GamesBeat: But some developers were saying they were going for a cinematic effect. Do you think 30 frames per second works for that?
Flynn: I don’t know about cinematic effects. For me it’s more about what you can do because you’re at 30 frames per second. Can you increase texture quality, increase the complexity of the models and the animations because you have that extra time to render? That’s the question. Maybe you can group all that under the theme of cinematics. I don’t know about you, but did you ever get one of those TVs that automatically —
GamesBeat: I can’t stand them. I walk past them at Sam’s Club, and it hurts my eyes.
Flynn: Yeah, I’m the same way. I don’t know if I’m just old now or what it is. Whenever I see that — I go to my mom’s place and the first thing I do, when she turns the TV on — “Nope, turn that off.” If you call that a cinematic — if you get too high a framerate and you lose that classic 24 frames-per-second cinema feel, maybe that’s a part of it. But for me, it’s more about how you have to make tradeoffs. The kind of game you’re making and what the players want to do with the game is much more the driver behind how you should build things than what I want or what I think we can do.
Above: BioWare wants to combine detailed worlds with massive scale in its new games.
GamesBeat: One more question. What’s your general feeling about how the game looks, throwing numbers out the window? When you look at the game, what do you feel? What do you expect gamers to feel?
Flynn: I think it’s beautiful, and I hope people feel that, too.
For us, it’s a chance to get back to some of the things we did with Baldur’s Gate: bigger environments, more opportunities to explore, more little things you can do in interesting places.
One of the things that’s really exciting is just the variety of environments we have in there. We don’t just have one kind of environment. We have high mountain forests. We have vast desert plains. We have beautiful coast areas. We have thick, overgrown old forests. We have all these different kinds of areas. That variety is one of the most interesting things about the game, to go to these places and not just experience that, just immerse yourself in that new place, but then have the story wrap you up in that place as well. It’s nice how our storytellers were able to get in that mode and see the beauty of the world and be inspired by that. And vice versa as well.
The inspiration of the stories they wrote early on, our environment artists and character artists were able to pretty faithfully create what they wanted. That’s really exciting.
GamesBeat: Going forward, you guys are excited about building on what you’re doing here in your upcoming games?
Flynn: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. The stuff we’re going to do with storytelling in an open world will evolve. We’re going to get a lot of feedback from fans, good and bad. Hopefully mostly good. But we’ll use all that and put it into the next Mass Effect game and our new IP.