Mass Effect 2/Dragon Age: Origins Interviews

Both CVG and Gamerzines have cranked out first installments to interviews they did with BioWare co-founder Ray Muzyka during his European press tour.

CVG covers Mass Effect 2 and the franchise as a whole:
The feedback we've gotten from your staff in the past is that Mass Effect 2 was all about checking off the criticisms of the original. Have you compiled a list for Mass Effect 3 yet - and if so what does it say?

We haven't done a list yet. What we'll probably do and what we did last time is we went through every review that had been posted, all the fan forums, all the internal feedback - what the team felt and wanted to pursue - and made a huge list and prioritised it, thinking about effort and impact, trying to maximise the bang for the buck in terms of delivering for the fans.

We'll do the same for this product and then try and make a list of prioritised features of what we're going to try and improve in the next week. At the end of the day it's got to be fun, right? So it's not just a feature analysis it's also thinking about what combinations and permutations of features are going to lead to the most entertaining and emotionally engaging experience for people.

While Gamerzines covers Dragon Age, Awakening, Mass Effect, and DLC:
GZ: Awakening seems much bigger than anything else done digitally. How big is it exactly? How many hours?

RM: It's a full expansion for the Dragon Age Universe, it's rich and explores a lot about the back story, explaining the things that players are curious about. You learn a lot more about the darkspawn and their motivation, and more of the cool things going on underneath the world. I think it'll answer a lot of the questions players had in the original game. It's a meaty expansion, a lot of developers would release it as a full game but we're releasing it as a great, high quality, really rich expansion for Dragon Age.