There's been a bit of a storm in a teacup about the "eight slots" on the PC UI, but one thing I do think it provides is an opportunity to have a mechanically interesting UI. The Dragon Age games thus far have severely lacked in having real mechanical interest--real tradeoffs and weighing of options. Origins had degenerate health/mana recovery even IN combat with the effectively infinite crafting of poultices and mana potions. Build options were kind of minimalist, and you certainly didn't have a lot of options along the way--if you wanted an ability, you had to buy the 1, 2, or 3 previous abilities. Most of the combat variability boiled down to what abilities your ENEMIES had, not so much what you had available to you.
DA2 didn't have quite that degree of degenerate healing due, at least, to the cooldown on potions. But the abilities got kind of boring quickly. There just wasn't much variety or build depth--less than Origins had, even. Yeah, they had branching trees, but you'd still have to take nearly everything in a tree to get to a later ability, so it didn't matter much that it branched other than forcing you into a narrower range of expenditures if you wanted upgrades and abilities that were deep in trees. The combats were also very often extremely similar, with even enemies not having notably interesting abilities. Placement was kind of random due to the "waves" where enemies dropped from the ceiling or whatever.
So, DA:I is going to use a different sort of system, it seems. No more degenerate healing. Limited numbers of abilities accessible at any one time. There are at least possibilities for some interesting mechanical tradeoffs, here. Anything that keeps combat from becoming a slog halfway through the game is a plus to me.
If you were designing for this kind of mechanical-limitation-based-system, I'd want to see stuff like:
1. Picking abilities and assigning tactics are part of the same UI screen and as seamless as possible.
2. The ability to "save" different loadouts for quick switching.
That's a minimum. Some other points of possible interest:
1. Splitting active abilities into different categories. Maybe some take up hotbar slots--those are the ones that you can use all willy-nilly. Then maybe have some others that are "combo" abilities, that, say, require you to cast 3 "small" lightning spells in a row to "charge" the area, then you get a big boom or a specialty spell or ability. Those would appear as pop-up icons (or could be auto-used via tactics), they wouldn't take up hotbar slots. This could be even cooler if you could create your own combos that would set up other abilities. So, maybe I don't want to take up a quickbar slot for Firestorm because I only really use it when I've Stunned a group of enemies and thrown a Vulnerability Curse on them. So you could set up Firestorm to come up only after Stun + Vulnerability Curse. That might be neat. (I'm not saying they did that, only that it'd be a neat sort of option.)
2. Maybe even having specific abilities have different modes: One that you can just use from the quickbar whenever you like, and a second mode that is situational, in the sense that it has some sort of prerequisite condition or other stipulation that activates that alternate usage. You can Critical Stab whenever it's off cooldown, but if you Critical Stab a Stunned opponent, it becomes Lethal Stab and you do 4x damage. This sort of thing was in DA2 to a certain extent with cross class combos.
That's kind of the sort of things I'm looking for to help make the game more mechanically interesting.
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