Interview with Bioware's Founders

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(Originally posted by Darien)

This interview in Computer Games Online weeklong series is with Founders Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka. They offer some great information on Neverwinter Nights, as well as some new screenshots.

What sort of plans do you have for add-ons?

Muzyka: We'd love to be able to support the community, post-release. That's very important to the continuity of the game—making sure that people can enjoy it long-term.

Zeschuk: I think our perspective is that it will be an evolving beast. Neverwinter two years from now... who knows what it will be? I think our goal is to look at how we can continue to improve it. It's not a case of just sitting static; we really want to support it.

Muzyka: We're kind of evolving the model and asking, well, how does the community for a game like this get supported? Part of it is that they actually have all the tools that we have, to be able to make things. We want to develop more content and improve the tools themselves—that's something we're interested in.

Zeschuk: The other issue with the tools as well, which is really important, is that we've made them to be inclusive, not exclusive. In a sense that, sitting down with the Quake editor—it's a fairly significant experience. You have to do a lot of stuff and know a lot of things to be able to accomplish anything. In Neverwinter we've really scaled it, so that basic user, the first time out, can build some areas and drop some monsters in and play in them. At the same time we don't take any power away from the power users—you just have this very scalable experience. The extreme, of course, is that you can go in and start changing scripts. That's available. So that's our goal—to have it scale to the user's desires.