So What's Your Story?: BioWare's Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk

4/21/2009 9:33 PM | 2 Comments | Page 3 of 7

Muzyka: Well, they have characters that comment on their world, and free control of the camera during that stuff as well, and the environment reacts to your actions...

Zeschuk: I'm being a little facetious. [Laughter] But they do it their own way. If you say there are like five or six techniques, they're all big investments.

Muzyka: And, we're trying to use all of them, too. Story through narrative, voiceover and characters is one that we're known for, but if you look at a game like Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect or Knights of the Old Republic, you'll see the other techniques, too. I think you'll start to see us talking more about these things as well. Just talking through them and getting reactions from people at panels actually helps us understand what it is we're trying to do, and how we're surfacing these things in the game.

Narcisse: In this business, the focus tends to be on game mechanics, and it trumps the focus on story. Do you think things have to be that way?

Muzyka: No; [for us] story's so integrated into the game mechanics that it's one and the same. Internally, we talk about BioWare's pillars, and there's a narrative in each of those pillars as well. There's a meta-narrative of those all weaving together; there's a meta-narrative outside the game. It's the dance of combat. You can take a three-minute boxing round and moment to moment, a fighter ducks and punches right, left. If you could slow it down frame-by-frame, there's a combat narrative and an exploration narrative. Which areas you go to first, second, third or fourth in a game; it's kind of mechanical when you describe it that way. But, when you think about the impact of that -- your first experience as an adventurer going through a really difficult area, versus your first experience as an adventurer going into a nice, safe town and talking to the townspeople -- your whole experience of the game world is going to be different. That's a narrative...

Narcisse: And that kind of choice sets up hostile or anticipatory feelings in the player.

Muzyka: Right. You have a chill going through you in every new area if you think you might be defeated, versus "I'm looking forward to talking to the townspeople." Progression customization creates a narrative, too, with a sense of pride. Because of the way it branches, it could go in so many ways, depending on what class and what origin you choose or the abilities you choose to level up. Dragon Age plays totally differently, depending on which non-player characters you have with you. I was walking with Liliana and Morgan -- two of the characters in the demo -- and totally random conversations started happening that I hadn't heard before, where Liliana was telling Morgan how she likes to shop. I was listening to this, thinking it was kind of surreal. But these are real characters. You wouldn't have that unless you happened to be traveling around at that moment with those characters.

Gus Mastrapa: You're talking about kinds of narrative that are partially steered by the player, so there's a kind of co-authorship...