BioWare Doctors talk EA Louse, Mass Effect 3, SWTOR

We haven't officially announced it.

That might have been what I was talking about. There's a whole range of different things. My answer didn't say anything about DLC. We just haven't announced anything on Mass for the future.

We have said it's a trilogy, so it's a good guess there's a third one coming. Beyond that, we haven't announced it yet.

Some time.

On the right day we'll announce it.

Next up we have Mass Effect 2 on PS3. That's our next focus for Mass Effect.

Next year.

No. We're just saying 2011.

We're disappointed in the sense of someone having that unfortunate perspective. That's how I would describe it.

It was sad to read that kind of stuff. We just won a top 100 employers award for BioWare. We invest a lot in quality of the workplace. It's really important to us. We take it seriously. The BioWare Mythic team is part of the BioWare group. I know the people that work there. They care. They feel the same way that the other leaders across BioWare and EA feel.

Talking about BioWare specifically, we invest a lot in that. That's one of our core values. We do a lot of things to try and make sure people are taken care of. That's our approach and it's unwavering and it's steadfast. We're committed to that.

That kind of stuff – we don't respond to rumours and speculation by people that are ill-informed. We're committed to quality in the workplace.

It's hard to know what their speculative motivation is. It's hard to speculate on that. It's rumour.

How do you know? The reality of it is when you take an anonymous space it's like, you don't really know where it's from. Regardless, we're always focused on making the best possible workplace. That kind of stuff doesn't really come into play for us – whatever crazy online communication.

We try to focus on making a great place to work, making great products. But you never know. If it's anonymous, there's no proof of anything. You can claim anything, right?

The way we like to respond to actual feedback is we act on it. We meet with staff at every studio on a regular basis, and we try to describe some of the things we do to achieve quality in the workplace.

I do this and all the GMs at every location do this. We sit down and do an open forum with all the employees and get feedback from them. We welcome one-on-one feedback. When we get stuff we can improve and act on we do it.

Rumours and speculation delivered in an anonymous fashion – it's really hard to respond to that. So we don't. Instead we focus on every day making the workplace a great place for all the people we work with. We're committed to that.

It's a tremendous opportunity. It's a big bet, but it's the right kind of bet to make for EA. It's the right kind of bet for BioWare to make. It's taking everything we know from the last 15 to 20 years of development experience and place some amazing people onto the team, with MMO experience as well as RPG experience.

The team is a group I'm really proud of. They're working really hard to deliver this great game. It's got a lot of content. It's taking the best of features from other products like MMOs and putting them together with something BioWare's known for: the story, choice and consequence, but not losing anything in the translation - exploration, combat, customisation, progression.

So in that sense it's really a smart decision. It's a pretty good bet for a studio group like BioWare to be building right now. We see it as more opportunity than anything else.

Hey, entertainment's risky by nature. You put out an album, sometimes it's successful, sometimes it's not.

We're bringing to bear an incredible amount of talent and focus on something that also happens to be the biggest brand in the world. Everything works out, we're all pretty happy.

We don't talk about the competition that much. We play all our competitors' games. We have great respect for all of them. Blizzard is a group we have a lot of respect for. They do great work.

We're not worried about the competition because we're striving to make the very best games of their type when they come out. We have a great licence, a great partnership with LucasArts. Star Wars, it's pretty popular. A lot of people like that. We're embracing that licence fully. We love it. And we know millions and millions of people out there love this universe, and we're delivering a great game experience in that universe.

And it's a great BioWare type experience in a massively multiplayer space in a Star Wars setting. Those seem to be some pretty good factors that have set us up for massive success. Beyond that, we just build the best game we can.

We're certainly making a game that has a lot of value long-term and it's going to be a great experience for fans who love Star Wars or BioWare games or MMOs generally or just a great online experience with their friends.