Sammy Chung

Fallout was never a party focused game. You could lose all joinable NPC's in combat and still complete the game. If you tried to do that for DA, you would have to significantly rebalance the game so that you solo it or be prepared to lose most of your fanbase. As for customisable difficulty with permadeath, Bioware probably looked at their userbase and decided there were not enough customers who wanted such a feature to justify spending the time and effort needed to make it viable.

They haven't said who the mandatory party member is, but I suspect it's Alistair. As for why, they've stated it's plot related.

I just want to point out that there is one mandatory party member in DA. Everyone else from Morrigan to Sten to Dog is completely optional. You can even leave the mandatory party member at your base camp if you want to try and solo the game. When you have permadeath, you don't get people learning to be better gamers, you get people learning to quicksave before every battle and quickloading every time a party member goes down. If you include items or places that resurrect people, then it's functionally no different than people getting up after a fight, it's just more tedious if you have to drag their corpse around until you get to the nearest temple/merchant. Another problem specific to Dragon Age is the fact that resurrection does not exist. If you put permadeath in such a setting, you are going to turn off 99% of your player base.

They talk about the DLC over here. The basic version is that after the game was delayed they had writers and designers with nothing do and they decided to make this DLC. Since DLC is much smaller they could make it, test it and have it ready by the release date.

The mage has a basic low cost magic attack they can cast if they're low on mana. You can also have them hit things with a sword if you want, but they won't be able to do any of the fancy stuff that warriors and rogues do. You also have to pump their strength stat if you want them to do significant damage with the sword.

There was originally but they dropped it for some reason. I don't know did they give any particular reason for that. From what David Gaider has said on the forums, the human commoner origin was a 'farmboy rises to greatness' scenario that didn't fit in with the rest of the game and they didn't have time to change it.

Preview focusing on game mechanics http://www.gamebanshee.com/previews/dragonageorigins3-1.php

They've said that part of the reason they have over-sized weapons is so that you can easily identify them in the zoomed out tactical view.

The life-span thing is not really true. The average life expectancy around the medieval age was heavily skewed by infant mortality. If you managed to survive to your 30s and 40s, you had a good chance of living to your 60s.

It's not even the 360's limitations, there are games that have more different models on screen. It's Bioware's crappy engine and/or their insistence to make really high res models. What's the point of having super high quality when you can only have three different kinds on the screen at the same time. Make some compromises, the PCs have to look great, the other models can look a bit crappier if you can have more variety. It's not the models that take up the most space, it's the conversations and everything associated with them. From the forums here: Another developer here says that all possible conversations in an area must be loaded into memory beforehand, which means that models have to hit a particular memory budget. You can argue that Bioware don't need to put in cinematic conversations, but that means following the Fallout 3 style of conversation where everyone you talk to is a mannequin rooted to one spot until you finish talking to them.

They've said that mages can wear any type of armour if they can meet the strength requirement needed for that armour.

I think they said on the forums here that there are no hard limits on point allocation, but if you dump all points into Magic you will have a smaller mana pool. Attributes also increase moderately on level up, based on class.

You can argue about whether Bethesda's games are any good, but they got their recent sales thanks to Fallout 3 being a Bethesda game. If Obsidian had gotten the Fallout license, you can bet whatever game they made would not have sold nearly as much as Bethesda's.

Given the fact that he linked to the RockPaperShotgun article on his blog I don't see why it can't be him.