BioWare Interview, Part One

BioWare’s Ray Muzyka fields questions about the company’s work ethic, Dragon Age: Origins’ marketing campaign, their plans for Mass Effect 2 DLC, and much more in the first installment to a multi-part interview on IncGamers.

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.