Mass Effect - Interview #2 @ Team Xbox

Team Xbox continues their conversation with BioWare's Ray Muzyka on Mass Effect:

Not to be too skeptical, but a lot of time when a company tries to make a multi-faceted game, just about everything gets the short end of the stick. How do you find a balance to satisfy different types of gamers?

Ray Muzyka: That’s an excellent question. At BioWare, we see the types of character and story-driven games we make as having four key activity pillars. There’s story and characters, there’s exploration, there’s combat/conflict/action, and there’s customization/progression. All of our game have those, to some extent. What we’re trying to do is build these activity chains between them. We think consciously about “How do we pull the player from the story to the exploration to the progression to the combat?” For example, maybe you run into an interesting character who tells you about an interesting place to go. You find some interesting items there and you upgrade your weapons with X mods and biotic energy. Then you get to go into combat and defeat the enemies you couldn’t defeat before, which allows you to get to a new part of the story.

We link all of these things together, they aren’t separate elements to us, they’re actually part of the same whole. We’ve always approached our games that way, and I think in the last two or three years, we’ve come to understand the way our games are built, in a way we’ve never done before. So, for us, it’s certainly not unfocused, we’re extremely focused. We’re more focused now on games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age than we ever were before. I think the fans will see the results of that.