Dragon Age 2 - Interview at vgames.co.il

A Bioware forumite, called OPini, discovered an interview with the Lead Level Designer, Yaron Jacobs on an Israeli game site called vgame.co.il - the interview is entirely in Hebrew, so OPini translated the important parts for us. Here are some rather interesting tidbits:

Q: What were the main designing objectives for DA2?

A: Everyone were very enthusiastic about creating a game which will be more accessible for a wider audience, without giving up the core components of the original game, while trying to add to the player pool for this game those people who felt intimidated by elements of DAO - such as the UI.
This is especially true for the console version of DA2 - we wanted to make the game more responsive and fun when you use a controller.

And another one:

Q: Why are the city's streets not as crowded as one can expect from a city as congested as Kirkwall? Is it due to technical limitations?

A: Yes, this is completely due to technical limitation. We had more people crowding the streets in early stages of development but we had to cut the number to be able to cope with the limitations of game consoles and low-end computers.

You should really go read the rest of the translation; this is a very interesting interview to read.