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From Edmonton with Love
Videogame development can be among the most daunting fields to break into, but there are many paths to take. BioWare's founders met at the University of Alberta, where they were studying medicine. Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuck first worked together programming educational software for the Faculty of Medicine. The duo was soon joined by Augustine Yip, who collaborated with them on a medical simulation program. Their work may have been satisfying in the sense that it helped to make people healthy, but there was a creative itch left unscratched.
Muzyka, Zeschuck and Yip relaxed by playing computer games and after a few years they realized that this was where their passion was. The medical field was satisfying and lucrative, but it was time for the group to move on. And it was precisely their success in medicine that afforded them the resources needed to start their next venture – a videogame company. They pooled together $100,000 and set out to make their first game.
They developed a proof-of-concept demo for what would eventually become Shattered Steel. Rooted in the tradition of MechWarrior, it featured an impressive high-res 3D engine with smooth, rolling hills reminiscent of NovaLogic's voxel-powered games. They submitted their demo to ten publishers, and to their surprise and delight, seven were willing to put an offer on the table.
They signed with Interplay, a move that would pay dividends in the near future. The deal paid off their initial investment and gave them access to Interplay's vast development resources. Calgary-based Pyrotek Game Studios were contracted to aid BioWare in finishing the freshman effort. BioWare was so happy with the collaboration, they would later hire away some of Pyrotek's veterans.
Shattered Steel was a modest success, receiving positive reviews and seeing decent sales. Of particular note was the detailed deformable terrain that allowed players to blast craters in the sides of hills, and zone damage that allowed strategic-minded sharpshooters to take out weapons mounted on enemies. Interplay was pleased with the game, too, and a sequel was planned for 1998. It would never come to pass, as BioWare's second game was about to completely eclipse anything Shattered Steel could have hoped for and define the company's direction to this day.
Infinity and Beyond
BioWare's founders have admitted they didn't expect much when they started their company, but this didn't stop them from thinking ahead. Even as their first game was only halfway through production, they were hard at work on a very different sort of project, of a much broader scope. BioWare's founders and staff were passionate fans of role-playing games – both the computerized sort and their pen-and-paper ancestors – and they wanted to try their hand at a large-scale RPG of their own.
Interplay financed some exploratory development, and BioWare returned with a demo called Battleground: Infinity. Their choice of partner proved to be quite fortunate indeed. Upon seeing the demo, the publisher suggested it might be a good fit for the Dungeons & Dragons license, which it had just snatched away from SSI. Infinity was recast in the world of Forgotten Realms.
The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons license would prove to be a bigger boon to the title than branding alone would suggest. To BioWare, this was not just a mythology and a logo on the box, but a game they had a great deal of passion for, and whose rule book was not to be tampered with. Virtually every RPG owes a debt to D&D, and Baldur's Gate was in some ways an effort to take the genre back to its roots, but in a very modern package.
The decision to make a multi-player, real-time game based on AD&D rules was controversial at the time, drawing skepticism and even mockery from hardcore RPG fans. Dungeons & Dragons had a rich tradition in computer gaming, strengthened during the days of SSI's "Gold Box" series, and fans had a set concept of how its rules should be interpreted for the digital realm. BioWare's more modernized take proved, however, to be more in line with the mass audience's tastes, particularly after Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo brought Western RPGs to a new breed of gamer.
But Baldur's Gate was no Diablo. While Blizzard's game was something of a modernized version of Rogue , BioWare's creation put the focus on role-playing in the classic sense. Every aspect of the game was designed around allowing the player to explore a deep story on his own terms, with his own character, and with plenty of room for individuals to have unique experiences. This fresh approach may be owed to a certain naiveté on the part if the team. Aside from BioWare's founders, who had worked on Shattered Steel, no one on BioWare's Baldur's Gate team had ever worked full-time on a game before.
The development carried on for three long years, as both Diablo and Fallout primed the market for Western RPGs, and Final Fantasy VII brought role-playing to the largest audience yet. It also saw BioWare's founders finally face a career crossroads. For most of Baldur's Gate's development, the three doctors continued to practice medicine by day, but by the project's final year, the realities of game development became too demanding. Muzyka and Zeschuck left the medical field and remain at the helm of BioWare, where they remain today. Yip decided to leave to practice medicine full-time.
Baldur's Gate set the tone for the rest of BioWare's career. While there may not be any one particular element that was revolutionary, it struck a unique balance of depth and accessibility. It went on to sell more than two million copies, nearly matching Diablo's numbers, making it the most successful Dungeons & Dragons title up to that point. Others soon followed in BioWare's footsteps, as the Infinity Engine was used for Planescape: Torment and the Icewind Dale series, making BioWare a leader in the computer RPG genre.
The Last Days of Interplay
The success of Baldur's Gate gave Interplay a much needed hit during a time when it had few, and cemented the relationship between the publisher and BioWare. When the developer announced its intentions to return to the action genre, Interplay was more than happy to open up the catalog. BioWare initially wanted to do another Shattered Steel, but the opportunity to follow up Shiny's 1997 cult classic MDK was too tempting to pass up. Even better, developing the sequel on Dreamcast would allow BioWare to cut its teeth on console development and on a new generation of hardware.
The move was met with some skepticism. The BioWare name was firmly associated with RPGs. The doubts were legitimate – MDK was as different from Baldur's Gate as you could get – but if the team could pull it off, it would make BioWare a stronger developer.
The team zeroed in on the quirky comedy of MDK with surprising ease and expanded the gameplay in a way that seemed fresh and appropriate. In the end, BioWare was vindicated. MDK2 went on to garner the same kind of glowing reviews the original had earned three years prior. PC and PS2 ports followed not long after, with decent sales. Despite this, it would be the last time BioWare would attempt a pure action game, or even venture outside of the RPG genre. The Baldur's Gate monster was simply too big to escape.
A sequel and an expansion to the hit RPG were underway as soon as the first game had shipped. With an engine and a proven formula already in place, development of the Baldur's Gate sequel moved a much faster pace, arriving less than two years after the first. The experience and the existing groundwork also freed BioWare to realize a much larger, more ambitious vision.
Even after Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, and BG's own expansion had seemingly mined the Infinity Engine for most of its potential, Baldur's Gate II still managed to impress. Review scores were even higher than for the first, placing BG2 among the best reviewed PC games. BioWare sold another two million copies, matching the success of the first and cementing the company's reputation as an RPG powerhouse.
Unfortunately, Baldur's Gate II and MDK2 were not enough to prop up the struggling Interplay. Despite its capable production, the publisher was undergoing a string of failures and disappointments that would eventually bankrupt the company. BioWare had to move on and leave its flagship series behind for good.
An RPG for Everyone
From the very beginning, BioWare has always thought two steps ahead, developing projects in parallel and searching for ways to one-up themselves on products they haven't even shipped yet. No sooner was Baldur's Gate released than BioWare was hard work on a truly next-generation RPG they hoped would make their hit series obsolete.
The Baldur's Gate games were the most successful computer versions of Dungeons & Dragons to date, but the series still hadn't completely managed to capture the pure role-playing of pen and paper games or the rapidly growing online RPG genre. For their next game, the BioWare team hoped they could make a game that could be all things to all people; a successor to Baldur's Gate, a social online experience, and a platform for dungeon masters to create with.
Multi-player had always been a selling point of the Baldur's Gate games, but Neverwinter Nights was something far more ambitious, calling to mind its namesake, the 1991 game that pioneered the massively multiplayer online RPG. While not a true MMO, Neverwinter Nights allowed servers to maintain persistent worlds hosting 75 players online at a time, as well as the ability to connect multiple servers to create a larger world.
To capture the creativity of true role-playing games, BioWare included a generous toolset to allow players to create their own content, build worlds, pen stories, and design quests. This feature alone ensured an almost endless flow of content and a healthy mod scene that continues to this day. In the same vein, BioWare also supported a "DM" mode, allowing a player to assume the role of dungeon master and control nearly every aspect of other players' games in real-time, just as he would in a pen-and-paper RPG.
Including the planning phase, Neverwinter Nights spent nearly five years in development before Atari released the game in June of 2002. By this time, the BioWare brand alone was enough to carry the game, but the overwhelmingly positive response from critics certainly didn't hurt. It nurtured a strong community for many years. A sequel was inevitable, but this time BioWare would sit it out, handing over development duties to Obsidian Entertainment, founded by former Black Isle Studios collaborators.
Console Conquest
Neverwinter Nights was the quintessential computer RPG; an experience that could never really be duplicated on any other platform without losing depth. BioWare had always favored the PC for precisely that reason, but the industry's tides were slowly shifting, and PC games were beginning a decline that continues today.
It was also a time when the kinds of deep, complex games usually associated with computers were becoming increasingly viable on consoles. If BioWare was to grow and thrive, it would need to find a way to reach new audiences. In late 1999, when most of the new consoles were still on the horizon, LucasArts approached BioWare with just such a challenge. They wanted a next-gen console RPG, and they were offering the coveted Star Wars license – an opportunity too good to pass up.
From a technical standpoint, this wasn't too difficult. Neverwinter Nights left BioWare with a solid 3D engine to use as a base and the MDK2 veterans on the team had experience with console-style visuals. The challenge was designing a game that could be accessible to the console audience without losing the depth that BioWare's games were known for.
To some extent, this was impossible. Character building was streamlined a bit, and the multiplayer component axed altogether. In exchange, players were treated to a game with a credible, detailed world and a cinematic presentation that far surpassed their earlier efforts. It was a smaller, tighter, but more vivid experience that could capture even the more casual audience.
Instead of point-and-click navigation, it used direct character control, but still preserved the kind of rules-based combat of D&D games (this time based on the pen-and-paper Star Wars RPG). Visually, the combat looked like exciting swordfights and gun duels, but underneath it there were "dice" being rolled to determine everything.
The under-exploited "old republic" setting, 4,000 years before the movies, proved fertile ground for BioWare to explore, freeing them to play a bit loose with what we knew of the Star Wars universe. Moreover, it allowed the team to step out from the shadow of the iconic original trilogy and the polarizing new trilogy. Despite its technical ambition and visual detail, development on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic went far faster than many of BioWare's previous productions, shipping in mid-2003, after about three years of development.
The Star Wars license exposed BioWare to an entirely new audience that would never have been interested in a Dungeons & Dragons game. Knights of the Old Republic became the company's best reviewed game, still standing as the third highest rated game on the Xbox, according to Gamestats. The Xbox version moved over a million units in North America.. Once again, BioWare couldn't be bothered to handle a sequel themselves, and passed the light saber to Obsidian.
Although Knights of the Old Republic was a LucasArts title, BioWare's support of the Xbox platform earned it points with Microsoft. Lacking in support from the east, MS knew that it would need to turn to Western developers to bolster the Xbox library. BioWare was quickly emerging as North America's premiere RPG developer, and so MS enlisted the company to develop an original property exclusively for Xbox – the first BioWare game not based on a license since Shattered Steel.
The announcement came in 2002, while the world was still waiting for Knights of the Old Republic. Microsoft's ample resources and BioWare's new-found experience put them in a great spot to develop a flagship game for the console. Inspired by Chinese martial arts films, Jade Empire featured an Asian-themed fantasy world and an action-based combat system that bore little resemblance to BioWare's past games.
It was something new and more distinctly console-lized than any of the company's past games. Character customization was trimmed down and combat rewarded reflexes and pattern recognition rather than just playing out statistics. This system actually allowed for surprising depth, because new abilities had practical applications in a real-time setting.
Upon its release, IGN hailed Jade Empire as the best RPG on the Xbox and awarded it a 9.9. It's a testament to just how strong Bioware's record is, then, that it is sometimes regarded as a misstep for its relative lack of balance that made combat too easy and downplayed its more strategic aspects. Even with average scores scraping the upper 80s, it was the weakest reviewed BioWare game since MDK2. Concrete plans for a sequel have yet to materialize.
New Names
BioWare has always been (deliberately) bad at keeping secrets , so it's no surprise that there had already been rumblings about its next move months before Jade Empire's release. The company tipped its hand when it acquired the license for Epic's then-unreleased Unreal Engine 3 – a telling move for a company more accustomed to building the engines that others license.
Initially rumors were swirling that BioWare was going to attempt a first-person shooter/RPG hybrid, and the truth wasn't that far off. Mass Effect would take the developer farther into action territory than its RPGs had ever gone, albeit from a third-person perspective. Despite the radical change in combat style, Mass Effect was also squarely aimed at Knights of the Old Republic fans, only this time BioWare would have the brand all to itself.
Along with Bethesda's Oblivion and Fallout 3, Mass Effect helped to open up the RPG genre to an ever-growing audience that had cut its teeth on Western action games and first-person shooters. More and more it seemed to make sense that these two aspects could be integrated without compromising each other; attacks were still based on stats, equipment, and resources, but now they simply required execution as well.
Mass Effect raised the bar for visual fidelity in an RPG. More than any of BioWare's previous efforts, Mass Effect's universe was incredibly detailed, lifelike, and believable. This also meant a shift toward a smaller, shorter, more limited game, continuing the trend already established by the company's earlier console efforts. This quality over quantity approach was balanced with an incredible amount of detail in the back-story and writing, which made the world feel full and well-realized, even if much of it remained out of reach. It would also help to justify the decision to make Mass Effect a pre-planned trilogy.
Mass Effect pulled in gamers from all walks. Within three weeks of its holiday season launch, it had sold a million copies, and it continued to ride high on the sales charts well into the next summer. Despite bugs and glitches, the strong story, characters, and writing earned the game nearly universal accolades.
Having successfully conquered the console market, BioWare set its sights on handhelds. The BioWare team shopped around for a license that would work on the Nintendo DS. Their decision to do an RPG based on Sonic the Hedgehog turned more than a few heads, however. Sure, there's no denying the 'hog can move units on a Nintendo platform, but there were doubts if the Sonic universe merited that kind of expansion.
BioWare's take was quite a bit different from other RPGs, borrowing liberally from the Japanese school of design. While it retained BioWare's trademark dialog trees and an isometric view reminiscent of itsearly games, it was the first BioWare game to feature a battle system completely separate from the over world. The touch screen elements in the vein of Elite Beat Agents added a bit of reflex action to the combat, but played no factor in the strategy, which stayed true to the tenets of the Japanese RPG genre.
The BioWare name was enough to lend the title some credibility, but the doubts raised about the strange marriage persisted even after the game was released. The main Sonic series has drawn criticism for years for its ever expanding cast and story, and the idea of a game that places this aspect front and center was problematic. The lukewarm reviews were the worst the developer had seen.
All the while, BioWare had been planning the ultimate successor to its early RPGs. Dragon Age was first announced before the 2004 Electronic Entertainment Expo and billed as the successor to both Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate (minus the pesky D&D license fees, of course). The arduous development carried on for over five years, evolving much along the way.
In October, 2007 Electronic Arts shocked many when it announced its buyout of BioWare and Pandemic Studios, cementing BioWare's future as a multi-platform developer. BioWare's new RPG became a multi-platform affair and underwent some major revisions that resulted in the game we now know as Dragon Age: Origins.
The PC version retained much of its camera and interface and survives as the closest thing to BioWare's original vision. Multi-player, however, was axed from all versions, and the combat simplified a bit on the console side for a more action-oriented feel in line with other contemporary RPGs. Much of the extended development may have been spent on these kinds of ample revisions, but the extra time paid dividends for the game's detail and size.
Fans of Baldur's Gate hailed Dragon Age: Origins as a return to classic form, and the PC version in particular was met with the same kind of warm reviews that Mass Effect enjoyed. Sales, on the other hand, were slower than Mass Effect's, but still reached more than a half million units in North America by the end of the first month. With a name like "Origins," it's obvious that BioWare is looking to make those five years a long-term investment and dilute the cost over several games.
The Road Ahead
It seems like BioWare is unstoppable. Very soon, we'll all be sinking our teeth into Mass Effect 2, easily BioWare's most anticipated game to date, and the third installment is already well underway. Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare's massively multiplayer follow-up to its previous LucasArts collaboration, is poised to be perhaps the first MMO to take a major bite out of Blizzard. And the Dragon Age saga is just getting started.
Much of BioWare's enduring success is owed to its founders' foresight. Even when they were basement upstarts, unsure if they'd ever finish their first game and still working day jobs, they were always thinking ahead to their next move. Now, with 500 employees across three studios in two countries, BioWare has the resources to realize some very high ambitions. As long as the developer continues to build on its accomplishments, refining its games rather than starting from scratch, it could be a very long time before they ever get a taste of failure.
