BioWare

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Ray Muzyka is general manager and CEO of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect studio BioWare. When he talks we listen.

Muzyka, who also serves as GM and vice president at EA, had plenty of interesting things to say about the state of the industry at large and the developer's upcoming plans when we caught up with him recently.

2008 was a good year for games. What were your highlights and what are you looking forward to this year?

Muzyka: There were almost too many good games to count last year. I played Fallout 3 recently and I enjoyed that a lot, it was a great game. And Warhammer had some interesting twists for the MMO space.

LittleBigPlanet on PS3 was very cool. There were a lot of great games on a range of systems really showing the artistry of games and showing a lot of things that had never been done before as well.

I'm really excited to be in the games industry right now, because if you look back at the last 30 years and see where people have come and then imagine where people are going in the next 30 years...

It's no longer a technology limitation but more a limitation on the artistry and the craftsmanship and [whether you] can create a world that feels real and elicits emotional engagement with the player and the audience.

2008 was a record year for game sales, but the industry faced lots of challenges and there was also a rash of studio closures...

Muzyka: The economy is definitely challenging right now. I think what happens when things get tough - and it's tough in a lot of industries right now - is that there's a flight to quality. So the developers who make great games and have good reputations and brands that mean something to fans and deliver the next game that's really good... will do even better in a time like this, because people are going to focus their dollars on those.

If things continue to be challenging, will publishers opt for safe bets rather than going out on a limb with new IPs?

Muzyka: I don't know. I can only speak for ourselves, and BioWare and EA are really focused on developing high quality new IPs, but you know, sequels can be good and can be really high quality.

I'm excited about developing sequels for games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age: Origins in the future.

Sequels empower creativity because you have the technology and the tools developed and the team knows what the world is and they know what it means to develop something else in that universe.

If they focus on quality they can really invest in that and try to make sure that the next iteration is really awesome. Sequels empower that because, despite a few constraints, they can enable creativity, so I think there's a place for both sequels and new IPs in a portfolio.

Thinking about game design trends last year, there was a notable increase in community features and we had some really great co-op gameplay...

Muzyka: Left 4 Dead

Exactly, and I was wondering what you think might be buzz trends this year, or what you'd like to see more of?

Muzyka: I'm excited by engaging our audience emotionally and we can do that in a range of ways. It can be single player and offline, or multiplayer and online.

You can have content creation tools by the fans - we're doing that in Dragon Age: Origins and we have a lot of post-release content planned as well. We're working on an MMO so we have the social space multiplayer interactivity with the open public.

We have different genres in development; we have science fiction in Mass Effect, Dragon Age's dark heroic fantasy. I think regardless of what setting you're in, whether it's single player or multiplayer, for us the key is deep story - you want to be part of the world and we want to engage the audience emotionally.

Bioware's a big proponent of advancing storytelling in games. Is this one of the areas in which you feel the medium's a little immature and is it the most important thing to develop?

Muzyka: I think it's one place to go. It's not the only thing you can do to develop games. Progression in customisation, exploration, combat and social experiences are important too.

For BioWare we want to make these characters that you want to be interacting with, we want to make storylines that you want to be a part of, [so] you want to be a hero or a villain in our universes. So for BioWare it's a very important pillar of our gameplay, for sure.

There's an ongoing debate about the possibility of a one platform future. What are your feelings on the matter?

Muzyka: I can see it going there and I think there are valid reasons to do that. I see Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo maybe having some issues with that [as] they might want to continue their platforms.

Given that they create the hardware and they're big brands that have a lot of loyal fans I think that it may take a while before you see one platform.

But the idea of a thin client that you could run code over the internet on and distribute to is a possibility in the future that I think could happen.

You're seeing it on some PC titles now like the flash-based games that are arguably an example of that, where you're playing a game that's displayed and rendered and you interact with it on your machine but it may be running somewhere else. It's an interesting idea in the future.

Do I think it's the only way games could go? No, I think there are a few valid ways games could go. I'm more interested in seeing the art of games.

I think as technology accelerates and gets better and better it's less and less about pushing pixels through a technology architecture and trying to find the ways to optimise.

That's still part of development, but more and more we're coming to a standard camera, kind of like the movie industry, but while you still iterate the camera it's more about what you do with the camera, more about the artistry and craftsmanship and how you direct the experience.

I think videogames are pretty exciting because you get to be the actor and the director at the centre of the experience at the same time, unlike a lot of other passive forms of entertainment.

You mentioned Mass Effect. Interestingly there was a recent listing for a GDC 2009 session based on level design in Mass Effect 2. Can you tell us anything about that?

Muzyka: That was interesting... Well, we haven't announced anything formally on Mass Effect 2 yet and the session at GDC is more development focused, but we have said that we're working on a trilogy of games or more in the past when we did Mass Effect and it's a franchise, which means we're going to develop in that universe for a long time. So maybe it would make sense for the team to be working on something like a Mass Effect 2, for example.

Can you see the franchise moving beyond PC and Xbox 360 this time?

Muzyka: We haven't commented on platform choice or anything like that.

What's the likelihood of Star Wars: The Old Republic making it's way onto consoles at some point, or the possibility of a new Knights of the Old Republic game for consoles?

Muzyka: Well the second question you'd have to ask LucasArts about because they're the owners of Star Wars, they're partners on The Old Republic and great partners to have.

In terms of other versions of The Old Republic all we've talked about and all our focus is on is the development of the awesome MMO on PC.

How would you sum up the health of PC gaming at present and is it being threatened by the success of current-gen consoles?

Muzyka: I think there are more people playing PC games and more dollars being spent on the PC space than ever before, but it's taking a different form.

MMOs are one way that's occurring, you know subscriber-based revenue for them and microtransactions and new business models like that, and there are people all over the world playing them.

And there are more people playing flash-based games and casual games, even core games that are played in a casual way, so maybe [they have] a more core experience and you only play them for short bursts or for half an hour or something.

There are more people playing those types of games too and I think that's pretty exciting, it's just [about] understanding how the audience is evolving.

It's not a bad thing if people want to play more types of games than they did 20 years ago. It's natural and normal as the audience and technology evolves.

As creators we have to adapt to that and continue to make sure that we're satisfying the audience but it doesn't mean we have to compromise.

We can still make deep rich experiences but we have to make them easy to access, you have make the control system really easy to use, and you have to make people feel like they're playing an experience that they can play how they want to play it, whether that is long sessions or short sessions.

I think it's a good thing if you can enable different play styles. You can enable different business models too and adapt to what the audience feels comfortable with and that's just smart development, but it can still be a high art to make a great game.

BioWare developed for DS relatively recently. Would you be interested in developing for Wii and PSP?

Muzyka: Yeah they're interesting systems. We haven't announced anything on either system but yeah, we enjoyed our experiences working on DS.

Sonic Chronicles was aimed at a younger audience and was kind of like a first introduction to the role playing genre for fans on DS - that was the idea.

It's done really well and people seem to enjoy it as well so it was a fun game to develop.

Tom Ivan