re-interact with them. You see how that worked out. So we believe be our most interactive game to date.”
Laidlaw has again talked about the team's aim of making an overall experience that “works as well on consoles as it does on PC”.
The line has led some fans of Dragon Age: Origins to believe that the game will be simplified in order to accommodate console gamer needs.
Dragon Age 2 will benefit from a much longer time frame to tell its story, and it seems that BioWare is also trying to play around with the idea of the unreliable narrator, which gives the developers much more space to create choices that have consequences further down the line.
A hands-on with the game at Gamescom showed the combat system in action, with more fluid battles, but raised some questions about how much the new role playing game limits tactical view choices much loved by the PC crowd.
Dragon Age 2 currently has launch dates of March 8 in the United States and March 11 in Europe for the PlayStation 3 from Sony, the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the PC.