Dragon Age 2 - The decline of the Classic RPG at Hooked Gamers

Ibortolis from the Bioware forums made this thread about a 3 page editorial at Hooked Gamers entitled The decline of the Classic RPG. Here are some highlights in the editorial:

Being more sensible than to simply outright dismiss Dragon Age 2 all together, we waited until we actually had a chance to play it for ourselves before making any rash decisions. That time has now come with the release of the playable demo. But were our instincts correct? Unfortunately, the majority of our team say yes, Dragon Age 2 is too clear a departure from the formula we have been in love with since playing Baldur’s Gate back in 1998.

Another highlight:

When you get into the game you will notice that player conversations have become much less significant as well. As far as the dialogue scenes are concerned, this is not role playing; this is interactive playing. The dialogue is so simple that it could be replaced by a choice that you make at the beginning of the game: "Do you want to be a compassionate, humorous, or obnoxious character?" After that choice, you would only have to watch the dialogue scenes play through with no player-input at all.

And yet another one:

What we see in Dragon Age 2 is a distinct loss of the necessity to plan attacks, you really can play it as an action-RPG. The demo made this immediately evident when we tried to adopt the pause-play style – it was just not practical. The reason for this is because combat is paced much faster and the only really viable way to play the game is to button mash.

And the final point:

More and more we see games being transformed to cater for only one type of player and quite frankly, many of them are starting to become unidentifiable from each other. Publishers want you to play the game as quickly as possible so you can move on and buy their next title. Ultimately though, this way of doing business will hurt the industry as a whole. A storm is brewing and it’s one that publishers are calling on themselves.

Do you agree with this?