Interview with BioWare at Gamescom 2013 
Interview Deutsch | Interview EnglischIntroduction
We started the interview by giving our anti-stress-kit to the BioWare guys. It looked like they were really happy about it and the athmosphere was pretty easy from the beginning on. Maybe because of that little gift. In fact we had planned an 1 hour long interview, that turned into a 2 hour long conversation. During that conversation we often run off course and talked about the games. So in the following article you just can read the most important answers to the interview questions. Our Interviewpartners were Jessica Merizan (first picture), Rodrigue Pralier, Melanie Faulknor, Jonathan Perry and Justin Yong (second picture from left to right):
Jessica Merizan clearly said at the beginning, that we will not get information about the new Mass Effect game and also not about the brand new intellectual property BioWare has been working on. She just confirmed that they are working on both franchises.
I tried to check with a few questions about the New Mass Effect game, if we could get some little information out of them, but i realized soon that this won’t happen and that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to ask all your questions about that topic. So all information in short:
The BioWare Montreal studios are working on the new Mass Effect titel at the moment and it will not be focused around Commander Shepard. The Story about the Hero of the Alliance is finished with Mass Effect 3. Rodrigue Pralier said that they are working on it since quiet a while now and that it is growing slowly. Rodrigue is working on it since last September and now there is a whole Team working on it. About the question when we can estimate the release, Jessica just said: „It comes out, when it’s ready.“
And now we move to your questions about the Mass Effect Trilogy:
Interview
How did you handled the high expectations of the fans during the development of ME3? Did you get a lot of information about that, or did you just concentrate yourself on the working process?
Rodrigue Pralier: We had a lot of information about the expectations of the fans and we knew that they were very high. But we also had a lot of pressure because it was the first game that was that big. Because of the decisions you could make during the game, the possibilities of the effects of your decisions were massiv. One small decision, sometimes had maybe 14 possibilities how it ends in ME3. If you looked at it on the paper you sometimes thought: „Oh my good, how can we bring this all into the game?“. But at the end we think, that we managed it pretty good and we hope that the most of our fans liked it.
Would you say now, it was too much?
Rodrigue: I think noone who worked from the beginning on at the Mass Effect Series ever thought how massive it would be at the end, but this doesn’t mean, that we never wanna do something like this again. It was a huge challenge and it made a lot of fun to work on it. It is not like noone will ever make a story like the Shepard Trilogy again.
Where there other ideas to introduce the Starchild to the players as you did in the final game?
Jonathan Perry directly took the Massage-gadget out of our Anti-Stress-Kit and started to massage Rodrigues back. After that we started a longer discussion about this topic:
Rodrigue: First I have to say, that the child at the beginning and in Shepard’s dreams is not the same child as that one we see at the end. This one at the end is just a physically embodiment that the catalyst is using to interact with Shepard. At this time he is in the head of Shepard and using the child as a symbol. The child represents humanity and what Shepard tries to safe. The catalyst is using that to get closer to Shepard.
Were there other ideas how to represent the catalyst? Maybe without a body like Vigil in ME1?
Rodrigue: It should be a symbol for the vulnerability of Shepard and the humanity. It is Shepard’s role to safe humanity and he wasn’t able to safe that child. That put a mark on him. It also should show the relation between humanity and the Reapers.
At this point, also Jonathan Perry jumped into the discussion. By the way, he is a developer who works on both franchises and worked also on Mass Effect 3. He also said, that you see the kid playing in the opening scene and Shepard looked at it and smiled. That is what he is figthing for. And then he started to heat up the rumors as he said: „By the way…..ist the child real? Because it seems like noone else than Shepard is seeing it.“ Now also Jessica started to talk about that topic and talked about the fan theorie and explained us that we can find a lot of metaphors in Mass Effect 3. The meaning intention of the ME3 team was, to bring a bigger message to the story than just the story you see directly. She talked about different layers of metaphor in many scenes. And by the way, Casey Hudson not even answered her the question if the child was real or not. He just said: „Is it?“
How did you cope with the harsh critics about the Mass Effect 3 ending?
Rodrigue: First we were a bit surprised how the fans reacted to it. Then we tried to do everything we could to make it better. That was why we released the extendend cut and later the Citadel DLC. We felt responsible to do that. So in short, first we were surprised, then we tried to do everything we could.
What did you learn from the work on the Mass Effect Trilogy for yourself and what were the highlights and lowpoints for you personally?
Rodrigue: I’m working for 7 years now in the game industrie and the work with the Mass Effect team is the highlight of my carrier. I’ve never worked with a team before that is so fascinated and motivated of their job. Everyone is working with a lot of passion and working also extra hours, because they really love what they do. That’s why I like to go to work every morning!
Justin Yong: The same like Rodrigue said. I’m working since Mass Effect 2 and 3 at BioWare and I like the work with all the people in the team.
To the question if they would do anything different now they said, that there are always things you would make different or you would make some little changes. Rodrigue for example wished that Wrex had a bigger role in ME2.
Will we get a nice Wallpaper with all squadmates of the Shepard Trilogy? The old and new ones, maybe also with the Normandycrew?
They didn’t confirme it, but they will ask back in the office if they could do something. So if you are lucky you will get your Wallpaper Dukemon. (The Sims question I forgot to ask, I’m sorry for that.)
After a short discussion about the wallpaper and how big that must be, Jonathan was asking us if we played the Citadel DLC and mentioned Tali’s tattoo. Because he wanted to know how it looks like, he was asking Matt Rhodes, a concept artist from BioWare, to draw it for him. The result was so nice, that we like to show it to you too. (The picture is from JP's Twitter-Account)
And because he was sad that he doesn’t have a lot of followers we will make a little advertisment for him. He told us that he often shows things on it that are very close to stuff he is not allowed to post yet. After that we could watch a short video of Dragon Age Inquisition that showed us the power of the Frostbite 3 Engine. He also put some Screenshots from that video on his Twitter-Account, so we also show you these:
Before we changed to the Dragon Age questions I asked your more general questions about Mass Effect:
Are you still searching for a new Lead Writer for Mass Effect „4“ or did you find one?
Rodrigue and Jonathan as well told us, that they are still searching for one and that they have some job interviews at the moment.
Will the Foundation Comics be translated into German and will they also be up for sale by us?
Jessica: Dark Horse is in charge of our Comics, I can’t say something about their plans at the moment. But we will ask them.
Are there plans for new Mass Effect novels?
Jessica: We have a great business development team who is in contact with our partners who produce things for us. At the moment I have no information about new stuff but there are also no information about an end of these partnerships. So it’s possible that we will see more material in the future.
Did you revise the novel Deception and will it be re-released?
Jessica: Yes, it went through some revisions and it will be re-released. But I can’t tell you an exact date at the moment.
Can you give us any information about the upcoming Mass Effect movie?
Jessica: Legendary Pictures will produce it. They were responsible for a lot of very good fantasy and Sci-Fi movies and they are trying to make the script perfect at the moment. They put a lot of time in it to do so. Casey Hudson is highly involved at the moment and the whole BioWare team is really excited about the movie. But it is one of the things that will be ready when they’re done.
Could you see some scenes yet or is it still on a planning phase?
Jessica: We can’t talk about that.
Do you have plans for more animes like Paragon Lost? Maybe to tell the background stories of other squadmates?
Jessica: We have an amazing partnerschip with Funimation who made both animes for ME and DA and these two were pretty successfull. Because of that we can imagine that we will use them as an option to expand our properties. Through partnerships like these, the opportunities are limitless.
When does the Mass Effect Risk board game come to Europe?
Jonathan: Was that not just a photoshop of a fan?
Jessica: I can’t say anything now but i will ask about that.
Why do you change from the Unreal Engine to the Frostbite Engine?
Jonathan: There are many reasons. One is of course the strategy of EA to bring all there developers under one umbrella and they would like that all use their Engine. It’s also pretty useful when all are using the same engine because it helps with the exchange of knowledge and technology between the different developers.
Rodrigue: Till now we used different engines for Mass Effect (Unreal Engine) and Dragon Age (Eclipse-Engine) what complicated the exchange between the BioWare Teams. Since we work both with the Frostbite 3 Engine now, the exchange of knowledge and technology is possible in much more direct ways.
Jonathan: I worked on Mass Effect 2 and 3, as well as on all Dragon Age games and I saw that a lot of things were pretty similar. There are also a lot of other develeopers like me who change between the franchises and it always takes some months to move from one engine to the other till you can work with it. These months will fall away now because we share the same engine. The exchange between the teams is easier as well as the exchange with other developers like maybe DICE who could give us a lot of hints how we can use the engine to let the character interact with his invironment, like you can see it in Battlefield.
Rodrigue and Melanie Faulknor also confirmed that the power of the engine is massive and everything looks damn good. They also have a lot more possibilities than before. Jonathan clipped and precised it with: „Everthing looks better in Frostbite! Much more detailed!“
How can we imagine the work with EA about the localisation, marketing and interaction with the German community?
Melanie: We have our own Studio that works with the localisation, what’s pretty rare. This studio is in very close contact with the localisation studio from EA which does all the work with the other languages. Because BioWare puts a high value on quality, they are working very close together with the EA Cologne studio.
About marketing and the interaction with the German community, I have to say, that we would like to do more, but it’s not allways possible.
Will you stay with the BioWare Points payment system for upcoming DLC’s?
Jessica: You can use the BioWare Points definitely for all BioWare Games that are out now. I can’t say anything about future titles, we will have information about that later. I would not stock BioWare Points for future games but we have no actual plans for another system right now.
Can you still play a video game with a neutral sight, or do you alwyas value it? How is it to play a game you developed by your own?
Rodrigue: Both. It depends on what I want. Sometimes I just sit down and play for having fun and sometimes I really look closer to everything and look if I can use it as an inspiration for my work.
Jonathan: Sometimes it’s fun to look very close when you play games you develeoped by your own. There were also situation I played something I was developing and then I found some very little faults that maybe no one else would see and then I was really annoyed about it. As Rodrigue said, you can take a lot of inspiration out auf other games you play when you have a close look what they did good and maybe use that for your own games you are working on.
So, all of you play the BioWare games too?
All: Oh yes, definitely!
Or do you want to have as less to do with games as possible in your free time?
Jonathan: Games are a big passion to me, a hobby, so I also play a lot of them at home after I finished working.
Rodrigue: I think that’s the main reason why we all ended up in the game industrie, because we like to play games.
In other words, you made your hobby to your job!?
All: exactly!
Closing Words
With this very nice ending we moved on to the Dragon Age questions. The answers there were also very interesting and I recommend you to read the Dragon Age Inquisition interview at our partnersite dragonage-game.de.
I finish this article with giving you some information about the Anti-Stress-Kit and the Community-gift. The BioWare-Guys were really happy about both and I want to pass their thanks to you all! Now you can see a picture of the poster and some picture about the content of the Stress-Kit.
