BioWare Interview

Shacknews managed to interview BioWare’s Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk during last week’s GDC about Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect 2, and Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Shack: Why did you choose to push the PC release of Dragon Age to the fall? Did you need more time, or were you looking to line it up with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 releases?

Ray Muzyka: I would say it’s a combination of factors. One, we certainly make good use of any additional time we have to polish, iterate. But as you can see, hey it’s like March, and you’re looking at a game basically, and that’s the real code, that’s the build, that’s the game. So it’s looking great.

But we’re definitely making use of the time to make it even greater. I also think this is a landmark in fantasy. This is dark fantasy, something that’s really differentiated. And the people at EA and BioWare EA that we’ve shown it to, everyone is getting really excited about the opportunity that Dragon Age presents. Like EA looks at it and says, “Holy crap, this game is going to be big. It’s an event. This is a landmark.” And we want to make sure that we actually make the most of that, and really back it all the way, build up and make sure that it’s got the opportunity to really be as big as it could be.

So the combination of factors were, BioWare always focuses on polish and quality. So we’re going to make every spare minute we have to make it better and better. But we also recognize the importance of commercial success in our games. So we want to achieve the best of breed in both. And the good news is the fans are going to win, because we’re making this game incredibly high quality.

We’re also investing in it as a platform, making sure there’s this deep integration of the online community, with the post-release content and user-generated toolsets. And just the polish of the underlying game itself is going to be pretty amazing. And we’re launching it on three platforms in the fall.

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Shack: Jumping quickly to The Old Republic.

Greg Zeschuk: That one’s pretty good I hear.

Shack: [laughs] There was some noise about microtransactions a few months ago. Is that something you’re still considering for inclusion in the game?

Ray Muzyka: Yeah, I mean it’d be intriguing. It’d have to be congruent with the game world. We haven’t talked about the business models of TOR yet, so we’re not confirming or denying anything on that front.

But you know, subscription models are something that the vast majority of fans in that space in North America and Europe prefer, and it’s certainly something we see as an important business model. But you know, microtransactions, other forms of business models are intriguing too. We’re looking at a variety of things, but we’re not ready to confirm or deny any specifics yet.