So you guys really like The Old Republic, apparently, as over the holidays Bioware and EA touted that the title was the fastest-growing subscription MMO in history and garnering a few awards in the process. So we thought that we'd talk to the men behind the studio, CEO Greg Muzyka and VP Greg Zeschuck about the launch of the game, the appeal of the Bioware model of storytelling, and why it was a fit for the upcoming Command and Conquer: Generals 2.
MTV Geek: How does it feel having The Old Republic finally out in the wild?
Ray Muzyka: Fantastic. We’ve been building up to this since the early access period, so for us the game has been live now through beta testing but also for the last week since we’ve been bringing players onto the final launch environment. So it’s really fun to see the player reactions and see the excitement and the passion and everybody’s so excited about it, it’s wonderful.
Geek: What have you learned so far about the way people have been playing?
Greg Zeschuck: Yeah, we have some very detailed metrics that give us some insight into what’s going on with the game, specifically, how many people [are on], how much they’re playing. The one thing we found really remarkable is the actual session times for people and it’s many, many hours—like nine hours-plus on average some days. So it’s kind of remarkable. It seems the fans are very, very attached to it [and] it’s a whole range of things people seem to enjoy.
Geek: While you can take it for granted that yeah, players are going to gravitate towards a Star Wars game and a Bioware game, what do you think has been the big draw here? It’s not your first foray into an MMO and all of the pitfalls that come with that.
Zeschuck: I find that really, our overarching goal for the game was to create just a great Star Wars experience whether you’re the hero or villain of your personal story. It’s centrally about you—you are one person in the online world, [but] you still feel very heroic because you have that personal story, or you can feel very villainous if that’s the direction you want to go. And it’s very, very flexible from a choice perspective—you actually make choices relevant to the story and the quests, something not seen in MMOs traditionally. The pieces all culminate in a great Star Wars experience in a familiar environment [and] tons of people love it and they know we’ve taken good care of it in the past.
We made it really easy to get into it—we onboard you really gracefully, we have our origin world that really sets the tone and tells you what your role is and your place in the universe and teaches you to play. After that, you’re rockin’ and rollin’, you have a pretty deep experience right away: you get a spaceship, you get to travel with other players, you get to do PvP, you get to do player vs. environment, and flashpoints of heroics, and operations, and raids, crafting, economy. So anything and everything you’d expect in a game like this is basically there, it’s all polished and Bioware quality.
Geek: Where do you think The Old Republic fits in in terms of offering player choice as compared to say Mass Effect or Dragon Age?
Zeschuck: It’s interesting—our approach to story has really evolved over the years—that’s certainly one of the things that we’ve been on a journey exploring. If you go all the way back to Baldur’s Gate and we have one line of voice with these tiny little characters, we discovered that that was a medium [where] you could create a story and a sense of choice. So, if you really track through all of our games over the years, you can see the constant attempt to make it more and more engaging, more and more emotional, and I think in the last few years certainly more and more cinematic. The style that Mass Effect brought was probably the biggest advancement. It actually goes back to KOTOR—KOTOR was the first game where we had full voice in it, then we had some facial motions.
So it’s something we’ve always done. Our feeling is when we talk about story and what we think about it, one thing we’re always really thoughtful about is the delivery mechanism of story, how do we actually make story happen. And you take a look at some games out there, for example the Bioshock games, from Irrational and Ken Levine—particularly the original one because that was his baby—and the story there was environmental. It wasn’t a lot of dialog and stuff, it was actually around you. There’s all kinds of different ways to do it.
And certainly in the case of Star Wars: The Old Republic there’s a good deal of action-environmental story taking place and that’s thanks to a certain degree to the Star Wars franchise. The neat thing about Star Wars and what’s very powerful about it is people instantly recognize characters and what their iconic type is, and gives us all of this awesome latitude to tell stories without as much work, in a way—not as many words, not as much detail requirement, people just have all this inherent knowledge about Star Wars.
Story for us is a requirement and we’re also still really flexible in how we implement it, we think we can do it in a variety of different ways.
Geek: Well, along those same lines, why did your team feel like Command and Conquer: Generals was a good outlet for storytelling? It’s not the first franchise you’d think of when you’re talking about story in games.
Muzyka: To answer broadly and then specifically, I’ll start with the broad discussion of what Bioware means as a label. It means a couple of things: there’s the philosophy of Bioware and our vision of creating, delivering, and evolving the most emotionally-engaging games in the world. And there’s a large overlap between real-time strategy fans and RPG fans and MMO fans. So, we’re excited about the opportunity get into a universe that I enjoyed—I enjoyed Command and Conquer a lot and a lot of the people on the rest of the Bioware label enjoyed it a lot. So partnering with Bioware-Victory allows us to pursue that vision in the RTS space.
It doesn’t mean we’re going to implement story in the way that you’ve seen in Bioware games previously, it doesn’t mean won’t implement story either. What it means is we’re going to implement story and emotionally-engaging content in a way that’s appropriate for that genre. And delivering that Bioware quality is another aspect of that vision—creating, delivering, and evolving really high-quality games that emotionally compel and engage.
There’s another aspect of the Bioware label [and] that’s how we do things, the process by which we do things. Sharing knowledge between team members, enabling technology and moving back and forth between different genres and enabling different genre groups to pursue excellence in their own respective fields. We have a business unit dedicated to social games, a business unit devoted to RPGs—the Mass Effects and Dragon Ages and other future products—a business unit dedicated to MMOs. These are all examples of how we’re pursuing excellence in different areas that are extending our brand but definitely not diluting it. They’re enhancing and adding. It’s a very careful, thoughtful evolution and growth and it’s all in ways that [are] consistent with our core values around quality and emotionally-engaging content.
The more specific answer is that we have some awesome people that we’ve partnered with at Bioware-Victory and we’re really excited about that, you know, John Van Caneghem [General Manager of Victory Games] and others who a lot of experience and passion for the space. And I think we’re going to do some amazing work. You know, Generals is a really interesting IP, it’s one of the most compelling, and it’s certainly the one that fans have been clamoring for a sequel for the most. So bringing the Bioware fundamental vision of the most engaging content and really high-quality gameplay, combining that with appropriately-woven story that also lets you experience this amazing, kick-ass action, what RTS fans expect, and all of the features that real-time strategy fans demand, and giving the team the time and space to build something that’s completely awesome. That’s what we’re really doing here.
Geek: It’s interesting that you mention the dilution of the Bioware brand. What, for you guys, would constitute that? When would you be in trouble on that front?
Muzyka: Basically, I think doing something that runs counter to our core values: quality in our products, quality in our workplace, entrepreneurship, and integrity; not pursuing emotionally-engaging games, you know, trying to drive the most powerful ones in the world; not striving to make each game better than the last. Those are antithetical to how we operate and as we expand our label, we’re working to expand in a way that’s enabling all of those things to actually be possible, to allow us to expand the kind of games we make to a higher quality, to continue to enable our fans to try different genres in a way that feels compelling and emotionally engaging. And doing it in a way that’s always consistent with our core values. So that’s basically how we prevent our brand from being diluted and we’re very serious about that, we take our core values very seriously.
It doesn’t mean we’re perfect, it doesn’t mean we don’t make mistakes. But it does mean that because of our core values of humility, we listen to our fans, we’re really honest with ourselves and we’re really hard on ourselves when we feel we can do better. And we try and improve so we listen to the feedback and we try to make it better the next time out of the gate. And I’m confident we’ll do that every time we can.
The Old Republic is available now and Mass Effect 3 will be available March 6th for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.
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