HomeLAN - Why would BioWare wish to license an engine for a game when they have created their own powerful technology for their current and future titles?

Ray Muzyka - The Unreal Engine 3 technology is very impressive – we’ve carefully assessed all of the available graphics engines out there and this engine is the right one for the specific title that it’s being applied to. It’s important to note that we’re still developing our own engine technology for our other titles present and future (Jade Empire, Dragon Age, etc) – and we have some very impressive next-gen technology of our own in development right now as well – the BioWare Eclipse Engine. We have some very talented people working hard on that engine as well as advanced technology for our other announced titles – Jade Empire (a martial arts RPG for Xbox, to be published by Microsoft) and Dragon Age (a fantasy PC RPG – no publisher has yet been announced on Dragon Age). We have five internal product teams and we’re also working with a number of external developers who have licensed our own engine technology like the BioWare Aurora Engine or the BioWare Odyssey Engine for their own titles.

All of our games are quite different yet they’re very similar in many respects – there is a core RPG layer which permits strong storytelling, character interactions, exploration and character progression. We’re currently building an RPG layer for Unreal Engine 3 to ensure that this title will have all of the great features that BioWare games are known for: a compelling story, entertaining character interactions and exploration, and strong character development aspects, and Epic has actually expressed interest in talking with us about the licensure of that RPG layer, which we own. Licensing the Unreal Engine 3 really allows one of our internal development teams to focus on creating a highly cinematic and immersive RPG in a relatively short amount of time, while our other teams continue work in parallel on future projects and on the next-generation BioWare Eclipse Engine.