The Bio-Way: BioWare Speaks About its Past and the Industry IGO: Do you know of any smaller developers working on some possibly great titles?

Zeschuk: We have a number of friends in the industry and are commonly chatting to a wide range of groups.  We know a number of very good new and smaller developers that are working on exciting games, but there are just too many to list!  Our hope is that they’ll all have the opportunity to bring their creative and innovative games to market so we can play them.

IGO: Neverwinter Nights came packaged with tools that allowed users to create their own adventures. Why was the feature implemented?

Muzyka: In Neverwinter Nights we wanted to create the complete Dungeons and Dragons experience, and we believed a large part of that experience was sitting down with your DM’s Guide and your graph paper and building a fiendish dungeon to unleash on your friends.  It was evident to us that we needed to have the ability to easily create dungeons and adventures to share if we were going to accomplish our initial goal with the game - thus our effort in creating a commercial-quality toolset to accompany the game we created.  The results were amazing – over 5000 modules created by our loyal fans, and BioWare’s online community has since grown to around 3 million registered users, all fans of roleplaying games rich in story and character.

IGO: Did you see anyone do anything with those tools that shocked you?

Zeschuk: We tried to hire anyone that shocked us with the Neverwinter Nights tools (those that shocked for the right reasons, of course)!  A number of very talented writers and designers arose from the Neverwinter Nights community, many of which are still creating interesting and innovative games.

IGO: Do you think digital distribution and Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade will open the door for independent developers?

Muzyka: The digital marketplace created by Xbox Live Arcade has the potential to significantly reduce the barrier to creating and successfully selling new and different types of smaller games.  This can have a huge impact on independent developers as they’ll have a viable chance at trying out new and interesting forms of games without the risk of a huge development cost – we’re really excited about Xbox Live Arcade and Xbox Live and other online communities, both on console systems and PC, for that matter!