BioWare Interview, Part One

UGO has kicked up the first installment to a multi-part interview they did with BioWare’s Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk at last week’s GDC. Here’s a quick update on what’s going on with EA’s BioWare/Mythic RPG group:

UGO: Can you give me an update about the Bioware/Mythic group? And are you guys working together on current projects like Star Wars: The Old Republic and Warhammer Online?

Ray Muzyka, CEO/GM BioWare: Yeah. There’s support going on across the group. It’s one group. I’m the group general manager, and Greg’s the creative officer. Together with the group operations manager, marketing, there are (general managers) at every studio. It’s very much a team orientation. There’s a lot of collaboration, a lot of sharing of best practices, a lot of offers of help. We make the MMOs and RPGs for all of EA. People are really passionate about making them, and people are doing everything they can across different areas of the BioWare group to enable people to be successful.

UGO: Would you say it would be commonplace for someone from the Warhammer team to call someone working on The Old Republic and be like, “Hey, what would you do here?”

Muzyka: Yes, we encourage that actually. There’s definitely no dividing line. If people need help, we try to encourage people to help out. People working across different locations… some people move to different places occasionally. Some people move from Edmonton down to Austin, some people move from Mythic down to Austin. It’s very much collaborative.

Greg Zeschuk, VP/Creative Officer, BioWare: People are getting to know each other too.

Muzyka: We’ve had some off-sites together. We had a meeting in fall last year in three different places: Austin, Virginia and Edmonton. We’ve seen our leaders, like 40 people down in Edmonton, 30 in Austin and Virginia. It was really good, the shared passion for the delivery of these games. Everybody has a slightly different view of their mission at different studios, but they are all aspiring to that same vision of deep emotional engagement and really building amazing RPGs and MMOs.