And yes, the doctors are doing the right thing by the company. But they are never as forthright as Patrick or David and I'm quite comfortable taking a cynical view of their PR because I know everything they say is sugar-coated and won't actually contain information I am interested in.
I think that's a valid view. Here's the metaphor I'd use, off the top of my head:
Awhile back, a feminist gaming site had an angry thread involving a book called (as I recall -- I'm so not searching for this) "Confessions of a Part-Time Elven Sorceress". It was an intro-to-D&D book aimed at women without a lot of gaming experience, a way to bring women into the gaming field.
The response by the feminist gaming site members was that the book was insulting, because it didn't address deep feminist issues, and because it pandered to stereotypes -- the author talked about her love of shopping translating into a love of getting loot and buying magical items, and the feminist gamers were really angry about went with the "women love shopping" stereotype.
What it actually felt like to me, though, was that the feminist gamers were angry that the book wasn't high-level enough for them. They'd wanted a book that addressed deep feminist issues -- a book aimed at them -- and what they found was a book aimed at presenting a broad view at an easy and friendly level. The feminist gamers already knew what the book said, and they were annoyed with how it said it.
For people who are coming to
Mass Effect from, say, Halo 2, the stuff my bosses are talking about is going to be pretty mind-blowing. For people coming to
Mass Effect from KotOR, I think that the actual game itself will still be darn impressive*, but it's not like the very idea of it is nothing you've ever heard before. I see the interviews as being aimed at the FPS people, who may very well never have seen this stuff before, so the way it's presented -- "Your actions determine what happens, and you can choose which path to take!" -- sound like Ray and Greg are being hyperbolic. I don't think that they are, but I do think that the message is, by necessity, being simplified for the non-RPG crowd. (I very much do
not think that the RPG elements of the game are being simplified for the non-RPG crowd. There are decisions I disagree with -- there always are -- but the reasons for those decisions have never been, "It's too hard for people who aren't roleplayers to understand this, so we're dumbing it down." And frankly, I've been in the meetings where, if stuff like that needed to be said, it would have been said.)
* Take KotOR with a different combat engine. Make the Force powers look cooler and affect the environment in better ways. Add a bunch of additional planets for you to explore for side-quests or racking or loot. Improve the look and feel of conversations immensely by writing dialogue that has a better length and tone for spoken-VO. This game is pretty much "Take what worked from KotOR, put it into a new IP and RPG system, and go from there." People who liked KotOR will, I think, be extremely happy with this game. People who didn't like KotOR will probably dislike this game, too, unless their concerns with KotOR were, I don't know, lightsabers or something.