BioWare Interview

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Written by BuckGB on March 7th, 2009

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Your older games on the PC are known for their depth and detail. Is it difficult to maintain those qualities when making a game that has to be accessible to console gamers?

We have an obligation always to make our games as accessible as possible, and yet you don't have to lose the depth and richness of the tactics, the systems, the customisation and progression and storyline and exploration all those great features of RPGs in the process. You don't have to lose anything in the translation to become accessible. And accessibility can be achieved in a range of ways too. It doesn't necessarily mean simple or that it's not good. On the other hand, you have to be careful how you do it. You have to make sure you're focussing on interface and control systems and usability, and make sure that you're not losing the deep, rich systems that people do love. The key is to make it so that it's easy to play, fun to play, easy to pick up with a nice, smooth learning curve and a great progression system so that you can pick up more depth as you go along. We have to spend a lot of time building tutorials and building the interface and controls to make sure it's going to reach as wide an audience as possible. But the kind of games we make, games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, you can see there's a lot of depth there. We've still got that same level of depth, we're just trying to make it easier to use and make it feel like you're not even using an interface, make it feel like you're just connected to this world and you're a hero walking around in this world. Ideally you shouldn't even be aware that you're using an interface. You're ideally just enjoying the storyline and enjoying the vistas and if you pause for a moment you think you're looking at a real world. It may be an alternate reality, but you should still feel like you're there.

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