BioWare Interview

Just when I start to think we’ve seen the last of the GDC-based interviews with BioWare’s Ray Muyzka and Greg Zeschuk, another one pops up.  This latest interview is over at Joystiq, where the conversation is primarily about DLC and the Dragon Age and Mass Effect franchises:

On that topic, I’ve heard that Mass Effect 3 would be considered to get out with a fast turnaround. What would a fast turnaround be?

Greg: Are you saying BioWare fast turnaround? [laughs] Well, you know, I think we certainly always have the intent for fast turnaround. I think it depends on what we dig into and, obviously, there’s quite an evolution from Mass 1 to Mass 2 as we talked about earlier. We’ll see, fan feedback, a lot of other elements will, in our impressions, guide what Mass 3 does. I don’t imagine it will be quite as dramatic as Mass 1 to Mass 2, because I think by and large people liked a lot of the features we put in. There’s an incredibly opportunity for refinement and I think one thing we talked about is, if you look at the evolution of the shooter experience from 1 to 2, that’s a huge step. I think, realistically, we can have yet another step, maybe refine it another level. That was really, for that team, their first shooter and then their second shooter and now they’re on to their third. There’s a great opportunity to just make it better and better.

Ray: It’s all about the quality, and we are going to innovate in all of our products. Each one we’re striving to make better than the last and the way we do that is to listen to fan feedback and, yeah, we’re gonna do some innovative things in future installments of Mass Effect. And we’ll take the amount of time we need to deliver a really high-quality game for our fans that meets what they’re asking us to deliver. And we’re still working on what that is, to be honest. We have a plan, we have a team working on the next installment now. We haven’t even formally announced it so to say a date would be way premature.

But you could do it if you wanted to.

Ray: We could. We could say something but we’re not going to.

Greg: [laughs] We never even said we’re doing Mass 3 …

Ray: We haven’t even formally announced it.

Greg: It’s not official!

Ray: Well, actually, it’s a trilogy, so that implies there’s probably another one.

Greg: But it’s not official!

Ray: In fact, there’s a team working on that something now but …

Greg: That’s not official.

Ray: But it’s all going to be about quality, you know, so that’s the governor on everything we do. It’s striving for quality. Mass Effect 2 set a really high quality bar for us as a studio group, and, hey, we want Mass Effect 3 to exceed that.