Greg Zeschuk Interviews

BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk addresses questions about Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age: Journeys, Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, Star Wars: The Old Republic, downloadable content, and more in two separate interviews on GameSpy and Joystiq. The latter is a lot more encompassing, so I’ll quote from that:

Dragon Age started as a PC game and it has a PC lineage, that Baldur’s Gate style. I know a lot of our commenters were really looking forward to BioWare going back to its PC roots. When the console versions were announced, a lot of people were apprehensive about that. Was it a delicate process managing those expectations?

It was actually. One of the most important things on the PC side in the same way that we didn’t want console players to feel they got a substandard experience or that we stripped stuff out the same is also true for PC. It’s interesting, the PC is absolutely unchanged in any way from how we intended it. It’s really amazing as a PC product. And, in fact, it is exactly what we wanted. So the interesting thing is we’ve actually done things to the console where we said, “We can take those back and make the PC experience even better.” Which might be something we do on a later date. It was very delicate to manage that because people make assumptions. Like obviously your expectations are driven by what you’ve seen before. Most companies, when they do a console port to the PC or PC port to a console, they kind of throw it over the fence and don’t worry about it and go, “Oh, yeah, we’ll get it back in six months from whoever’s doing it and publish it.” We just don’t do that. We look at what we make as very important and fans have to feel it’s for them.

I think what you said press-wise, one of the ways to do that is to get their hands on it. One of the most powerful things you can do is say, “Hey, go play the PC version and see that it’s a really great PC game.” It is as great as it was ever intended to be. The console version is the same thing. For Dragon Age, the momentum has started to build more recently, the momentum didn’t build in the spring. Folks were out on the pavement showing people, getting hands on. Some folks actually had copies of games they’re playing and they go to the press and spread it and say, “Wow, the version I have feels like the right version.”

When they announced that the PC launch was going to be delayed to time up with the console launches, do you think that hurt your outreach? This is going to be one of BioWare’s first games in recent memory that was launching on PC first.

At the end of the day it ended up being a business decision. In the sense that the staff actually looked at it and asked, “You know, what’s the best?” The best thing is to make the whole Dragon Age: Origins launch a gigantic event. And come with an amazing game that you know, that players can effectively choose where they want to play it. So it would have been first, but at the end of the day it made sense to put it all together. It might be fair to say that we wouldn’t have had as big a presence if we weren’t all kind of piling on and saying, “This is going to be our mega release.” Like you know, at least talk about the concept of an “event product.” And in a lot of ways this is how you do an event product, you have a big launch for a lot of stuff and you get everyone focused on it.

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You can make that argument for Dragon Age but then somebody that beat Mass Effect in 15 hours will say, “Mass Effect was an RPG and it was only 15 hours. An RPG should be 100 hours. So, you know, you should have given me that DLC for free.” I mean there’s always that voice.

Really one error we made in Mass Effect that we’re fixing is the percent complete concept because the guys that beat Mass Effect at 15 hours, their percent complete was probably under 50% or maybe at 40% or 60%, somewhere there, right? So there’s a whole bunch of other content they haven’t experienced …

You mean in terms of the quests?

That’s one thing we’re doing nowadays, to make the core, sort of central start-to-finish, follow-the-quest stuff is often less than half the content in the game. A lot of it’s the choices, the optional stuff. So, in fact you should not be saying, “I got ripped off.” You should go back and play it again. Try a different character, make different decisions but also do some more of the off-the-path stuff. Don’t run to the end.

In other words, there’s a whole bunch of free DLC built into your game that you didn’t play?

Yeah, that’s it right. The thing that DLC does is it allows us to even tell more stories and expand the universe because we’ve got the core story built. After it’s released, we start going, “Okay. Now, let’s think of how we transition to the sequel.” Like I mean, this is one of the interesting things where we’re certainly thinking about when Dragon Age is out, when you say, “Okay, now let’s build some islands and continents that actually connect with future stories,” sort of like a pre-story. The stuff that once again otherwise wouldn’t exist that actually helps flesh out future stuff and it makes more sense.