DA: The Awakening - Interview @ Gamasutra

This short interview with BioWare online producer Fernando Melo is ostensibly about DLC in general but I'm going to file it under Awakening:

In your presentation, you emphasized that this is a "content" expansion more than a "features" expansion — less of a bullet point list, more straight-up game expansion. Is that down to you and the players seeing the primary strength of Dragon Age as being its story and world content?

FM: It is. More than "content," generally, it’s really the story. That’s what made Origins so special, and [it's what] people really seem to gravitate towards. There's a lot of depth, very memorable characters, and the fact that you make choices and you get to live out the consequences.

There are new features in there — you can now do rune crafting; there’s some combat balancing; there are all-new tiers of items; you have smarter, higher-level enemies; you can use higher-powered spells; and there’s a re-spec ability.

But all of those are fairly subtle. There isn’t one whiz-bang feature we wanted to prop up. It really is about driving a whole additional part of the lore, and we felt that that was what was going to resonate best with fans.

More information.

As an industry, retail expansions are difficult to put on the shelf.

Why is that?

They sell for less than a full game, will only sell 50% of the original game sales (or whatever) but still take up the same space.