BioWare Unreal Engine 3 Q&A

IGN PC has conducted an interview with BioWare’s Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, in which they discuss the recent announcement that the company has licensed Epic’s Unreal Engine 3. Here’s a bit to get you started:

Q: Obviously the new Unreal engine is very advanced. The demo screens are awesome. Is there a sense at this point of whether Unreal Engine 3 fits existing technology? Or are we still years away from common consumer hardware which will run it?

A: We can’t comment on what specific platform(s) the game we’re using the Unreal Engine 3 will be targeted for, but I can say that we are exploring both PC and next-gen console options, and what we have in the works so far looks absolutely stunning – the team is doing a great job! In addition, it’s important to note that there’s more to a great game (particularly a role-playing game) than just the graphics engine — all of our games at BioWare are quite different (different settings, different features and different underlying engine tech) yet they’re very similar in many respects too – we’ll make sure we capture this uniqueness via the RPG layer. We’re committed to making each game we build better than all of the previous BioWare games and the advanced features we’re putting into this game should definitely help us achieve that, and the BioWare Eclipse Engine being developed by our Technology Architecture Group will help us to continue to excel in the future beyond that!