Dragon Age 2 - Familiar Characters, Technology

IGN has an article on characters that will be returning from Dragon Age and DLC...spoilers apply if you count this sort of thing.

Meanwhile, the Bioblog explores the technology improvements in Dragon Age 2.  A sample:

Lighting is a crucial element for the visual appearance of any game.  Regardless of how detailed and unique the base art is, a poor lighting system that fails to bring out that detail will make the game look worse overall. With this in mind we spent most of our research effort into new lighting techniques and tried to identify the one that best fits the levels we needed to create for Dragon Age II.

The lighting system we ended up with is based on an offline global illumination renderer that creates higher quality lightmaps than before. Global illumination means that light bounces in the scene are considered for the overall lighting. This simulates how lighting works in the real world.