by Robert Purchese
You think you have trouble keeping up with all the games coming out? BioWare co-founder Ray Muzyka spends up to three hours a night on games and still thinks that’s not enough.
“There are too many games released today,” he declared to Develop. “It’s interesting, because it’s very, very busy – it makes it very hard as a player to keep up. The releases clump up – even though that is changing a little bit.
“For us, we have to play our games, play competitor’s games, play other relevant games and play the handful of games we just really want to play more of and finish.
“I try and play two-or three hours a night,” he said, “but that’s hard and it’s not enough.”
That’s a lot of game time. What’s his favourite?
“Mine was probably the original System Shock,” said Muzyka. “It was awesome. I finished that game four times in 10 years.
“I loved the way it was the first true 3D adventure. The shooter mechanic in 3D meant it was very hard to control in a way, but the richness of the world was amazing.
“Our IT guys hate us for it, but we use a fan website with patches to make sure System Shock will work on our current gen laptops.”
Muzyka’s musings about there being too many games correlates with BioWare’s upped production. If we go back to 2003 and Knights of the Old Republic, BioWare typically had two years between releases: Jade Empire arrived in 2005 and the first Mass Effect in 2007.
It wasn’t until autumn 2009 and the release of Dragon Age: Origins that new owner EA (as of 2007) had time to influence BioWare’s output. Just months later, in January 2010, Mass Effect 2 arrived. And in March 2011 we’re expecting Dragon Age 2. Next year should also witness the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, although anything could happen there.
What’s more, next month BioWare will unveil a new game – tipped to be Mass Effect 3 – at the Spike TV Video Game Awards. A 2012 release for this makes sense.
How many hours do you spend on games each night? Can you keep up?
This has got to be a tough cookie. Surely they’re able to also immerse themselves with the older titles, but it’ll only spark copy catting rather than innovating what the next generation gaming experiences would be like.
They still have me on hold with SWTOR, but i’ll bet its crazy at the Bioware offices with all the current titles up for release. Here’s to crossing our fingers for them since they haven’t really let me down just yet.