Mass Effect/Dragon Age Interview

[GameBanshee News]

The folks at GameSpy were recently able to catch up with BioWare's Ray Muzyka for a Q&A about the PC version of Mass Effect, Dragon Age, downloadable content, and more.

GameSpy: Where does Mass Effect go from here? Will we be seeing much additional content that takes place after the end of the first game, or will it be more along the lines of "Bring Down the Sky"?

Dr. Ray Muzyka: Both approaches are really intriguing to us, I think we like both ideas. We're not releasing details yet, but really, they're both valid approaches. We could continue the storyline, we could try to build stuff that's interstitial between different aspects of the trilogy. We've always talked about Mass Effect being a trilogy of content. Or, we could do things that are off the beaten path. "Bring Down the Sky" was a little bit of both in that it actually featured an alien race that I think was introduced in the prequel novel. We view Mass Effect as like a body of work. We're creating a world, we're creating this IP that the fans can immerse themselves in both in and out of the game, between the installments and the post-release content, the novels, and other spin-offs as well. We take it pretty seriously.

Which one is better? I don't know, I think it depends on which fan you ask. Some will say, "yeah, I'm totally into the story." Some will say, "yeah, it's about the story, but maybe it would be nice to have it separated as well." I think both approaches are valid, and I think we'll make both kinds of content.

One of the games we're planning a lot of post-release content for as well is Dragon Age. We haven't announced any details about that lately, but it's the kind of game that people just love, that sweet spot of BioWare games, the aspirational fantasy, the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, kind of the next-gen interpretation of it. We're really going to want to stay in that universe a long time. It's taken literally years of design time building this universe that feels coherent, kind of like the top of a mountain poking above the clouds. It feels like it's got weight, it feels like it's got a lot of depth to it, it feels like if you build something, it's going to hold, it's a strong foundation. That's the kind of time we invested in it, and because we do that, we can build all kinds of small structures coming out of that foundation, and they feel like they resonate, they feel like they're not just held together.

Because the Batarian race was actually introduced in another part of the Mass Effect universe, and now you're going to see them live and in person in the "Bring Down the Sky" expansion, it's that much better. That's what we want to achieve in the end: that emotional connection between different parts of the universe in a rational way.