Ray Muzyka Talks BioWare With IncGamers Part 1

23 Dec 2009 at 15:44:14 by Tim McDonald

Ray Muzyka, one of the current legends in the videogames industry, sat down with our very own Tim McDonald to discuss what BioWare is up to now, how Mass Effect 2 is going and what to expect from Star Wars: The Old Republic.  In this, the first of our two part interview, Muzyka discusses the company's history and the dedication to top quality gaming, as well as revealing a few bits and pieces about the studio's upcoming games...

First things first, BioWare. So far the company really hasn't made any games that are anything less than critical hits. How do you do it?

We have great people. I mean, the people at BioWare really care about the quality and we're always striving to make each game better then the last for the fans. We know we're only as good as our next game, basically, so we take that really seriously. We're always trying to innovate and push the envelope and we've just been really lucky to get great people to work at BioWare that really care about games as an art form and really invest in that for our fans.

So how did the company start and what was the sort of work ethic that you tried to bring into the company initially to try and get this high level of quality?

A bunch of journalists have asked me that and it's hard to answer other than just really, at the end of the day, you've got to take the time to play your own games and then make sure you're proud of them, make sure you believe that everything you possibly can improve. Really having a clear goal in mind, a clear target for what the quality level is for the various feature systems or content in the games and just making sure you just strive to hit that. You play the games yourself, you play your competitors' games as well, so you have a sense of what kind of things are possible. You just pursue that same vision when you play games, then I think you have a shot at it. You can really drive the quality if you really take it seriously and personally invest the time to play the games.

BioWare has traditionally worked largely on single-player games, and we'll get onto the Old Republic a bit later, but earlier on today the EA general manager for the UK and Ireland said that the future is very much multiplayer. As a single-player focused company, how do you respond to that?

Well, we've done a lot of multiplayer games in the past. Baldur's Gate was co-op multiplayer, Neverwinter Nights was competitive or co-op multiplayer, Shattered Steel was our first game, and that was very innovative for the time and it was actually competitive multiplayer, co-op multiplayer. We're doing Star Wars: The Old Republic, of course, which is an MMO. So we've done a lot of multiplayer games too.

I think the future of single-player games is quite bright, but the online extension of those games is also something that's going to be very likely. Maybe you can consider the world where there's massively multiplayer games, there's also maybe massively single-player games, where you have the game as a platform where you're launching a lot of post-release downloadable content, or user-generated content tools, or links to a social website - all of which we're doing for Dragon Age: Origins, for example. We're surfacing the hero's journey in Dragon Age on social.bioware.com, so players can share their experiences and really show the impact and the consequences of their choices with their friends, and I think that it's pretty cool to see that. But it's still a single-player game and yet, with the user-generated content tools and a lot of post-release downloadable content and a lot of online extensions through the social.bioware.com website, the possibility of linking together with your friends and really making it feel like an online experience is definitely there.

So you do feel that it's not necessarily so much the multiplayer aspect, but more the connection with other players and with a bigger player-base, to an extent, then?

Well, I mean multiplayer's a great way to enable players to connect and extend their experiences online, too. So I'm just saying I think there's more than one way to connect, and multiplayer's one way. Social gaming features is another, asynchronous multiplayer might be another, user-generated content is another, post-release downloadable content from the development team is another approach, so they're all interesting ways to get players to connect, long-term.

You said earlier that you try and get players to emotionally connect with games. This resonated with me personally quite a lot, as I'm quite a strong proponent that games can be a very special storytelling medium entirely separate from films, and books, and all the rest of it. How do you approach that at BioWare, with the company, to try and get players "emotionally connected", as you put it?

Well, it's not easy. I mean, part of it is we have a history of trying to strive for emotional engagement, and we have a lot of people that care about that as a goal and have been with us a long time. So we're kinda iterating and building on our foundation of past releases. But I guess we approached it in a number of different ways. We want to make companion characters that you care about - or dislike, for that matter; they're both solid emotional responses. We want to allow players to make choices which are morally challenging, which they're going to feel an emotional reaction to. We want to show the consequences of those choices in-game in a variety of ways. It's multi-factorial, I guess, but it's sort of our vision - we feel it's a measure of success in the kind of games we make if we provoke an emotional response.

For me it's all about games as an art form. I think games are a valid art-form. They're non-linear; they're different than a lot of other art-forms. That doesn't invalidate the other types of art - linear media like movies, or television, or books, or paintings, or music. Those are all valid too, and they're going to continue, but videogames are emerging as a new form of art that I think is pretty exciting.

So how would you define games as art, then?

I don't know if I do. I mean, it's more the subjective thing of the individual, the customer. They're going to have their own perspective on it. So I don't know - I've never really tried to define games as art. I just feel that they are. For me that's sufficient. I feel they're a form of art because they make you feel something and there's a creator behind it; there's a lot of artistry that goes into making games. I guess for me it's just more of a sense that I think they're a form of art. A commercial form of art, but a valid form of art that's becoming more and more important in the world.

You mentioned choices and consequences there and we've seen recently with Dragon Age and from what we've heard and seen of Mass Effect 2, they're both significantly darker than past games. Is this a move for BioWare towards a more mature audience or more mature themes?

Maybe for those two games we set out to make a more mature storyline and a more adult sensibility to both worlds. But we've done E for Everyone games, and teen-rated games in the past. So we could do those again in the future too. It's more just the choice we made with Mass Effect and Dragon Age respectively was to make them a little more mature than some of the stuff we've done in the past.

So it's more a coincidence than it is a deliberate style choice.

Yeah, it's not a portfolio decision for everything we do in the future. It's more at this point in time, we decided to make those two games in a more mature sensibility. But we have a diverse portfolio, so it's interesting at any given time. All the different games we're making are all kinda different from one another. They're all appealing to slightly different audiences - with some overlap, of course. But I think it's pretty cool to have a portfolio that's all kinda distinct and unique, and has different types of gameplay features, different audiences, different targets, and different goals.

Dragon Age seemed as if it were a bit of a move back to the more classic BioWare titles, being a hardcore straight-RPG. There were a lot of elements in there that... it felt very much like Baldur's Gate to some extent. Were you worried at all that people wouldn't necessarily pick up on this, being that it's a little more hardcore than what we've seen in gaming recently?

No, you know, I think we're trying to make the games accessible at the same time as appealing to different target audiences. So you know, we're trying to expand the reach of our games at all times. With Dragon Age we were certainly aiming at a more core audience in some ways - it's a spiritual successor to some favourite games from BioWare's past. But we're also expanding our audience too. We put in a lot of features that I think will appeal to a pretty broad audience for Dragon Age as well. And it's on multiple platforms - 360, PS3 and PC. So that's going to expand the reach too.

The marketing campaign for Dragon Age famously focused more on the sex and violence aspects on the title itself. There was, from some quarters, a bit of a critical backlash to that. On the other hand, now that the game is out, it's been ridiculously highly acclaimed. It's a very, very good game. How do you feel about the two things? Were you worried when there was the initial backlash, and are you satisfied with the response you're getting to the game now?

The moments in the marketing campaign you're referring to - they were pretty focused, and I think you saw the campaign broaden after we introduced some of those elements. It was more just making people aware - "Yeah, this is part of the game, these are some elements that are part of a mature sensibility." Making players aware that "Hey, this is more of an M-rated title than you may have seen from some past BioWare games." Then after that we showed the entire scope of everything that was in the game, and now what people are reacting to, I think, is the whole picture of the game, and they understand where the mature elements are in the context of the rest of the game. It's not inappropriate or out of place. It just fits in the context of the world and the story that we built. I think we're satisfied with the acclaim. I mean, we're always pushing the envelope, we're always trying to make each game better than the last, so I think we're always hoping to get as many people excited about the game as possible, but it's great for the dev team to see the feedback from the press and the fans is so positive so far, and I think it's exciting.

Going back to an earlier point for a moment, where you mentioned the "connecting with players" and the "using games as a platform for DLC," we've heard that Dragon Age has an awful lot of downloadable content planned for it -

Yeah.

- and there are rumours going around at the moment that Mass Effect 2, certainly, is going to have the same.

We're planning more Mass Effect 2 downloadable content than in Mass Effect 1. We recognise that to make good downloadable content is really hard. You have to have a dedicated team focused on it from the start, a number of months out from the launch of the game, even, to make sure you have a plan and development in process, so with both Dragon Age and Mass Effect - particularly Dragon Age - we've really invested in the downloadable content, and the idea of the game as a platform. So you'll see a lot of downloadable content for Dragon Age, and certainly more for Mass Effect 2 than you saw for Mass Effect 1.

Is this in any way a response to piracy? I mean, with Dragon Age in particular - that's a very PC-centric game, I personally believe - with piracy and used game sales the way they are, the fact is that Dragon Age packs in downloadable content for free if you purchase it new, which you'd have to pay more for if you purchased it otherwise. So is this at all a response to piracy, used game sales, and things like that?

Well, you could phrase it in the other sense, that we want to reward the customers who purchase new and we want to reward the customers who actually purchase legitimate copies of the games because they help keep us in business, so it's really just about making sure that we deliver value for our fans post-release and continue to love and to feel if they invest in us, we're going to invest in them, and continue to deliver a high-value experience for a long time after the main game ships.

Part 2 of IncGamers' interview discusses more on SWToR and Mass Effect 2 and click through to read that.

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