BioWare still has no idea how to make a game for the Wii audience
A portion of Joystiq interview with BioWare co-founder (and Group Creative Officer of EA's newly formed RPG/MMO Group) Greg Zeschuk...
J: BioWare has done DS, obviously with Sonic. You've done iPhone now. And I know you've – or maybe it was Ray, who we talked to a little while ago – said there's an interest at BioWare to do XBLA or PSN, to do Wii. You're probably not going to tell me if you are or aren't working on any of those ...
GZ: Well, that's where the experiments lie, right? I can't be too specific on that for you. Because for us, what we're actually trying – like our objective is, what we're trying to do is find a way of capturing the BioWare experience in a smaller or different platform and making it worthwhile to release. I think that's actually the fundamental thing that we try to do, is try to distill what we make. That has really been our objective on DS and iPhone. It's like, "Can we capture whatever it is and put it on there?" That's an ongoing process; it's very iterative. I mean we've got to keep making more of those to try to figure it out.
So things like Wii, we just haven't quite figured out what we would want to do on Wii yet and how it would fit into all of our franchises and all of our other stuff.
J: For Wii, would you be more concerned with the interface, or with the audience?
GZ: I think it's a combination of things. I mean, our traditional audience is getting a bit older. There's exceptions, obviously – we've got the DS game, Sonic's actually doing quite well. Sonic's an amazing thing, it just keeps on chugging away from a sales perspective. So we've done some young audience stuff. And the interface, it goes back to figuring out what's the core gameplay that we want to have? Because we want also to feel somewhat unique, we don't want to say "Hey, let's just copy 'blah'" or whatever. "Let's just copy Paper Mario, let's just redo it all, it's Paper Shepherd," you know? It doesn't make any sense.
And then, secondarily is to understand the audience. Because when you're working in the hardcore console audience, or the broad PC audience, they're very different things. I think that we know our audience really well in the general RPG side, and some of the story-driven stuff. We learn more about them all the time. We have to learn more about those audiences to be able to really be able to nail it in something that they're playing.
Unfortunately, I think BioWare's real problem is that they're trying to figure out how to make a Wii game that would be cost-effective, rather than going all-out on the idea. I don't have high hopes for a BioWare project on Wii anytime soon.
Als ob unsere Großmütter Resident Evil bisher wegen der Steuerung nicht gespielt hätten.
