Dragon Age II: Console or PC?
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Pausing and zooming around the battlefield still plays a big role in Dragon Age II. Against multi-stage bosses and grunts alike I found freezing the action and issuing heal and special attack commands made a big different in effectiveness. Like Origins, you're still limited to queuing one command at a time. That means you can't order a heal, a fireball, and a frost arc blast all during the same pause. You have to wait for the first action to be executed before ordering a new one. The only reason I bring this up is because in BioWare's past role-playing games, you could, in fact, queue multiple combat commands to multiple party members at once and then watch the automated fireworks. It was a cool feature because it let you plan ahead, anticipating enemy attack patterns and layering multiple buffs and debuffs.
Again, Lazin explains why that's the case. "The number of enemies in [Knights of the Old Republic] is much lower than what we've got in [Dragon Age II]. Here you get very large parties of enemies who go down fairly easily individually. So consequently queuing up orders, a whole lot at once, isn't particularly useful because that individual guy is going to be dead pretty soon and you're going to need to reassess in two seconds and pick a different target."