BioWare Interview

The guys at Thunderbolt have kicked up the results of a quick chat they had with the BioWare doctors Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk during E3. Topics include the company’s history, video games as an art form, Mass Effect 2, and more.

Me: Do you guys feel that you started out with Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire and you’ve moved on since then, do you feel that as you’re progressing that you’re learning more about delivering a more cinematic experience?

Greg: We were doing games, you know, 20 years ago. We started with games before BioWare and then Shattered Steel was our first BioWare game in the 90s and then Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate 2, Neverwinter Nights and have gone on from there. It’s interesting; we’ve put together a video that serves as a historical retrospective that we show to new hires in orientation. It shows little snippets of gameplay going all the way back 10 or 15 years and you can really see that foundation progressing. Really, it’s all about emotion in the end. That’s our vision. The way we pursue that, our mission is to deliver the best story-driven games in the world. We believe there’s more than one way to tell a story and we’re perusing a lot of them now, but historically we looked more at the characters and cinematic experiences. Now, we’re focusing on the narrative of the world and your narrative as an explorer as you progress through the game world and see how it changes in response to your actions. But the social narrative as fans interact on Facebook and extra game sites and social networking sites, we learn from that as well. Our stories are non-linear with choice and consequences, where players get to make a meaningful impact on how the story unfolds, which we think is pretty exciting.

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Me: One of the things that I noticed during this E3 is that it seems like the emphasis is on refinement. It’s like Greg said, the camera is built and now it’s finding ways to deliver the maximum experience. One of the things that I noticed while watching Mass Effect 2 is that the game in many ways looks very similar, gameplay-wise, to the first, but you can see a lot of subtle tweaks to the cinematography and the direction of the cut scenes. The camera moves around, there are more dramatic shots.

Ray: We always use this as sort of a joke, but it’s true in the sense that, with Mass Effect 1, it was a real challenge fitting the entire galaxy on one disc. And in many ways, it was a race to the finish line. Whereas Mass Effect 2, we’ve had the opportunity to take the technology that we built and tweak it and there were a lot of things that we refined. For example, the frame rate is a rock solid, there’s no hitching, it’s just 30 plus [frames per second] the entire time. The lighting is actually different – we’ve actually changed the lighting effects during conversations to make it more dramatic.

Overall, we’ve been able to refine it. That’s one of the most exciting things for us in doing this sequel. We haven’t done a sequel in years. You know, the last sequel that we worked on was, like, Baldur’s Gate II. We’ve done a couple of expansions after the games, but full sequels, this is one of the first ones in a long time. It’s been fabulous working on this. We’ve been able to hone our craft. Another advantage is that we’ve had fabulous teamwork on this. Pretty much the exact same people are working on this, so when you get in a situation where you’re improving on something with the exact same bunch that built the original, it just gets better and better. Eventually Mass Effect 3 will come around and it’ll be even more compelling. It’s kind of scary, really, because we did pretty well last time, but Mass Effect 2 is even better.

I agree with you too though, walking around the show floor, and seeing some of our competitors products, you see that the bar just keeps going up. It’s amazing.