Dragon Age: Origins Preview

VideoGamer.com: When I saw the sex scene begin during the E3 presentation, it was on for maybe a second then cut out. What will you show? Will it be a simple cutscene or will there be gameplay elements to it?

GZ: It'll be cutscene-controlled environments.

VideoGamer.com: Will it be full frontal nudity?

GZ: I don't think we've worked that out yet. Because we can adjust that whenever we want, right? On Mass Effect we worked extensively to figure out, how do we want to portray it? It's not oodling pixels [laughs] – sad but probably titillating, too. For us it's more just making sure it fits the context of what we're trying to create.

VideoGamer.com: Do you think graphics are there yet in terms of making video game sex not look silly and odd?

GZ: Getting pretty close. On some level that tends to be a function of motion capture. Ironically, as silly as that would be, motion-capturing sex scenes is something I think we're not at the level of [laughs]... that's craziness. The graphics are one part, but it's interesting because as you get the graphics up how characters move is very important too, and looking natural. The more realistic they look, the worse their animation looks if it's bad, so it's kind of funny.

VideoGamer.com: But we're getting there?

GZ: I think we're getting there. Some of the animation tools and technology we have, plus the graphics, are getting pretty impressive I think.

VideoGamer.com: Dragon Age: Origins is your first PS3 game. How are you finding developing on the PS3?

GZ: It's been interesting. It's actually been quite good. We discovered a couple of things we did were pretty beneficial. We have a lot of threading through the... like the multiple threads going for the game and it looks really great on the PS3. You can just throw them on all different processors for example. It's new. Because we already had experience on 360, that kind of got ahead a little bit, but now we pretty much caught up. Actually it was very exciting. People on the team were really pumped to work on it. They were like, wow. We have a lot of people that like doing new stuff and trying new things, and they were like, wow another platform, can't wait! It's been good. It's going to be exciting having a PS3 game out, finally. We only did one PS2 game – MDK2 on PS2. It's not like we have anything against Sony by any stretch. It's just that from a publishing perspective we worked with Microsoft for five years - that made it so easy to focus on Xbox and we didn't have to worry about the PlayStation platforms. But now, since being part of EA, it just makes complete sense. It's something we're totally behind.

VideoGamer.com: One of the things that some developers struggle with is achieving graphical parity between PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the same game. How are you finding that job?

GZ: It's not bad actually. It's funny, we had extra graphic memory left over on the PS3. We were like, wow! So we actually started putting some of the audio bits in there and stuff. It's a function of effort. We have an external group, it's a developer named Enter Reality, we've contracted to work on it, we actual also teamed with some internal BioWare folks, so we're working together on the game. They've done PS3 work before and they're very talented, so we've been able to bring a lot of our artist stuff in to help and some of our technical folks, so it's worked out pretty good. Overall, pretty happy with how it's turning out.

VideoGamer.com: Will the graphics be exactly the same on both consoles?

GZ: Oh yeah. I can't say absolutely for sure. There will be elements that will be better... the actual graphics hardware is different on them, so one may be brighter than the other, but definitely the content will be absolutely the same.