BioWare Interview

Kotaku has posted another BioWare interview, and this time they chat with co-founder Greg Zeschuk about the Mass Effect franchise, Dragon Age: Origins, and Star Wars: The Old Republic. Damage control on Mass Effect: Pinnacle Station to follow:

“We wanted to make something different,’ Zeschuk said of the recently released expansion to the first Mass Effect, Pinnacle Station. “The reaction’s been quite vigorous from a lot of folks. I think part of it was the time. The expectation was that it took so long that [people thought] it would be something very grand. But what we want to do in Mass Effect was just riff on stuff a bit and do a combat simulator. We thought it would be neat to have this neat little encapsulated thing …. It [contained] a few things we weren’t able to get in the full game.”

Zeschuk said Pinnacle Station took longer than expected because, he laughed, “Games are hard to make.” He said that BioWare didn’t find it easy to incorporate downloadable content in the base game of Mass Effect. The team wanted to keep everything in the fiction to make it accessible through the natural exploration in the game but didn’t find the most accessible hooks to attach the new content. “From a structural perspective, Mass Effect the game even though we had one piece out pretty early it wasn’t ideally structured for downloadable content. I think, pretty early, we’ve been saying that Dragon Age is a platform. I would say Mass Effect 2 is as well. We took the learning from how tricky it is to put things into the game in Mass Effect and that was a very big factor.”

In my review of Pinnacle Station I had guessed that BioWare was testing possible multiplayer mechanics in their still-single player Mass Effect squad combat battle system. Not quite. “I wouldn’t say exactly multiplayer, but definitely taking the combat further [with] some kind of competitive mode,” Zeschuk said. “We do a lot of story at BioWare. Sometimes we want to do something different than just a story.”