To get to the bottom of this we went straight to the source: The Doctors. That is, Dr. Greg Zeschuk (Co-Founder and Vice President of Development Operations at BioWare and a Vice President at EA) and Dr. Ray Muzyka (Co-Founder and General Manager/CEO of BioWare and General Manager/Vice President at Electronic Arts). These two gaming visionaries built BioWare on the back of one expertly crafted role-playing experience after another. They tag-teamed our interview questions and edited one another's answers. What does BioWare have planned for the "Star Wars" universe? Read on...
GameSpy: Developing an MMO represents a big shift for BioWare and a lot of new challenges -- what made you decide to move the company in this direction?
BioWare: Developing an MMO is something that we at BioWare have been interested in doing for many years, and we've just been waiting for the right time, the right project, and the right partners and intellectual property setting. We had planned for Neverwinter Nights to be a "first step" down the MMO path and now here we are building The Old Republic in the "Star Wars" universe in partnership with LucasArts!GameSpy: Obviously running an MMO will require some expertise BioWare hasn't traditionally needed, like managing live game servers. Has it been a challenge to staff up?
When the opportunity arose to take what we started with Knights of The Old Republic and bring that to the online space, we decided that this was the moment we had been waiting for. Creating an MMO is new for BioWare, but we've managed to recruit a really fantastic team at the Austin Studio -- we have people on the team who have worked on practically every major MMO ever built and we've combined them with the expertise of a number of the BioWare RPG veterans. We're merging the rich heritage of storytelling from previous BioWare games with the technical know-how of how to do a MMO right, and we've got great team synergy on Star Wars: The Old Republic as a result. We think we're creating something very special, something very fresh, which adds a whole new dimension to playing games in the online space.
BioWare: Austin is a great city with a really rich talent pool, particularly in the MMO genre, and we've been fortunate enough to have a lot of these really experienced and passionate people who heard about our project and decided it's something they wanted to be a part of. Some people on the team have worked on many MMOs so it's fair to say the team has a lot of knowledge on how to run a successful MMO service in addition to creating a great game. It's amazing to see how quickly the game is coming along, and how closely it's staying true to the vision of bringing BioWare style storytelling to an MMO.
GameSpy: Why announce the game so early? It seems like gamers have a few years to wait.
BioWare: Keeping a lid on this project certainly proved to be really difficult. The massive amount of anticipation for a BioWare MMO really drove the rumor mill, and people were speculating about the game a good while before we announced it. Since then, the reaction has just been fantastic; the forums are just buzzing and we've found that not only are BioWare fans really excited, but "Star Wars" fans are really excited too, to see the KotOR franchise make the jump to online. Beyond that, we're not saying anything yet about when the game will be released -- the main thing both BioWare and LucasArts are committed to is a high-quality game. The best part about getting the word out now, though, is that we don't have to keep it a secret anymore. When you're so passionate about a project, it's something you want to talk about, and we're glad we can finally do that now!
