BioWare Interview @ RPGVault

RPGVault sat down with Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk of BioWare to ask a whole slew of questions about their past, present, and future. To start off, they’ve released part one of the three-part interview. Here’s a taste:

Jonric: When you decided you wanted to make an RPG, to what extent did you realize what you were getting into? What did you think your biggest challenges would be? And looking back, what were the actual biggest challenges? Was there anything that went smoother or easier than you expected?

Greg Zeschuk: See my earlier answer featuring the ‘ignorance is bliss’ theme. We had no idea what we were getting into when we set out to make our mega-RPG. We knew it would be hard to make a game from practically nothing with a group of people that had never made games before – including ourselves! I don’t think we really considered the challenges, aside from always thinking “this is really daunting” as we made the game.

Ray Muzyka: It’s interesting to consider that not a single person at BioWare who worked on Baldur’s Gate had ever worked on any other games before, except for a few people who had worked on our own Shattered Steel. I think that’s a strong testament to their abilities and determination. In fact, to date, BioWare has only ever hired about a half-dozen people with video game industry experience – and we have nearly 110 employees now. However, because we’ve been lucky enough to retain most of the incredibly skilled staff we’ve hired over the years, we’ve built up quite a bit of internal experience in the past seven years.