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RM: I'm more excited than ever, because of a
whole bunch of things. One is where we point at the nexus of change. I see 30
years in the past and 30 years in the future, and it's like, "Holy crap,
look at all the things that have happened in just the last few years, let alone
compared to 10 or 20 years ago in video games. Where are we going in five or
10?"
Another thing I'm excited about is being
part of a larger company. It's like this big toy box where there's this cool
tech over there and interesting ideas and smart, nice people that are willing
to share and collaborate on a bunch of things from different studios. But none
of it's forced. It's as much as we can enable. It's up to us, as BioWare. It's
part of that.
It's part of EA. We are EA. BioWare is a
publisher now. It's a weird thing to say, but it's true, and that's not a bad
thing. It's all about how you approach it. Are you oriented around your design,
and your fans and long-term goals, not just short-term goals?
It's going to be
a very healthy thing, because being a publisher actually really is about having
a closer connection to your fans, in some ways. You're selling things to them,
so if you're listening to them, you can take that stuff and bring it in and
make your games better, which is our philosophy. And I think it's the
philosophy of the new EA as well.
I
hope so. The way I looked at EA, is that EA is like the weather of the
industry. First of all, you can't get out of it if it's raining. You're sort of
stuck. But also where EA goes, it kind of pushes the industry in some ways. So
if it's sunny weather for us, it's good for everyone.
But
to wrap up, story based games are your thing. It's part of your... I saw you
speak at the IGDA Leadership Forum earlier. I feel like, watching Mass Effect, there's still a little bit
of the Uncanny Valley thing going on. How do you feel about perfecting that?
RM: We can always improve. I think we can
always get better. The good news is that we're not done yet. We have a long way
to go still, and we continue to get better over time. I'm excited about that. I
think we've built a really great foundation of people and teams, and they're
really passionate and ambitious. They can fuel great things, because you
actually can listen to feedback and improve.
I don't know. For us, our mission may
building the best story or narrative-driven games in the world, but I see
narrative -- and I talked about this in the [DICE] panel -- as being very
broad. I think you'll see more and more of that coming in BioWare games. It's
the narrative of the explorer, and the narrative of the combatant and the
hero's journey. It's the narrative of the story, characters, and the social
space.
Maybe there's some different ways to look
at narrative. There's more than one way to tell a great story. But I think
beyond that, our vision is emotion. So yeah, we're going to be pushing it hard
to make you feel really compelled by the game as we deliver it. And if we need
to deliver more compelling characters, we're going to be doing that.
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