XE: Even though Jade Empire is a great game, a lot of people (including myself) have accused it for being to simple at times. How much more depth will we see in Mass Effect, and will the player have the ability to change the difficulty?

Ray: BioWare defines role playing games as those games with a core of significant story and character development. Additionally, we believe a number of other critical RPG features such as exploration, strong player rewards and progression systems, and some type of combat also significantly contribute to the role playing experience. Mass Effect has a number of very strong role playing elements that we believe place it solidly in our – and our fans’ - definition of a role playing game!

Like Jade Empire, Mass Effect is an action RPG, and our third new intellectual property in development (the second is the epic RPG Dragon Age for PC), so we are benefiting from the knowledge we gained in creating both the Jade Empire and Dragon Age worlds and from our understanding of merging action features with role playing that we gained in developing Jade Empire.