although I'd say that the fact that you were encouraged to frequently pause the game to issue orders and that you were controlling 3 people at once were what really made it not an action RPG
True enough, however on the console that was also more difficult and some things were outright impossible. On PC you could zoom out and drag-select all your guys and move them as one click. On the console, you could only direct control one person. There was no mouse-based movement, you had to manually navigate. This was also possible on the PC version, but I imagine most people zoomed out and used mouse clicks for movement orders.
So again, the console version of DA was more like an action RPG than the PC version was. As long as they keep these things in the PC version, it should hopefully turn out okay.
The video they showed though really looked more like God of War then Diablo or a similar action RPG. But of course the video producers often cherry pick their action scenes and they may have made it look more action-y then it was.
I'll kind of disagree on that.. it's more God of War-ish due to the camera angle and having direct control rather than mouseclicks, but action-RPGs on consoles depend on the combo system, every weapon has a "moves" list that you execute by chaining button presses. In DA/DA2, you might have different attacks that make sense to be chained (like a knockdown followed by an attack that does extra to knocked down enemies), but the execution is still with one keypress, you won't need to X-X-A-Y-B-rotate thumbstick to execute a shield bash.
It is true that they're trying to make DA2 combat more action-y, but if they make sure to keep tactical pause (which they said they would) and the other tactical controls like zooming, mouse-click orders, ability to manually control companions, etc then the more action-y combat might just stay tactical enough. We will have to see.
