BioWare's Dr. Greg Zeschuk

Yeah. We're careful about it. Sometimes we'll do stuff for effect. You go back to Dragon Age 1, everybody was freaked out about that one trailer with the Marilyn Manson music. They were like, 'ah!' It was another facet of the game.

The interesting thing about doing PR is there is no way at this essentially early moment we can reveal everything. We can't show all the facets. Say we show one facet, and everyone freaks out. Then we show another piece, and they say, 'Oh, well, I'm okay now.' When you play it, you get a sense of what the gameplay is like. You go, 'oh, okay, it all fits together'.

From a PR perspective, just people talking about something is a good thing. They'll give it a look regardless. You'll see when we show all the elements, people will go, 'oh, okay'. They'll probably be less freaked out.

It's different. It's not quite going that way. You could make that case based on what we've shown. It's like looking at the game through a keyhole. You go, 'oh, well that's all there is'. Well, there's a lot more than that. But that's what we're showing right now.

We announced recently that we started doing external testing with real fans. That started a few weeks ago. We have these forums fans can talk on and do stuff. It's really cool seeing their responses. We can track what they do. You get a sense of what people are thinking. In general people like it.

There's a fair amount of work left to do on some of the features. But the whole core concept of the game is there. If you played it at E3 or at a showcase you can see what the game is. Like with Dragon Age, there are still more levels we need to release. More levels of information and more concepts.

The scale of an MMO development is so long that you can't totally open and go 'ta-da!' There are quite a few little things that we're going to show over time. But the foundation of gameplay is there. People are pretty happy with it. I get a strong sense of the iconic nature of the characters. If people play different characters they get a very different experience. That was one of the most important things we strove for. We could have gone for a scenario where you have 30 character classes. But if they're all plays on the same… That's why we went for a moderate amount of characters.

The feedback is good. It's fleshing out their remaining features. The core is done. A lot of testing and iteration. You spend a lot of time running more fans through more and more content and getting their feedback. Then there's a lot of tuning. Because we have that ability for fans to try it, you can iterate on it in real time and make it based on feedback, and be much more dynamic than you normally would. Typically, the only iteration we do on a BioWare game is our own internal testing.

Oh yeah. You're never going to please everyone. There's no such thing as 'the everyone game'. As long as you get a nice bunch of folks who like to play it and want to be part of the long term, we'll be happy.

There's some fun stuff we're still to reveal. There's still time to talk about more feature. But then you want to keep some secrets. We always run this balancing act of how much we reveal and how much we don't, how do you time it out? It's all private. The NDA is all behind the scenes. People probably will tell their friends. You're not allowed to online. But if you're talking to your friend in the bar at night…

In a sense it's more restrictive than a typical BioWare game of what you can talk about publicly. But while there's an NDA in place you have to respect it. Someday when that's off they'll be able to talk about all of their experiences. But that's way down the line.