Dragon Age II Announced

It's been a while since the launch of Dragon Age II (sequel to award winning game Dragon Age: Origins) has been announced. A few details are also available:

No more speechless player character

Unlike Dragon Age: Origins, the main character's background, race and voice will be set. The story centralizes around a fully-voiced human character, Hawke, a Lothering refugee who rises to power.

Remember Lothering? That's the city which gets destroyed at the very beginning of DA:O. You also get to recruit two of the games most memorable characters from there. 

Characters...no, there's no mention of Morrigan or Lelliana

• Hawke: The protagonist who had escaped from Lothering to become champion of Kirkwall in the Free Marches.
• Bethany: Hawke's sister and a mage
• Varric: A dwarf who acts as narrator and has accompanied Hawke on travels.
• Cassandra: A chantry seeker that is interested in Hawke. She believes understanding Hawke's actions could be the key to preventing a war that threatens to engulf Thedas.   
• Flemeth: The notorious Witch of the Wilds.

Just when you thought Flameth was dead....

What are your thoughts? Emotions? Expectations? 

There is a long thread in the System Wars forum about "Dragon Age 2 Dumbed Down for PC".

Basically that Mike Laidlaw at BioWare made a statement that they were "going the way of the audience" because the game sold more on consoles, when actually with digital distribution PC sales equalled one of the consoles.

Later in the thread, a quote from Mike Laidlaw with this link was posted:

this is a message from the lead designer on DA so looks like things are not so bad.

http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/141/index/4376174/37

(Mike's reply at bottom of page)

"Hey folks,

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.

Mike.."

The SW thread is here...5 pages long.:lol:

I hate the fact that their making it to be a Fantasy Mass Effect. I liked that game, but I Loved Dragon Age.: Origins. [spoiler] By the way, could it be that Hawke is the son that you Sired during Dragon Age.: Origins...Well, depending on your choices. [/spoiler]

No offense, I edited this post for those who might not have yet played DA:O.:)

- tops

Seems as though with every new bt of information, I'm becoming more and more excited about buying this game.:)