Dragon Age - Interview @ Joystiq

Greg Zeschuk sits down with Christopher Grant at Joystiq to discuss Dragon Age and a little about Mass Effect. Greg talks about the game, console ports, MMOs, and ther DLC. Here are a couple of snippets from the interview:

Christopher: The Mass Effect 1 DLC was a lot smaller, was a lot more bite-sized. It was a lot more affordable too.

Greg: The DLC that we're doing is all kinds of shapes and sizes. That's the other thing, we want to give the players the opportunity to pick and choose some of the big things, some of the smaller things. You know, a couple things we have already are interesting for what they are, and then there is actually some very cool stuff that we have. I think the other thing too is that DLC is an area where you want to make sure you're getting the right value for the right money. So it can vary a lot in pricing compared to regular games where you always come out with this price. So all those things are stuff we're going to play with, you know how big it is, and pricing it accordingly. Yeah, we have some big thing we're planning for DLC, actually. It's a big part of the strategy just because the kind of world again, and the kind of player that plays those games loves to sort of continue experiencing new things and have it all packed up together.

Christopher: There's definitely a strange calculus that gamers do when they judge the value of DLC. I don't even know if I understand it.

Greg: No, it is actually sort of bizarre. The other thing that's interesting about DLC is there is not a lot of opacity about what the impact has actually been. Like, who knows how many of whatever has been sold? It's actually not like NPD - you can't look and go, "Hey!", right?

Christopher: You guys are doing these console games and you're also working on Star Wars: The Old Republic, which is this huge project. And you've recently also, maybe "inherited" is the term, Mythic, which was EA's other big MMO studio. So now BioWare is kind of cemented itself as "the" RPG studio at EA.

Greg: Now we're the RPG/MMO Group actually. It's on my card.

Christopher: The RPG/MMO Group?

Greg: Yeah, it's on my card. I'm the group creative officer. So effectively, you're absolutely right on that. One of the things we've been learning as well is that there's a lot of benefit in getting everyone together who makes similar stuff because you can not only share tools of technology, share know-how - I mean the Mythic guys have a tremendous amount of experience running MMOs. They've had them going for 10 years now, which is amazing. So for us to be able to draw on this example - and then what we can bring to them is we can bring a new perspective. We work with a team and have a really good time with the team at Mythic. I went to dinner with them last night, for example. And just, you know, looking at Warhammer sales, what can we do to keep this going, keep it vibrant, keep things happening.

It's interesting because I think there's a lot of positives. Because the way we run things, Ray and I - and Ray's the group general manager - so the way we kind of manage things is everyone's got a lot of autonomy. Everyone just shares a lot of information and we all have a lot of common opportunity to learn. I think that's actually the really big focus. Finally, everyone has different goals. We have goals that we have to try to achieve collectively and individually and those things allow us to actually have all these things going on at the same time and not have our heads exploding.

Because, again, you have Casey Hudson and his team running Mass Effect, Mark Darrah and his team running Dragon Age, Rich Gordon, James Ohlen running Star Wars Old Republic and then Rob Denton and Jeff Hickman and their team running Warhammer. So there's a lot of really great people dedicated to it. So our job is give power to all of them.