IGN and Team X Box have posted the same interview with the BioWare Joint CEO Greg Zeschuk on the newly licensed Unreal Engine. Here's a snip:

IGNPC: BioWare is known for its masterful RPGs. Epic's Unreal technology, obviously, has been used mostly for first-person shooters and similar action titles. Does this suggest something about the new title, or are we not appreciating the new engine's versatility?

Greg Zeschuk: Unfortunately there isn't anything we can specifically say at this time about the title, but I can tell you that it is an RPG at its very core. The game will have an extremely strong story, great characters and a compelling, slick cinematic feel. People that are fans of BioWare's prior games will really like what we're doing with this title.

In terms of the engine itself, our plan is develop what we call the "RPG layer" on top of Unreal Engine 3. This is the part of the game code that drives the features that people are so fond of in our prior games: things like real-time lip-synched fully voiced conversation systems, integration of game world data to create a living, breathing world, and a great story. We've had some very preliminary discussions with Epic about this addition to the engine, and we think there might be an opportunity for people to license this RPG layer from us (since we're the owner of it) after they've licensed the Unreal Engine 3 from Epic. We think that the work that we're doing on this title can certainly expand people's perspectives on what a licensable game engine can do.

RPG at the very core... though still rendered by an RGP layer on an FPS engine. Sounds like a KotOR-style cRPG. What do you think?

Read the whole thing at Team X Box (http://interviews.teamxbox.com/xbox/905/BioWareUnreal-Engine-3-License-Agreement-Interview/p1) (also with some Unreal engine screenshots) or at IGN (http://pc.ign.com/articles/549/549530p1.html?fromint=1).

[ September 21, 2004, 21:59: Message edited by: Taluntain ]

Not necessarily. I have some ideas how it is possible to turn a fps engine in an rpg one with third party view/control like the infinity engine games. The first person view would simply be used as a camera standpoint, floating and the party of characters would actually be the other avatars that you do see on your screen. If you make the camera view unaffected by gravity (very easily done), this would have the advantage of giving you a totally free third person camera view.

Another of the advantages is that you can make cinematics with the ingame graphics engine this way, especially with the features described in the interview.

So my opinion is, if they are trying to recreate a similar game-control like with the ie games, then I think it is possible and might even give very good results.