After winning Game of the Year, BioWare shares details on upcoming Mass Effect 3 (video)

Last night, BioWare’s Mass Effect 2 video game beat out Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption, the big favorite, to win Game of the Year at the 14th annual Interactive Achievement Awards.

That sets the stage for Mass Effect 3, which BioWare, a division of Electronic Arts, will publish later this year. Mass Effect 3 has the potential to be one of the year’s blockbusters, as the sci-fi game series is gaining momentum and spreading to more platforms more quickly with each installment.

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Mass Effect’s popularity shows that a game with deep storytelling and lots of action can still hold the attention of gamers, who have a lot of choices these days.

It is also a critical series for Electronic Arts, which needs to keep churning out the hits in order to keep pace with rival Activision Blizzard. EA and Activision Blizzard constantly battle for the leadership of the hardcore game industry. A studio such as BioWare is a prized asset because most of its games, particularly its original titles, are hits.

We talked with the BioWare founders at the Dice Summit video game conference in Las Vegas, where they offered a little tease on the next installment of the Mass Effect series that started in 2007.

Muzyka says that innovating in the game play is still a priority for BioWare, just as the company innovated in the leap from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2 by allowing users to import the major decisions they made in the original game into the second game. The ramifications of those decisions altered the course of the story for the second game.

You can expect to see more exploration of the universe as well as the defense of Earth itself as the villains, known as the Reapers, take the fight to the homeworld of the human race. I’m looking forward to seeing whether BioWare can make further breakthroughs in making the game more movie-like, making the human characters more graphically realistic, and improving the quality of the artificial intelligence behind non-player characters. BioWare has innovated on those fronts before.

Luckily, the entire Mass Effect series will have the luxury of being made on one generation of consoles, since the first game debuted on the Xbox 360 and the second and third will be able to as well. (EA is supporting the PC and PlayStation 3 as well). That means that BioWare can concentrate on game play and story for Mass Effect 3, rather than have to worry about inventing a new technology for a new game console. This kind of game making, where the focus is on the craft of making a game, is similar to movie making, where the focus is on creating a great movie rather than inventing a new camera with every film.

The best game award was a sweet coincidence as BioWare founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk were inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame on the same night. Mass Effect 2 also won for best story and best role-playing game.

Here’s the full list of award winners below, and check out the video with Muzyka (pictured left) and Zeschuk (pictured right) below.

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Game of the Year: Mass Effect 2

Role Playing / MMO Game of the Year: Mass Effect 2

Outstanding Achievement in Story: Mass Effect 2

Lifetime Achievement Award: Bing Gordon

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Pioneer Award: Bill Budge, early employee at Electronic Arts and engineer at Gooole

Outstanding Achievement in Animation: God of War III

Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction: Red Dead Redemption

Outstanding Achievement in Visual Engineering: Heavy Rain

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Outstanding Achievement in Gameplay Engineering: Red Dead Redemption

Outstanding Character Performance: Red Dead Redemption

Family Game of the Year: Dance Central

Racing Game of the Year: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

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Outstanding Innovation in Gaming: Heavy Rain

Outstanding Achievement in Original Music: Heavy Rain

Outstanding Achievement in Soundtrack: Rock Band 3

Outstanding Achievement in Sound Design: Limbo

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Adventure Game of the Year: Limbo

Outstanding Achievement in Online Gameplay: Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty

Action Game of the Year: Red Dead Redemption

Sports Game of the Year: FIFA 2011

Fighting Game of the Year: Super Street Fighter IV

Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year: Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty

Portable Game of the Year: God of War: Ghost of Sparta

Casual Game of the Year: Angry Birds HD

Social Game of the Year: CityVille

Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction: Red Dead Redemption