Dragon Age - Preview @ GameSpot

This new Dragon Age preview at GameSpot looks at high-level combat skills and character development, particularly for warriors and rogues:

Warriors and rogues each have unique talent trees that are basic to their classes (that is, the warrior talents remain active and can be increased even after a warrior character graduates to an advanced class such as a templar or berserker; the same applies to rogues). BioWare senior producer Ferret Boudoin says, "As far as skills go, any warrior or rogue worth their salt maxes out combat training as quickly as possible. The tier-three and tier-four abilities are just too yummy to pass up." The warrior has two talent trees. The first is a defensive set of talents that increase the warrior's resistances to damage or helps manage the amount of stamina (a meter that powers the use of special abilities) the character uses; the second is an offensive set that includes modes that let the warrior deal critical damage on slower attacks or manage the amount of "aggro" (how focused your enemies are on the warrior) your character generates in combat. Rogues, on the other hand, have four talent trees: two include miscellaneous extra attacks that stun or weaken foes, one is for picking locks and disarming traps, and a fourth tree is for stealth skills.

Meanwhile, Destructoid asked Mike Laidlaw about The New Shit:

I think part of the reason it's infamous is because people were surprised and just weren't expecting it. What they expected was a long string of flutes and some harpsichord, perhaps. Quite frankly, Dragon Age ultimately is about surprising the player in terms of their expectations of fantasy. 

"It's going to shock them in a lot of ways. At the same time there's a deep RPG in there, and a great story, but what I think that particular campaign achieved is, it hit an element of the game, and the game's about eighty hours for average players, so you certainly can't make a three minute marketing spec that covers every friggin' element of that, so you pick a part of it and go, 'let's talk about violence for a while, and while we're talking about violence, we're going to play some music that, essentially, is pretty violent.

I'll be shocked if I'm actually shocked but we'll see.  Finally, Worthplaying has some hopefully new screens.