Greg Zeschuk Interview

With Ray spending most of his time in the World Series of Poker these days, BioWare doctor Greg Zeschuk has been the subject of all the recent press interviews we’ve seen. NowGamer is the latest website to kick up a four-page Q&A with Greg, with the topics circling around Star Wars: The Old Republic, Mass Effect, Dragon Age II, and some of the recent happenings in the PC gaming sector.

Was returning to Star Wars a no-brainer, or did you think ‘˜Well we’ve got Mass Effect now.’?

We like to mix it up. We don’t want to do all licenses or all our own properties. It’s nice to have a balance, and I think certainly returning to Star Wars both ourselves and LucasArts felt it worked really well last time so, it was exciting to say ‘˜let’s try again’ in a sort of slightly different way. But it definitely made sense.

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Now we’ve got that elephant out of the room, let’s move onto the interesting stuff. Are you pleased about the level of excitement for Dragon Age II?

Yeah. It’s funny, because I’ve actually moved to the Austin studio now so I’m in two minds obviously I’m still very involved in everything that’s going on across all of BioWare, but I’m not technically a spokesperson [for the game], but I know everything that’s going on with it. It was exciting to get it out there because people were probably a little surprised by how fast we’re doing it people are used to things taking a long time. But what’s interesting is that historically we haven’t done a lot of sequels.

Mass Effect 2 was one our first sequel and people saw how much better it was, and one of the exciting things for us is because we usually set such a great foundation for making a game, like Dragon Age one, that by the time it’s done we’re ready to go. The teams are actually really excited to do sequels; that’s actually the thing that’s funny about BioWare. You hear people from other companies go ‘˜we don’t want to do sequels, we hate them’, but we like doing them because we invest so much in actually creating the whole world, that the chance to finally start doing them. the team’s super enthusiastic and is full of energy towards it.