Interview: BioWare Founder Ray Muzyka

Check out our detailed chat with Mr BioWare to learn about the impressive story of how the unique developer came to be, and why he would never have sold the the "old" EA.

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Kikizo: I've spoken with a lot of the execs from the EA Casual side of things lately and they all said the same, that their focus was a Riccitiello backed strategy.

Muzyka: I would like to hope that the time we spent working together - Josh and Andrew and Greg from Pandemic, and all the folks from BioWare and Pandemic, together working with John, and it was kid of a cumulative process, we all talked about the idea, and it evolved a lot, of how creative autonomy and independence for a developer within a larger company is such an important... well, it's a requirement, of being successful in an commercial artform kind of industry, where you need the creative spirit and passion from the teams to make something that's going to be really compelling and that's going to be enduring for the long term. The proof is going to be for every company to individually prove their product to the fans. At the end of the day all that matters to the fans is that it's fun.

Kikizo: I think any web service can tell us that Mass Effect is one of the best games on Xbox 360...

Muzyka: Thanks...

Kikizo: And with the PC version of Mass Effect was that you put enormous emphasis into listening to user feedback. A trend I have noticed that many companies seem to be putting more and more emphasis and investment into lately is the importance and collation of customer feedback with things like Community Server. How did you go about collecting feedback and processing it to improve the PC version?

Muzyka: We looked at a lot of different sources. We had a lot of really good usability feedback from our partner Microsoft, we had good usability feedback from our new partner at Electronic Arts as well, we had marketing feedback from our fans - usability feedback, testing - things like that, and in addition we had a lot of feedback from the press - so we actually read a lot of reviews and press reviews, and also feedback on our forums - you name it - and we kind of compiled all these comments together and made a list of things to look at. And even more than that we looked at what the fans on PC would want for a customised, optimised experience, and that was kind of the grounding point for it all - feedback, combined with what we think fans on PC really want to see, and then the two together resulted in something that was very optimised and attuned to the PC platform - it feels very natural. It feels like a new game because of the tactical HUD, the squad command, the hotkeys and things like that really make combat feel differently; the way you play dialogue is even a bit different because you move the mouse cursor and it aligns the dialogue in a different well. I think it's different personalities that players bring to different platforms, between console and PC. We're trying to build really scalable content on PC.

Dragon Age

Kikizo: What type of storytelling did you and the other co-founders of BioWare enjoy prior to founding the company?

Muzyka: Well I've always been pretty passionate about video games ever since I was a little kid. I mean I love grand, science fiction fantasy adventures, and books too, and I read a lot, but you know, video games are a big part of it. When I was ten years old I played Wizardry 1 and that was the best thing ever, and Zork after that, and kind of never looked back from there - I loved adventure games and RPGs.

Kikizo: Dragon Age is one of your big upcoming titles, can you give us an update on that?

Muzyka: We're going to be showing more stuff soon, later in the year - it's a really exciting title for us, it's like the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate and it's the bread and butter for what BioWare fans are expecting, in terms of aspirational fantasy - it's got this really deep, compelling universe that's everything you'd expect a fantasy game to be. And we've been working on it for years - it's something a lot of the people who worked on Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights and some of the past BioWare fantasy epics are working on now. And every game has to be better than the last one, and when it comes out our goal is for that to be the best game we've ever done.

Dragon Age

Kikizo: It was great talking to you and good luck for the future.

Muzyka: Thanks, great to meet you too.

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