Dragon Age: Origins Preview

VideoGamer.com: Regarding DLC, will it be ready at launch or soon after?

GZ: Very early. We'll have stuff ready very early in the process. A certain amount of stuff will come through pre-orders and things like that - we'll make certain things available. There will be stuff available early on. We want to have a very robust stream of content for people to experience. We want people to have the option of spending significant time in the world of Dragon Age and having lots of different experiences there. That's something we learned from Mass Effect – we didn't carve out a specific team to do that, we just fitted it in between things, whereas with Dragon Age there's a specific team working on it, and it already works, the pipeline works for them to create content.

VideoGamer.com: What can we expect from DLC?

GZ: A whole range actually. There will be stuff that fits into the game. There will be stuff separate from the game. There will be contents – there's the usual, hey here's an item pack. What we generally want to do with the item packs is give them a little more of a thematic benefit, where you actually have a little bit of a story by getting the item, it's a little bit of gameplay plus the item. So it's a pretty good range. It'll probably be one of the more robust programs folks will see. We want to spend a lot of effort on DLC.

VideoGamer.com: One thing that's great about what Bethesda has done with Fallout 3 is that it's supported the game with some superb DLC...

GZ: Just that phrase supporting the game, is key. Historically you throw a game over the fence at retail and it's like, bye bye! We haven't done that. We've tended to always try and maintain that customer relationship via community, via post-release content, via tools. So for us it's a very natural approach. We think it's the right approach. We want people to continually be thinking about the game. There are a lot of benefits to still having PDLC coming out that's high quality and people think is beneficial.

VideoGamer.com: You guys recently teamed up with Mythic and were brought in under EA's RPG/MMO group. One of the things that surprised a lot of people was Mark Jacobs' exit from Mythic. Did that surprise you?

GZ: You know, Mark's a really good guy. I've known him for a while. He's an entrepreneur. He wanted to do his own thing. I can't speak to other people's decisions per se. I think the work he's done is great. I'm a massive fan of Dark Age and I really liked Warhammer quite a bit. People make their own decisions and do their own thing. You can never really predict why, what or how.

Dragon Age: Origins is due out for the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 on October 23 2009.