BioWare - Building Experiences
BioWare's Greg Zeschuk does another branding interview, this time at Gamasutra:
What do you think about the current state of RPGs? It's interesting that your two upcoming games [Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age] represent almost two different eras, the more modern action RPG and the more sprawling, traditional RPG.
GZ: Yeah. From the perspective of what our overall strategy is for all the games we make, I think one thing that's really important is to make games that play and feel very different. Mass Effect 2 has got a really strong shooting component. The shooter is really good. And of course, you've got the incredible cinematic conversations. We describe it as a third-person conversation where you're directing Shepard, and he's doing stuff.
Whereas Dragon Age is very much, right from the beginning, an intimate playthrough of who you are, where you came from, and the decisions that got you to the point in the game where it starts. That's a very personalized experience. It's a little more traditional in that you've got a party and you can directly control the party members. You said "sprawling," which is a good word to use, because really it's a gigantic game.
It's funny -- I've been teasing the lead designer about that while we're here because I'm almost done with my [Dragon Age] playthrough.
Is that Mike Laidlaw?
GZ: Right, Mike Laidlaw. I was just realizing how big this game is. One of the guys from Mythic just finished it, and I was saying to him, "Did you get to this part, and did that happen? Did this guy go in your party?" He goes, "What do you mean? You can get him in your party?"
It's got that magical thing we strive for, which is personalization. The state of the industry in general, I think, is very exciting, because we've been seeing other games kind of coming into this space, this story-driven gaming, but it's also progressive -- all the pillars we talk about at BioWare, like combat and great characters.
We've really been progressing a lot. I look at Fallout 3, which is probably the best exploration-driven game ever. I think that is just incredible. All of us have continued to work at our craft to keep making better and better games. Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 are among our best games ever. It's very exciting to actually have this coming in pretty quick succession for a little while here.