Dragon Age: Origins Interview

Strategy Informer continues to churn out content from their recent trip to Edmonton, with the latest feature being an interview with BioWare’s Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk about Dragon Age: Origins, the future of the RPG genre, the company’s five-year plan, and more.

Dakota Grabowski: Where do you see the future of the role-playing genre heading? Do you think Eastern developers will continue to cater to the Western audiences and keep targeting the demographics to sell better here in North America?

Ray Muzyka: I see it broadening. We see it definitely broadening with our games and continually diversify. So we are always trying to add different elements, features, content and continue to expand our definition of a RPG. You can look at Mass Effect 2. It’s as much of a shooter as is it a RPG. It’s really rich and deep. It has a lot of features RPG fans are going to be really excited about. Fans of Mass Effect 1, or other RPGs, are going to be all over it. It really has a tight shooter experience in it. Dragon Age, you could argue that it has got a lot of RTS elements in it with the way the combat flows and the tactics you can decide on. But it’s still incredibly deep and rich with a huge emergent world to explore. It’s heroic, dark and edgy. You can look at Grand Theft Auto IV. I’d argue that it’s as much an RPG as it is an action-adventure game. There are a lot of developers that are creating games more about the experience and less about the genre classification.

Greg Zeschuk: The Japanese market is really interesting. I mean, yeah, you’re right about what’s happening. Certain companies are really getting it. You look at Capcom and you can say, (Yeah, they figured out the Western market.) There’s the realization that you can’t rely on old markets. It’s been true for all of us. Certainly in Canada, we’ve had that perspective. In the earlier days, we used to look at their games and try to figure out what the magic was behind Final Fantasy. It’s kind of funny too. It’s ironic because Mass Effect was number one when it launched in Japan, which is amazing to us since we never thought that it would be the case. It’s a different market there than it used to be. I can see why the appeal would work there and it’s easy to see that it’s all about the global market. So now, really, you have to make games that appeal broadly. You can’t make a big blockbuster that caters to a small or even a moderate size market.