At a very high level, demographics are going to help us on this, because sooner or later, people who have actually played games are going to be in most of the decision-making positions in the Western world.

You go back to the Baldur's Gate days, we literally had 32-pixel characters strutting across the screen, and we'd have a couple lines of voice and a lot of text. On one hand, it's a reflection of the evolution of the technology. On the other hand, though, I think it's a reflection of our aspirations. We've always felt that the medium can get more and more cinematic, and I think when it follows the convention of Mass Effect 2 film, it grows more and more compelling. There's a hundred years of knowledge and learning in that space that we can then apply.

It [World of Warcraft] is a touchstone. It has established standards, it's established how you play an MMO. Every MMO that comes out, I play and look at it. And if they break any of the WoW rules, in my book that's pretty dumb.

I've reached an unexpected point in my life where I no longer have the passion that I once did for the company, for the games and for the challenge of creation.

The problem with natural language processing and the thing that really holds the technology back, is that when it crashes and burns, it's horrific. I think we would be in a position to really take a serious look at it, once two things happen. The interesting thing about a dialogue-choice system is that we've devoted so much into all kinds of other systems for processing, and dialogue choices use zero processing. So suddenly, if you want to have a great natural language processor, you need to dial down your graphics to make it work.

After seeing Avatar the movie, you see how far it can go to be right. But you kind of see that and go, "Oh, there's the bar now, and how close can we get?"

With Mass Effect we said, "Let's reflect the fact that you can be almost anyone, do almost anything, but..." In our minds, we always felt the character was iconic.