BioWare Considers Bethesda 10 Years Ahead on Open-World Design

The Average Gamer had the opportunity to chat with BioWare’s Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk during the Eurogamer Expo, and much of the conversation revolved around their respect for how well Bethesda’s open-world titles are designed. In fact, Mr. Zeschuk suggests that they’d have to work at it for 10 years to do it as well as Bethesda:

When asked if they would be doing more of this type of storytelling, the response was affirmative. As a studio, BioWare look for inspiration from other developers’ products. According to Zeschuk (One thing about developers is they’re all really good at certain things. When I think about Bethesda and I don’t mean to criticise. I think it’ll probably be big praise more than anyone they are unbelievably good at creating a sense of place. Like you’re there. It’s incomparable.

(And so all of us are good at different things. We’re good at telling structural character-driven narratives. That’s our really big strength so for us to get to where Bethesda was on their sense of place, we’d have to work on it for ten years. They worked on it for ten years. Every game you can see they’ve done it a little bit better, a little bit better, a little bit better. That’s kind of the magic of development is that to really get great in the craft you have to actually repetitively build upon it for years and years.)

Muzyka confirmed that we will be seeing more opportunities to explore in future games from BioWare. (We do try and incorporate more open world system-driven design in our games. You’ll see more of that from BioWare in the future too, along with narrative and characters and choice and consequence; some of the things that we’re better known for. Also more action a lot of different things. It doesn’t mean we’re losing our roots. We’re augmenting them, enhancing them with other things that we respect very much from other developers.)

More open-world, more narrative, more characters, more choice & consequence, and, of course, more action.