Dragon Age 2 - Afterthoughts Interview @ 1Up

1Up has an "Afterthoughts" interview with Mike Laidlaw, where they ask some surprisingly good questions of the Dragon Age 2 lead. Laidlaw sticks to the company line but its a reasonably good read overall:

1UP: Since Bioware is known for taking consumer and critic feedback, and figuring out how to apply the most useful data gathered for the next title, it makes me wonder: If DA2 started work before DAO went out there, how did you arrive at the decisions that were made for developing DA2?

ML: That's a hard question to answer, because that implies that decisions were made and never revisited, which is absolutely not the case. We are constantly looking at it. I would say some directional decisions were made, like looking at the combat speed and responsiveness -- that was something that while we were working on the consoles, we understood as, "wow, this really feels awkward on the consoles." However, we wouldn't want to torpedo the overall control scheme and the way it feels on PC, so is there a way to -- now that console and PC are in harmony as top-of-mind -- see what steps we can take to increase the overall speed and the way that characters execute the orders that I give, as opposed to awkwardly waiting to get there. So some early decisions were made, and certainly some visual decisions for overall style were made, in part because we had a better understanding of the engine and how stylistic changes could result in greater performance, archer combat, and so on. So they were made early, and then evaluated again as we proceeded into Origins feedback and so on.