Ray Muzyka Talks BioWare With IncGamers page 2

24 Dec 2009 at 16:44:45 by Tim McDonald

So can we take this as a sign that we're not likely to see a Knights of the Old Republic 3 at any time soon, then?

You'd have to ask LucasArts about that. *smiles*

Speaking to a few people about The Old Republic, I was told that four of the key tenets for making the game were, I believe, exploration, combat, progression, and story. How have you tried to integrate all of these into the MMO?

Well, those are sort of BioWare's design pillars, and they're part of all of our games. The difference with an MMO is that you have them in a social milieu and online experience, so I think we tried to integrate them in, in much the way that we've done with past BioWare games - but with recognition that there's a lot of established precedent for how the MMO features work, and we're looking to the great MMOs of the past for inspiration about that. So I think you can expect this to feel like an amazing MMO experience with a lot of BioWare design sensibilities merged in, and the addition of story as a design pillar that hasn't really historically been a precedent with a lot of MMOs, but we're really taking it seriously in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Considering there are a lot of BioWare fans who may not necessarily be fans of MMOs, are you going to be able to play through The Old Republic largely in single-player if you don't really want to get involved with other players, but you do want to see how the story pans out and enjoy the game for what it is?

We talked to a lot of MMO fans and we've done some research on them, and we find that in a lot of MMOs, yeah, there is a lot of soloing going on and a lot of people really enjoy that. I mean, when I play an MMO, I sometimes play with friends and I sometimes like to solo, so yeah, Star Wars: The Old Republic will accommodate those different play styles - either co-operative play, or competitive play, or solo modes.

With the deep story focus, again - I mean this is something that must make the end game in particular quite challenging to do. How are you going to keep the players attached to the game, after the end, after the story finishes?

We haven't revealed the details of that but there are some very cool systems that, when we talk about them, I think are going to be very exciting to the fans.

Do you think there a lot of things that happen in MMOs because they've always happened, and not necessarily because they always should? The lack of story, there's usually some focus on level grinding and so on and so forth... Do you believe that there are these things that are there for no real reason other than that they have always been there, and if so, how have you tried to improve or avoid them?

Well, we always look at things from a customer-centric perspective, so if the customers are enjoying the features then we try and implement them. If there's areas for innovation or improvement, then we'll generally go for it and try our best to innovate and improve on the systems. But any genre will have conventions that players are used to and are comfortable with, and I think it's wise to consider those, at least, even if you're choosing to innovate or radically depart from them, it's still wise to consider why the players enjoy those kinds of conventions and is there a way to approach them and evolve them, maybe, or innovate within the constraints that the players are comfortable with, as opposed to trying to start from first principles, so it's a mix of both sometimes. You want to understand why the players enjoy playing a certain kind of system, and the mechanics you describe - there's reasons why those are fun in some ways. Could they be improved? Well, yeah, I think they can, and to the extent that we think they can, we'll try and innovate on those in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

This is something that Blizzard, in particular, is very famous for, to be fair - as you mentioned there, not so much changing and creating new techniques but innovating and polishing things to a brilliant shine and making them very much their own. I presume you've been paying a lot of attention to Blizzard and how they've handled World of Warcraft and their games, as well.

Absolutely. A lot of team members are big fans.

Going back to story again, for a little bit. Is this, do you think BioWare's main tenet to some extent? The fact that there always needs to be a story in the game?

I think - no, I mean there's many tenets we have. I mean the four design pillars we have are story and customisation, progression, exploration, and combat. Story for us is an important tenet and it's part of the kind of games we make. I think there's many ways to tell a story, and some of them could be dialogue and characters, others could be the world telling the story, others could the sort of moment to moment decisions you make along the journey or the narrative of the explorers as you go to different places, and even the social narrative outside of the game about how players compare their experiences with one another. We're doing a comparison of different player choices in our social website, social.bioware.com, where you get to surface different details, and see how one player's journey is different from another, so that's pretty cool too. So I think there's many ways to build a game, and story for us is an important part of it, but there's even many ways to tell a story.

With BioWare traditionally, all of the titles, by and large, have been RPGs. Have you ever felt like you want to branch out into something different and maybe try telling a story and espousing on all of your four tenets in a different way, moving into a separate genre or something like that?

Well, for me the definition of a role-playing game is really broad, so you can actually merge in different genres, design choices, and feature sets, and still stay within the zone of an RPG provided you still focus on those design pillars I was talking about. So I think we're always trying to broaden what we do. Mass Effect 2 is as much a shooter as it is an RPG. Dragon Age has a lot of the RTS elements in combat that Baldur's Gate, given that it's a spiritual successor to that, had. And Star Wars: The Old Republic has a lot of RPG elements from BioWare games, but it's an MMO. So those are a few examples of how we're broadening the definition of what we build.

If you missed part one, click through to read that.

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