Crispy Gamer interviews BioWare's doctors

[Pavlos]

Source

 

Crispy Gamer (it just sounds wrong...) has conducted an interview in which stories and methods of story-telling are discuffed between the two founding fathers of BioWare: Doctors Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk.

 

 

"I'd say that the bigger tent pole is emotion," says Dr. Muzyka, "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."

 

A rather curious definition of narrative there but interesting nonetheless. It's nice to know that BioWare are still committed to creating "quality story-lines", I just wish I was as interested in their latest offerings as they seem to be.

[jrrtoken]

Nice of them talk about how great and expansive their stories are; If only they would actually write decently, then maybe their words could have substance.

[Char Ell]

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.

Hmmm.... Story is very important to me but I don't know that I agree with Dr. Zeschuk in that we're rapidly approaching the point where all engines will be pretty similar. Sure he has a lot more visibility into this than I do but until we start getting some Star Trek holo deck type stuff to play I think game engines have a long way to go in development and will take different paths.