, The Mass Effect: Andromeda issue.<\/em><\/p>\nThis feature from former managing editor, Matt Bertz, covers the full history of BioWare up until the feature’s publication in December, 2016.<\/em><\/p>\nTwenty years ago, Dungeons & Dragons was considered by many to be a Satanic game played by mentally imbalanced adolescents, and role-playing games were a fringe genre in video games. That was the reality when two doctors decided to start up a game development studio on the side of their medical practice back in the mid \u201990s. Fast forward two decades, and BioWare stands as one of the pillars of a genre that has since become a destination for millions of players and infected nearly every other type of video game, from sports games to shooters. With franchises like Baldur\u2019s Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age the studio put storytelling at the forefront of the role-playing experience in a way that changed the genre forever. To commemorate the studio\u2019s long-standing commitment to excellence, Game Informer<\/em> interviewed several BioWare developers, past and present, along with several other noteworthy industry figures who worked alongside them, to recollect how an unassuming studio in the far-flung Canadian prairies managed to become RPG royalty.<\/p>\n\nThe Oral Historians<\/h2>\n Ray Muzyka \u2022 Greg Zeschuk\u00a0<\/strong>\n
Mark Darrah<\/strong>Current Job:<\/strong> Executive producerWorked On:<\/strong> Baldur\u2019s Gate series, Jade Empire, Sonic Chronicles: Dark Brotherhood, Dragon Age series<\/p>\nBrian Fargo<\/strong>Current Job:<\/strong> CEO, inXile EntertainmentAaryn Flynn<\/strong>Current Job:<\/strong> Studio GMWorked On:<\/strong> Baldur\u2019s Gate series, Neverwinter Nights, KOTOR, Jade Empire, Mass Effect series, Dragon Age series<\/p>\nCasey Hudson<\/strong>Current Job:<\/strong> Creative director, Microsoft StudioWorked On:<\/strong> MDK 2, Neverwinter Nights, KOTOR, Mass Effect series<\/p>\nMike Laidlaw<\/strong>Current Job:<\/strong> Creative directorWorked On:<\/strong> Jade Empire, Dragon Age series<\/p>\nKevin Martens<\/strong>Current Job:<\/strong> Lead designer, Blizzard EntertainmentWorked On:<\/strong> Baldur\u2019s Gate series, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire<\/p>\nJames Ohlen<\/strong>Current Job:<\/strong> Studio creative directorWorked On:<\/strong> Shattered Steel, Baldur\u2019s Gate series, Neverwinter Nights, KOTOR, Jade Empire, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Dragon Age series<\/p>\nFeargus Urquhart<\/strong>Current Job:<\/strong> CEO, Obsidian Entertainment\u00a0Worked on:<\/strong> Shattered Steel, Baldur\u2019s Gate, Neverwinter Nights<\/p>\nPreston Watamanuik<\/strong>Current Job:<\/strong> Senior creative director\u00a0Worked on:<\/strong> Neverwinter Nights, KOTOR, Jade Empire, Mass Effect series<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\nThe Origin Story<\/p>\n
The Origin Story<\/h2>\n Growing up in Canada in the \u201970s, Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk are exposed to video games at an early age. Titles like Pong, Castle Wolfenstein, and Pirate\u2019s Cove capture their imaginations and compel each to take up programming as a hobby. Their paths first cross in college.<\/p>\n
Greg Zeschuk:<\/strong> Both Ray and I went to University of Alberta in the late \u201980s. We were in inorganic chemistry together, that was the first class we met each other. Then we went to med school together, and that\u2019s where we got to know one another. Ironically, we bonded over the foosball table.<\/p>\nRay Muzyka:<\/strong> We also played a lot of video games. It was a common passion. We started doing some medical-education projects, too. We\u2019re both self-taught programmers. So we signed up with our third co-founder of BioWare, Augustine Yip, who\u2019s a doctor as well. He left BioWare pretty quickly after we incorporated to go full-time practice in Calgary, but we started the company together.<\/p>\nMuzyka:<\/strong> We named the company BioWare \u2013 software for humans. It was a play on words that there are three doctors kind of working together.<\/p>\nZeschuk:<\/strong> We used to have one guy that since the beginning told us it was terrible.<\/p>\nMuzyka:<\/strong> There were a lot of people that told us that. Some people, their names will be not mentioned, told us we would never build a brand. I remember that very clearly, there was one meeting that we had… [laughs].<\/p>\nZeschuk:<\/strong> It\u2019s a circular reference for our future owner, but not anyone relevant.<\/p>\nMuzyka:<\/strong> We did medical-education software projects together, like an acid-based physiology simulator. We understood it was a pretty tough market to get in.<\/p>\nZeschuk:<\/strong> People don\u2019t want to pay for education or health, especially in Canada, so when you combine the two\u2026it\u2019s very difficult. Then we realized, okay, let\u2019s try games.<\/p>\nHiring in Edmonton, no one had ever really worked on a game before. So we had all of these video game noobs that were just trying to figure it out.<\/p>\n\n <\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n
BioWare founders Augustine Yip, Greg Zeschuk, and Ray Muzyka show off their first two game releases, Baldur\u2019s Gate and Shattered Steel<\/p>\n<\/article>\n
Muzyka:<\/strong> James Ohlen is another great example. He was running a comic book store in Grand Prairie, a small town in northern Alberta. We hired him because we heard from other guys in that area that there was this guy up there running a D&D campaign with a waiting list. He was running this comic book store so he could only run two campaigns, but he had a waiting list and as soon as anyone would drop out people couldn\u2019t wait to sign up.<\/p>\nZeschuk: <\/strong>And he traded his Magic cards for a car so he could drive to work.<\/p>\nMuzyka:<\/strong> We originally set up in Greg\u2019s basement. That was our first office. Scott Greig went to the basement for an interview and he was ready to run out of the room. He was like, \u201cAre these guys for real? Two doctors want to start up a video game company for some reason?\u201d<\/p>\nZeschuk:<\/strong> I think people thought it was a phase. Even for us, on some level we thought we\u2019d go back to being doctors.<\/p>\nMuzyka:<\/strong> I didn\u2019t think that at the time. Obviously that would have been the case, but it wasn\u2019t part of the thinking process because I was too dumb to realize the business might not succeed. We didn\u2019t take a salary for five years at BioWare either, so the fact that we could work once a month as a doctor and buy soup and beans and pay off our maxed-out credit cards and lines of credit and our mortgages and stuff was helpful. For me, anyways. I couldn\u2019t have survived without that. It was a pretty tough existence, but it was fun.<\/p>\nZeschuk:<\/strong> We were young, so the resistance to that stuff was higher.<\/p>\nRather than start small with one project, the scrappy team works up two game concepts simultaneously, a mech combat game called Shattered Steel and a role-playing\/strategy game code-named Battleground Infinity. The doctors begin shopping for a publisher.<\/p>\n\n <\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n
Greg and Ray tour Stonehenge during the early days of BioWare<\/p>\n<\/article>\n
Muzyka:<\/strong> We made a list of the top 10 publishers worldwide at the time. I think only one of them is still around. We divided it into two and started cold-calling them, over and over, until they started taking our calls. I think we got almost all of them to start making an offer.<\/p>\nZeschuk:<\/strong> They had these giant piles [of games] they never looked at, but since we kept bugging them they\u2019d be like, \u201cFine, fine, we\u2019ll look at it.\u201d Shattered Steel in particular was really good technology for the time \u2013 3D objects in a 2.5D space.<\/p>\nMuzyka:<\/strong> Nine out of ten publishers made an offer on a demo from two doctors and an unknown team from Canada based on a twenty-page business plan and a relatively crude prototype.<\/p>\nBrian Fargo:<\/strong> I met them when they presented the Shattered Steel project to us. They wanted to take on MechWarrior from Activision, and they had a great little demo. Super passionate, super detailed, and I was impressed with their knowledge of the category and their approach.<\/p>\nFeargus Urquhart:<\/strong> I thought it was super cool that Ray and Greg were incredibly involved in not just the managing, but in the development itself. Greg wrote one of the tools that was used to get the models in the engine.<\/p>\nMuzyka:<\/strong> Story and character were a big part of what we did from the beginning. That wasn\u2019t popular; a lot of people were saying it was a bad idea. Even Shattered Steel, it was an action game but we added story to it in a way that wasn\u2019t common at the time. We had a story arc that went through and tried to explain everything. It was bolted on near the end, but for us that was important. It made the world complete.<\/p>\nZeschuk:<\/strong> I think closing [Shattered Steel] was sort of surreal because we had never done it before, we didn\u2019t know what to do. I think the biggest thing was willingly we always strove to learn something from what we did. We had no QA, no testing, so everyone was just playing it. The whole idea of crunch time and working really hard, it was actually really exhilarating.<\/p>\nMuzyka:<\/strong> Caffeine-fueled mania. It reminded me a lot of being on call as a doctor, too.<\/p>\nZeschuk:<\/strong> When we actually finished it, it was remarkable. We\u2019d often lurk in stores, wait, and watch someone actually buy the game we made.<\/p>\nCritical Strike<\/p>\n\n <\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n
BioWare\u2019s first product (shown here) was a medical software called Gastroenerology Patient Simulator<\/p>\n<\/article>\n
Critical Strike<\/h2>\n During the development of Shattered Steel, BioWare was also shopping its role-playing game, code-named Battleground Infinity. Interest originally proved tepid.<\/p>\n
Muzyka:<\/strong> Some of where we came from was almost rebellious. We loved role-playing games growing up, and our desire was to try something no one else was doing. I think that benefited us because we weren\u2019t trying to tackle a red ocean. There was a big opportunity there, but people were saying role-playing games were dead, that we wouldn\u2019t ever succeed. We heard that so many times.<\/p>\nUrquhart:<\/strong> They came up with the idea of Battleground Infinity. It was all about the gods. There were a ton of different gods, like an RPG and an RTS smashed together. That\u2019s why Baldur\u2019s Gate has this view and control mechanism, I think, because Battleground was more of an RTS.<\/p>\nInitially, what they sent me wasn\u2019t enough for me to think we wanted to do another game with them at the time. Thankfully, they continued to work on that demo and had been presenting it to Westwood and Sir Tech.<\/p>\n
Zeschuk:<\/strong> We mentioned to Feargus that, \u201cHey, we were just down the street [pitching the game] at Virgin.\u201d He was like, \u201cCan I take a quick look at it?\u201d So we go over, and he goes, \u201cHold on.\u201d<\/p>\nUrquhart:<\/strong> During all this, Interplay had signed the Dungeons & Dragons license. So I said to them, \u201cWhat about this being a D&D game?\u201d They said, \u201cThat would be super cool.\u201d This is big business talk back then. I said, \u201cLet me see what I can do.\u201d It was a little challenging, and my boss at the time actually thought it was a stupid idea. So I brought in the VP of marketing and I sold her on it. She brought Brian Fargo and he looked at it for like three minutes and said, \u201cSign it up.\u201d<\/p>\nFargo:<\/strong> With D&D, I felt that if I could get the developer that really understood and appreciated the roots and really focused on the detail of the experience, that we could do something with it. And that\u2019s what [BioWare] offered. When they showed me their product, I remember visually it showed a lot of promise.<\/p>\nJames Ohlen:<\/strong> That tech became the basis for Baldur\u2019s Gate.<\/p>\nMuzyka:<\/strong> I always thought of Baldur\u2019s Gate as a strategy\/RPG. We merged in some strategy elements. We looked at control mechanics of games like Command & Conquer and Warcraft II. We looked at the character interactions of Jagged Alliance from SirTech \u2013 they would react to things you did. So that element made it into the game as well. I think we came up with the control-mechanic formations on our own, but it was based on some stuff we saw in strategy games. Combine that with the best-of-breed RPG fundamentals…and that was what pulled it together. And D&D obviously. We wanted to make it feel like you were playing D&D with your friends.<\/p>\nKevin Martens:<\/strong> I think that\u2019s the secret thing and I still recommend to this day, if you don\u2019t play pen and paper as a dungeon master you\u2019re not going to be a good game designer. That\u2019s where you learn. If you can keep people coming back to your kitchen table every Sunday afternoon time after time and they can\u2019t wait to learn what happens next, you\u2019re learning game design no matter how informally you\u2019re learning it.<\/p>\n\n <\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n
Baldur\u2019s Gate<\/p>\n<\/article>\n
As the team raced toward its scheduled release date, BioWare and Black Isle Studios ran into roadblocks. Baldur\u2019s Gate wasn\u2019t ready for its planned release date, and the marketing department didn\u2019t want to waste money promoting it because role-playing games were still considered niche.<\/p>\n
Fargo:<\/strong> If you shipped on December 21, you\u2019ve really missed Christmas, right? Because you\u2019re not in most other retail channels. So we sort of sucked it up and said, \u201cLook, this thing has way too much promise.\u201d Our reputation was always paramount, so we didn\u2019t want to shove something out the door, so we absorbed that hit and gave them the extra time to get it right.<\/p>\nUrquhart:<\/strong> Dungeons & Dragons was a brand no one believed in anymore. We were working with this idea that the [Baldur\u2019s Gate] sales forecast was 70,000 units in the U.S. and the sales forecast for Europe was 0. The challenging thing about that is that sales forecasts are where you get your marketing budget. Interplay at the time did these big sales meetings where we\u2019d bring sales reps and the actual buyers and have all these presentations, something of a boondoggle, but I went to Brian and said, \u201cI need you to tell people Baldur\u2019s Gate is going to be awesome. They need to hear it from you.\u201d So he did. He really sold it.<\/p>\nFargo:<\/strong> If you wouldn\u2019t launch a company around the title, you probably shouldn\u2019t be doing it.<\/p>\nUrquhart:<\/strong> At the time, CompUSA was being a big pain in the ass. We told them, \u201cThis product is going to be huge.\u201d They were like, \u201cWe don\u2019t care.\u201d<\/p>\nMuzyka:<\/strong> Diablo came out, and that was one of the first good RPGs in a while. Then Baldur\u2019s Gate came out soon after. Both of those had been in development while everyone was saying, \u201cLet\u2019s not do these.\u201d They kind of died because they stopped being fun and when you release games that are, all of the sudden, hey there\u2019s an audience for these again.<\/p>\nUrquhart:<\/strong> At the Christmas party in \u201998 I was talking to Brian Fargo, who said, \u201cI\u2019ve got a funny story for you. I had the CEO of CompUSA call me to ask for units.\u201d Because they took none, and everyone was selling a ton, he said, \u201cWill you please give us units? You don\u2019t have to pay, provide end caps, anything like that. We just need units.\u201d The funny but sad part of that was that the CompUSA buyer who did that to us, they actually fired.<\/p>\nMuzyka:<\/strong> I don\u2019t think any of us really had any idea it would sell the millions of copies that it did in the end.<\/p>\nZeschuk:<\/strong> We didn\u2019t know what it sold. It took a while to get royalty checks because they are delayed based on the publisher getting paid. It was quite a while before we realized how big Baldur\u2019s Gate was. We started winning a bunch of awards.<\/p>\nMuzyka:<\/strong> At the same time, both of us still practiced medicine. I did more ER and family med and Greg did some ER, family, and geriatric work. I practiced for two years full-time before we incorporated BioWare.<\/p>\nZeschuk:<\/strong> I just remember one day, l was on call at the geriatric hospital, and going, \u201cWait a minute. I worked at BioWare all day. Here I am, laying in the hospital. Why on Earth am I doing this?\u201d That was the moment for me when I realized it. It\u2019s interesting because that came after Baldur\u2019s Gate was successful. By the time we knew it was huge, we actually were still working in that cross-over period. I decided to retire at that point.<\/p>\nMuzyka:<\/strong> I think Greg retired from medicine a year or two before me.<\/p>\nPotion Of Fortitude<\/p>\n\n <\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n
Baldur\u2019s Gate<\/p>\n<\/article>\n
Potion Of Fortitude<\/h2>\n Following the commercial and critical success of Baldur\u2019s Gate, BioWare transitioned one team immediately into the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion, while three other teams started work on Baldur\u2019s Gate II: Shadows of Amn, Neverwinter Nights, and the studio\u2019s first console game, MDK2.<\/p>\n
Aaryn Flynn:<\/strong> The ambition for Baldur\u2019s Gate II was incredibly high, so we had lots of pressure on us to deliver that.<\/p>\nMuzyka:<\/strong> We targeted several areas for improvement: Improve the user interface, improve the graphic resolution, tighten the story, obviously extend it so you could carry your character you imported to a higher level, and still start a fresh character if you wanted.<\/p>\nZeschuk:<\/strong> I think the biggest thing with that game was we didn\u2019t make almost any engine changes. A lot of times when doing quality assurance, you\u2019re changing fundamental structure and have to start from square one. But with BG II we literally picked up right after BG I, kept a similar technology base, and just kept chugging with it.<\/p>\nMartens:<\/strong> We just wanted to do more. What I realize now \u2013 I\u2019m 18 years in \u2013 is just how lucky we were to have a super stable engine. We could hit the ground running. We had very few new features for Baldur\u2019s Gate II that stopped development at all.<\/p>\nFlynn:<\/strong> After BG, James [Ohlen] was very proud of the reviews of the story coming in. But this fellow Diarmid Clarke gave him a dose of humility when he told him that FFVII characters were so much better-developed.<\/p>\nOhlen:<\/strong> I\u2019m very competitive, and SquareSoft was killing it with the Final Fantasy series. They were doing a lot of things better than us in how they built up characters, made people love them, roman-ces, all the rest. So that was a big inspiration for Baldur\u2019s Gate II. I really wanted to take the crown away from SquareSoft as the studio that did the best story, the best characters, all that.<\/p>\nMartens:<\/strong> My story of James is that he has always had a vision grander than anyone else around me. Here was this kid in Edmonton, Alberta, trying to take down the long-time kingpin of RPGs. That\u2019s not possible, right?<\/p>\nFlynn:<\/strong> So much of what we did back then, the eagerness was 80 percent of it. It was less about what you knew, because no one knew anything at the time. What the hell did folks in Edmonton know about how to make computer games other than they made one or two at that point?<\/p>\nOhlen:<\/strong> In Baldur\u2019s Gate, the stories were quite simple. The characters got introduced in the main storyline and their personalities were developed through the barks they had, and they were quite dumb. For Baldur\u2019s Gate II, we reduced the number of characters because we realized we wouldn\u2019t have the time to do a storyline for the same amount of characters. But we gave every single companion in BG II their own area and story that introduced them, so they were key characters in the major storylines.<\/p>\nMartens:<\/strong> The biggest challenge of it was we wanted to represent a lot of different viewpoints, because you could be any character. The challenge of BioWare storytelling in that era was you could be anybody from anywhere, any class, any gender that\u2019s available in D&D, and by the time we were done you could even be any subclass. But somehow the story had to work for all of these. It was the same thing with romance \u2013 how do you write one romance like how Final Fantasy might do for a game with a character that could be any character of any gender?<\/p>\nFlynn:<\/strong> The QA for that game was nuts. What we lacked in discipline we made up for in energy and passion for what we were doing.<\/p>\nMartens:<\/strong> Some of the memories that stand out for me were seeing how fast we could get through the game. We figured we had about 150 hours of content, but we kept adding it right until the end because there was no reason not to since you didn\u2019t have to wait for VO or all that stuff. We ended up with about 240 hours, and then we would race the critical path to see how fast we could finish it. I think the fastest we ever got through it was 1 hour and 58 minutes.<\/p>\nFargo:<\/strong> I still think it\u2019s probably one of the biggest RPGs of all time in terms of number of quests you can do.<\/p>\nMartens:<\/strong> Everybody felt the aftermath, everybody had a down period at the end or a recovery period \u2013 whatever you want to call it. James used to sleep under his desk. He actually wouldn\u2019t go home. Someone would bring him clothes from home, he wouldn\u2019t even go home to change, he would get one of his roommates to bring it over. Because three of the four people he had lived with worked at BioWare. That\u2019s probably too far. I don\u2019t think James felt that way at the time, and I don\u2019t think it affected his life, but he didn\u2019t have a child at that time. I felt something was wrong with crunch back then, but I didn\u2019t know any other way to do it. And I have to admit we brought a lot of it on ourselves by making plans that were grander than the staff we had or the knowledge we had to do it.<\/p>\nOhlen:<\/strong> It was the most fun I ever had as a game developer.<\/p>\nBaldur\u2019s Gate II shattered expectations and earned massive critical acclaim; it still ranks sixth on Metacritic\u2019s list of the highest-rated PC games of all time.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nSolo Questing<\/p>\n\n <\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n
Neverwinter Nights<\/p>\n<\/article>\n
Solo Questing<\/h2>\n Following the success of Baldur\u2019s Gate II, BioWare was in the midst of its most ambitious project to date. On top of an original campaign built on the 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons rules, Neverwinter Nights offered a full set of editing tools so players could create their own modular experiences, plus an online infrastructure for questing with friends. During development, problems arose at Interplay.<\/p>\n
Flynn:<\/strong> Neverwinter was a very challenging development. It was our first 3D role-playing game.<\/p>\nZeschuk:<\/strong> The vision for Neverwinter was very clear right from the beginning: toolset, DM client and game \u2013 these things were just a huge undertaking. It was a big, complicated game.<\/p>\nMuzyka:<\/strong> It was part of the core vision right from the start to enable user-generated content. We had this long-term vision that we wanted to make and capture the D&D experience. We felt that enabling someone to be a dungeon master, to have control over it in real time in a multiplayer or single-player setting, and allow users to make content to expand the universe out would be part of it. Then we would have a curated online store where we would present the best of the user-generated content for other players to see. Trent Oster, the project director, had a grand vision for NWN that encompassed all of these game pillars; it was definitely an ambitious game.<\/p>\nZeschuk:<\/strong> I would say one of the biggest financial risks we took was paying for Neverwinter Nights. That was a big dice roll.<\/p>\nFlynn:<\/strong> We always had this ability to convince ourselves, \u201cAh, ambition smambition, we\u2019ll get it done.\u201d<\/p>\nMuzyka:<\/strong> We talked with Will Wright, who talked about the pyramid of user-content creation in The Sims. That was one of the inspirations for sure. You had this community that had a lot of players, and a certain number of people that got involved in the online aspects, and a certain number of players that would make things, and the certain number that would make really complex, interesting things. So we were trying to create that, enable the players to have that power in the Neverwinter setting and a D&D setting. We thought, \u201cThis has never been done before.\u201d<\/p>\nOhlen:<\/strong> It was kind of disappointing because we just knocked it out of the park with Baldur\u2019s Gate and Baldur\u2019s Gate II, and then all of a sudden, Neverwinter Nights was in danger because Interplay was blowing up.<\/p>\nMuzyka:<\/strong> We hadn\u2019t been paid any of the royalties [for Baldur\u2019s Gate II]. We were owed a lot of money.<\/p>\nFargo:<\/strong> BioWare was a little out of money, and probably one of the biggest creditors at Interplay. I remember saying, \u201cHey we\u2019ve got to do something clever to get these guys paid.\u201d<\/p>\nZeschuk:<\/strong> There\u2019s actually quite a dramatic business story behind the whole transition. When the wheels fell off at Interplay, there was a pretty ambitious deal brokered with so many people involved \u2013 us, Interplay, and was it Infogrames or Atari at the time?<\/p>\nMuzyka:<\/strong> Infogrames first and then Atari, they had a name transition halfway through. Then Titus [who acquired Interplay] was involved, as well as Wizards of the Coast and TSR.<\/p>\nZeschuk:<\/strong> The business side was like threading a needle. I mean we were in negotiations every couple days for six months.<\/p>\nOhlen:<\/strong> It could have gone really wrong. Neverwinter Nights was like, \u201cIf we make this and it isn\u2019t successful, that\u2019s the end of the company.\u201d<\/p>\nDarrah:<\/strong> We were probably within months of having no money…but it never really seemed to be reflected in in the culture itself. Everyone was really focused on making the games themselves.<\/p>\nMuzyka:<\/strong> It got resolved amicably in the end, but we launched a lawsuit to get paid the royalties we were owed and to protect Neverwinter.<\/p>\nMartens:<\/strong> The day that we got the deal with Atari, they gathered the whole company together and told them we had a new publisher. Everyone had a very big cheer.<\/p>\nWatamanuik:<\/strong> Neverwinter Nights was a very stressful project. I did a lot of crunch on Neverwinter; it was like six months where I didn\u2019t get to see my wife very much.<\/p>\nOhlen:<\/strong> I was working on Knights of the Old Republic at the time, but the executive producer on Neverwinter Nights at the time, Trent Oster, was like, \u201cYou got to come over here and take over the project and make sure it\u2019s actually successful.\u201d I had to put my work on KOTOR on hold, go to Neverwinter Nights, take all the writers from across the studio and work on getting Neverwinter Nights out the door.<\/p>\nMartens:<\/strong> Everybody ended up on Neverwinter to ship that again. I think that\u2019s the last game where we did that, where the whole company had to ship the game.<\/p>\nWatamanuik:<\/strong> I was really happy with how close we were able to map the game to the actual Dungeons & Dragons rule set.<\/p>\nFlynn:<\/strong> It was really cool once we got stuff out there and we saw people making it. Every week something would go around the office and you would go, \u201cWow, look at this.\u201d<\/p>\nDarrah:<\/strong> It definitely had a long legacy, and it arguably has probably shaped a lot of what we see today in terms of RPGs with toolsets and trying to have these very long, user-supported tails.<\/p>\nZeschuk:<\/strong> Every once in a while you go across these kind of what-if scenarios and you go, \u201cWhat if we actually kept on going in that direction?\u201d If you look forward past that, we\u2019ve shifted harder toward story, but we\u2019ve shifted away from that user-generated content\u2026 It\u2019s something I wish we had pushed harder, but you only have so many resources and you have your focus and perspective at the time.<\/p>\nOhlen:<\/strong> I used it as the most powerful hiring tool I ever had. I kind of miss it. The guys who I would bring in were able to do ridiculous things with the tools like, \u201cHow the hell were they able to do that?\u201d<\/p>\nWatamanuik:<\/strong> It was responsible for an entire generation of design talent that came into the studio because they had worked with and understood the Neverwinter Nights Aurora engine. Great PvP mods that came out of that, and great technical demos. Our first cinematic designer at BioWare, Brad Prince, completely hacked the Neverwinter Nights engine to be able to accomplish some of the first cinematic scenes that we did in our games, and it was because of that deep understanding of those tools and what you could accomplish, the power of the scripting language.<\/p>\nThe BioWare Timeline<\/p>\n
The BioWare Timeline<\/h2>\n