BioWare - Ray Muzyka Interview @ CVG

CVG was another site to catch up with Ray Muzyka at GamesCom.  Part 1 of their interview is online, although much of the conversation is wasted on peripheral stuff like other developer's games.  On Mass Effect 2 looking good:

It focuses on deep character development but how do you get players to really care about polygonal characters?

Muzyka: That's a really good question. I think one of our visions is to really create an emotional engagement with the game and that can be done in a variety of ways.

One of them is through characters and story, to get you to make choices that matter and to have characters that feel like real, living characters - digital personas that you actually care about.

With Dragon Age it's a little bit different, but with Mass Effect's Sheppard, it's almost like a third-person authored experience because you're given general directive orders and then you see Sheppard enact it, and that's almost a game in itself - seeing what he's going to do. Be he has a strong personality and it grows on you so you really care about him doing the right things.

But the small things matter. You have to have digital actors that are credible and believable. The small things like the characters' eyes - whether they look right, where they look and if they blink at the right frequency, whether the light reflects off their eyes in the right way, whether their hand movement is right.

In real life you don't even need to speak - you can convey as much by nodding your head or lifting your eyebrow, and that's the same thing that a high-fidelity character can bring. It's with this motional expression that, if you can make players believe in your characters, the possibilities are endless.