BioWare - Q & A @ bit-tech.net

Matt Atwood is again the Bioware rep for this short interview at bit-tech.net. Staffer Joe Martin asks him some questions about the relationship with EA, the upcoming Mass Effect for PC release, porting and piracy:

 Bit: Speaking of customisation and all that, I mean, to me the RPG genre is one most closely associated with the PC. So, why did you take the Mass Effect franchise to the Xbox 360 and then to PC? Why not the other way around?

Matt: I think it depends on what you’re doing. Look at our next game for instance, Dragon Age, is a very traditional RPG and there’s a strong argument for making that for the PC first. But with Mass Effect, we wanted to deliver a different type of experience.

Mass Effect…It isn’t just a pure RPG, it’s so much more. You don’t have to level up and do all that stuff manually and you don’t have to follow all the side quests – you can just play it as a shooter, with your feet up on the coffee table if you want and that type of casual experience is more suited to consoles...

We’re certainly not making it an Xbox 360 exclusive and we’re working to get the PC version out as quick as we can because there are as many problems as there are…like the interface, for instance. The team did a great job and we did the best we could, but the PC allows us to do so much more.

 Bit: It’s interesting you’d say that because a lot of PC games are moving more towards console games in an effort to avoid piracy. Was piracy a factor in the console launch?

Piracy is always a concern obviously, but if we were that worried then we wouldn’t do a PC version at all, right?

Hmm, maybe I should qualify that. We’re very concerned about piracy and we put steps in to stop people doing that. At the end of the day the BioWare team spent four years—it’ll actually be more than that when the PC version is out—of their lives making just the first game in this trilogy. Four years of their lives with very many long hour days. They deserve to have consumers pay for the title – they’ve put a lot of work in. That said, piracy didn’t factor into our platform choice massively and the sequels will be released in the same way – Mass 2, Xbox 360.