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

4/21/2009 9:33 PM | 2 Comments | Page 1 of 7

(Contributor: Gus Mastrapa)

With plot-intensive titles such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect on their resumes, it's clear that Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk love to spin yarns. As development on their latest game, Dragon Age: Origins, comes into the home stretch, the founders of BioWare pulled back the veil to show it off during GDC.

During the interview that follows -- where Gus Mastrapa was kind enough to back me up -- Muzyka and Zeschuk hold forth on mass media perceptions, story integration and world-building. Start scrolling to hear how the two Canadian M.D.s handle both the big picture and the little details in BioWare's games.

Evan Narcisse: I wanted to start off by addressing something that's on the official BioWare Web site. On it, there's a quote attributed to you guys that says, "BioWare's vision is to deliver the best story-driven games in the world." In the videogame industry, there's such a low premium placed on story. What makes that the tent pole that you guys want to base your properties on?

Ray Muzyka: I'd say that the bigger tent pole is emotion, and story is more of a path towards that. You create that path with the characters, the story and the narrative, by making choices and having consequences result in the narrative flow. Narrative is bigger than just story, too. Story's one valid way -- an important way -- to get narratives conveyed, but narrative can be the social interaction outside a game, in community interactions or user-generated content.

There's the moment-to-moment narrative in combat, as you head from tactical decision to tactical decision, or the narrative of an explorer as you go from place to place. For us, we want it to take you beyond story, beyond narrative and ultimately to emotion. We want you to feel something, like you're an explorer with a sense of awe at discovery, or visceral fear if you go into combat and you think you might die. We're concerned with making you believe these are credible characters that you're traveling the world with, and making tough choices regarding them. That's the endpoint for us, emotion. It's this thing you're always reaching for, as opposed to a goal, because you never quite reach genuine, true emotion in any artistic endeavor. But you can get closer and closer, and every project strives for more genuine emotional engagement.

Greg Zeschuk: It's what we think of in a long-term view, with creating emotion as the endpoint. A third of the games that come out in a year are basically technology demos about how many characters are up on the screen. So, once you reckon with that, what do you do? For us, it's try and tell better stories. We know the tech's not that far off from the point where we'll all have engines that are pretty similar and they'll all look awesome. If we want to do super-realistic, we can; and if we want to do cartoony, rubbery guys, we can. Now it's all about how you tell the story.