BioWare Development Director Interview

GamesIndustry is offering a rather interesting article-style interview with BioWare Montreal’s development director Dorian Kieken, who talks about the company’s evolution, stressing how they are much more organized now than they were during development of Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic. Obligatory quote ahead:

“For Bioware, originally, making the game was just about the people making the game, and that has a lot of merit – I have a lot of belief in team self-organisation,” he says. “But it was to such an extreme that the games were not very well organised in a lot of ways. The first Mass Effect took five years to make and had one production person for most of the project, and a second by the very end. Mass Effect 2 had twelve or thirteen production people.”

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“For the very first time we have control of things that we’ve never had control of before, things like marketing. Marketing used to be a department we were always negotiating with, but that is part of our group now,” he says.

“Ultimately, EA comes to the BioWare boardroom and says. ‘Here is the amount of money you have, and here is the amount of money you need to generate in X years. The way you do it is your problem.’ So the growth of Bioware Montreal is in the context of the other Bioware studios. It’s because we’re successful with the Mass Effect series that we can grow a studio. It’s all within the Bioware label strategy.

“[The trust] is something very new… I have a lot of respect for John Riccitiello. He is trying to move the company towards a vision that is very smart, with a sort of city-state culture. Basically, you’re accountable only to generate revenue. I like that relationship of responsibility.”