Half Life 2 Development Details and Dragon Age
Indeed, there are some interesting things to learn in that article. At the end of the day, though, one has to remember than Half-Life 2 and Dragon Age are different games completely, and will have different goals. A first-person shooter needs to prioritize things like physics and a realistic environment and such, because everything that it does revolves around that.

And of course we could add any feature at all into Dragon Age, including physics and z-axis and such things, but the good part of that article is in the realization of how much such features can cost, development-wise. It's always a matter of cost vs need, from our point of view.

Such considerations are never fun, however, nor sexy. It's far more fun to consider what could be added without thinking about the cost... to wonder what the perfect game might possibly be like, if you didn't have to worry about eventually selling enough of it to cover your costs. But that's always going to be the case.