GameSpy Interviews Ray Muzyka
Posted Wednesday, December 11, 2002 - 19:51 CET by Mollusken

While at the Australian Game Developers Conference, joint CEO of BioWare Ray Muzyka answered a few questions from GameSpy.

Can you say with confidence that you would never do a five-year production process again, or do you see that as not being a bad thing?

What we are doing to prevent getting into five years of production all on the same project is realizing that within that five-year period there is a good two or two-and-a-half years of engine development that probably merits a separate phase of the project itself before you apply people who are project-minded onto it. If anything, maybe in total, we would have a project that is as long if you're including the engine development and the actual game development. But for us now, we're thinking of those as two separate things. We're going to do an engine development group in parallel, say, with projects that are being developed on existing engine beds and toolsets -- maybe not on existing engines, but reworking those engines rather than rewriting them from the ground up, which is the next generation engine technology. We have some stuff in development.

Can you tell us a bit about the NWN expansion packs?

We just announced we're doing two. We haven't said too much about the second one yet, but the first one is in co-development with another studio called Floodgate. Floodgate is comprised of a number of ex-Looking Glass employees. We have tremendous respect for the work that Looking Glass did. Some of my favorite games are System Shock and Ultima Underworld. They are probably my number one and two favorite games of all time, actually. We're really excited about that. They are doing the art and design on that expansion called Shadows of Undrentide, and BioWare is doing the programming, so we're implementing some of the new skills and programming features and putting together the art and design assets they create.

There's a lot of more questions and answers to read at GameSpy.