Ray Muzyka & Greg Zeschuk Interview / Pop Quiz

Xbox Nation has a new feature in which they show various game screenshots to BioWare's Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk in order to compare and contrast the respective game to some of BioWare's titles. An excerpt from a Deus Ex II screenshot response:
GZ: That's Deus Ex 2.

XBN: What do you think of it?

RM: The original game [Deus Ex] was one of our favorites. The sequel was kind of cool, too, in that the quests would branch when you set out to do a certain goal. The mutually exclusive nature of the game quests was interesting, too; you could follow only one of the paths to conclusion.

XBN: Strangely, the game maintained the illusion that the player had freedom...

GZ: That's exactly the disappointment of it, as we saw it. The technical requirements being so high, it probably had to be smaller as a result. So it felt a lot more constrained, a lot more linear, more on a direct path.

XBN: Will Jade feature a similar sort of branching, nonlinear gameplay?

RM: Yeah, as Greg said, this is one of our core goals for BioWare games, and it will be a big feature of Jade as well we're trying hard to make Jade the best game we've ever made.

GZ: Our producer on Jade Empire, Jim Bishop, described the story of Jade Empire as "How do you deal with power?" That is, what decisions would you make? That was a really powerful statement in itself of what it would feel like to be a really powerful martial arts master by the end of the game.

RM: We like the games where you get put in the position of having to make tough decisions, and we'll keep trying this approach at BioWare our goal is to make each game we create better than the last.