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April 26, 1998 Baldur's Gate from BioWare and Interplay is certainly one of the most highly-anticipated RPG titles ever. As part of our continuing effort to bring our readers the most in-depth coverage of the genre, the Vault Network's Jonric caught up with BioWare's Dr. Ray Muzyka to find out about the people, the company and the story behind the game. VN: Some of our readers may already know that you and your two partners in BioWare are doctors. Could you tell us a bit more about your backgrounds? BioWare was formed by myself and my two partners, Greg Zeschuk and Aug Yip. We're all from Alberta, and have known each other for about 11 years now - we met in medical school. BioWare is run by myself and Greg now - Aug has stepped down from being an active partner. We don't have extensive backgrounds in programming, but Greg and I have done some in the past. Nowadays we spend most of our time producing titles and running the company. Greg is married, but I'm still single. VN: How did Bioware get started, and how has it progressed? BioWare was incorporated in February, 1995, but we had been doing some medical education software before this. We haven't done a lot of this lately though - we've now committed to make video games and animation full time. Shattered Steel - a mech action title - was our first commercial release, though we did release a shareware title, Blasteroids 3D, before that. We showed demos for Shattered Steel to Interplay as well as nine other publishers - and seven out of 10 made offers. We went with Interplay and subsequently chose them again for a multi-product deal when we started Baldur's Gate - and we have been very happy working with them - they have treated us very well. Baldur's Gate is our first RPG, and a monster RPG at that - probably one of the largest ever made for the PC. Our animation division (BioWare Active Media) has grown rapidly over the last year and complements our video game division quite well - we have specialized in organic character animation for television and film and have several projects under way right now. Check out our webpage for more info on the animation as well as Shattered Steel and Baldur's Gate (www.bioware.com). VN: Baldur's Gate doesn't exactly seem like the natural next step after an action title like Shattered Steel. What led you to make the leap to an RPG, and especially to a "hard-core" RPG franchise like AD&D;'s Forgotten Realms? We love RPG's - and this is the major reason we wanted so badly to make Baldur's Gate - it's the RPG that we have always wanted to play! I've played just about every RPG out there - my favourites being Wizardry, Ultima (III, IV and V in particular), the Gold Box games (Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds), Ultima Underworld, Betrayal at Krondor, Might and Magic III, Fallout, Wasteland to name a few. Both I and a lot of my team are big fans of AD&D;, having played it when we were younger. In fact, some of my team still plays - James, the lead designer on Baldur's Gate, still DM's several groups in real life and a lot of people from BioWare play in these sessions. Go figure - working on Baldur's Gate all day, and they still can't get enough AD&D;! VN: What has it been like creating BG? How has it been different from Shattered Steel? The team working on Baldur's Gate is exceptionally talented and we are lucky to have found them! All told, there are about 30 people, and each day I'm grateful that we have such capable people. Making an RPG is quite different from making an action title. The team size is rather different, as are the kinds of problems that you face and the solutions that you can implement to solve them. The quantity of the resources required has necessitated a huge team - over 30, as I have said - and this leads to complications from seemingly minor problems... like the trees being consistently the wrong size, or a field missing for item creation in the item editors. One ironic problem with the sheer volume of art and story we had to create was that as we got further into the project, we got better at doing what we were doing - mandating redos of previous efforts. QA'ing a game of this size is difficult as well - the volume of bugs is proportional to the size of the resources... so we plan on fixing a lot of bugs! VN: What about the business side of BioWare? How did you handle your rapid growth with none of you having any formal business training or background? And how did you come to be the designated spokesman for Baldur's Gate? Well, Greg and I jointly run the company (joint-CEO's) so we both do interviews at various times - usually together if we are being interviewed about the company. Probably the reason you're talking to me right now is that I am producing Baldur's Gate, our first big RPG title. BioWare is the the greatest challenge and the most fun that I have ever had in my life - I love working here. The best part is the people (we have great employees - the creative energy is outstanding here and I consider them all to be good friends). The worst part? I can't think of a worst part. Every day, I can't wait to get to work and this is one symptom (speaking medically :) of a dream job I think! Greg and I have won a few awards - for example, Young Entrepreneur of the Year for Alberta (from the Business Development Bank of Canada), and the Export Development Award for Canada (from the Export Development Corporation of Canada). We also won numerous awards for Shattered Steel, which Greg produced and which was critically acclaimed. Check out our webpage for the details. I guess overall we try and learn more about running a company every day - trying to read as much as possible and learn from as many people as possible. A company of over 40 people is always a challenge, fundamentally different from 10-20 people. Communication becomes a major concern - getting all of the teams talking to one another. But this is a lot of fun in itself - particularly if you have good people, as we do. VN: Did the three of you know what you were getting into when you started BioWare? Would it be different starting a game company today? No, we really had no clue when we started BioWare what we were getting into, other than that we loved video games and wanted to make them. But that has been part of the fun - learning more each day is part of the challenge. I imagine that it would be might be a bit more difficult to start a game company now - from what I understand there are quite a few less publishers and developers now than there were a few years ago. Some shakeup of the industry was inevitable given the short time that electronic games have been a viable enterprise. VN: Where does Baldur's Gate stand now? What's left to be done, and of course, what's the target release date? We are wrapping up the programming and design resources for the game now, and plan to have everything complete and ready for full QA in early May. All the art is pretty much done at this point. We plan on a full two months of QA, meaning the game will be out in the mid-late summer. Interplay has four teams planned to intensively QA the game around the clock, plus another team here. Each QA team is 4-5 people. Probably the greatest challenge will be to QA the multiplayer component of the game, which though it has exactly the same story as the single player game, is more complex because of the interactions between multiple people. VN: What type of gamer do you see as the primary target market for Baldur's Gate? The appeal for players of "serious" RPGs is pretty obvious, but what about "lite" RPG players, adventure gamers and others? The game should appeal to a wider audience. The story is as rich or richer than any RPG that I am aware of from the past, with heavy emphasis on character development and personality. This should appeal to hard-core RPG fans as well as adventure fans. And the game itself flows and plays very easily, which should appeal to fans of the more quick moving games (e.g. real time strategy, etc.). We're really hoping that BG can pull together a lot of people with very different tastes and yet encourage all of them to play more RPG's (the best games in my humble opinion)! You can play the game in different ways - either with more subtlety, trying to solve the quests without combat and exploring more subquests, or more aggressively if you have more of a hack and slash mentality. This is not too different from AD&D; - our goal has always been to make the first port of the pen and paper game with a large portion of the feature set of the original game. VN: I understand BioWare is under contract to produce two more games for Interplay. Can you give us an indication of some directions you're going in or looking at? Well, I can't say much about them other than one is a sequel to a major action title (NOT Shattered Steel), while the other is an online RPG, again a sequel. As well, we are already working on the first mission pack for Baldur's Gate right now, which we plan to release about three months after the title ships. And we plan on the sequel to Baldur's Gate to start soon after the game ships. One thing we are eager to do is to allow players to continue to adventure in the world we create - whether this be in a mission pack that plugs into the main game or the sequel. This is one of the things I enjoyed most about the Gold Box series and some of the other PC RPG series of the past. Editor's Note: Readers who can't wait to see more of Baldur's Gate can download a Quicktime movie at http://www.interplay.com/bgate/index.html or http://www.bioware.com. A non-interactive demo is also scheduled for release within the next few weeks. [an error occurred while processing this directive] |
