The BioWare Technique

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If you love role-playing games, you love BioWare, a company set up in 1995 by industry legends (and medical doctors), Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka. Consistently the greatest RPG creators for the past decade, they have developed an enviable list of triple-A titles including the Baldur's Gate saga, Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire.

They also created a gun-toting cigar-smoking dog with four arms in MDK2, but further investigation of that will have to wait for another day.

You see, in May BioWare will release the PC version of their latest opus Mass Effect - and as such it only seemed right that we grabbed an interview with two of the Canadian company's respected writers - Mike Laidlaw (opposite-left) and Drew Karpyshyn (opposite-right) to stand as the lynchpin of our game narrative special.

SILENT MOVIES
Karpyshyn joined BioWare in 2000, beginning work on Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, and going on to be lead writer on Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) and most recently, Mass Effect. He's also the writer of the much-acclaimed Star Wars - Darth Bane: Path of Destruction and Rule of Two novels, as well as Mass Effect's prose prequel, Revelation, and Ascension, its sequel.

Laidlaw began working for BioWare in 2003 and was lead writer on Jade Empire as well as collaborating on Mass Effect, and is currently leading a team of writers on a project that is shrouded in mystery.

Both are experienced games writers and great champions of the medium, believing that they should be aiming to reach the quality of film scripts, but also ensuring that games develop in their own way.

"Getting to the same level of quality as film is good," says Laidlaw, "but just trying to make a film isn't the right direction. Interactivity gives us something no other medium has."

Karpyshyn agrees: "We're finding that the technology is finally reaching the point where it's starting to feel very realistic - we can actually have interactive conversation where you talk with people rather than them just talking at you.

"I like to use the analogy that we're at the point where Hollywood was in the early '30s where they're just starting to add sound, they're starting to get the technology locked in place. It's all about our skill set, coming up with our own conventions, our own language of telling stories, something film has developed over the last century."

SPEECH THERAPY
Creating entertaining, involving dialogue for characters is a major element of making a role-playing game, with characters such as KOTOR's killer robot HK-47 and his immortal line, "I am most eager to engage in some unadulterated violence." However, when asked about writing speech for games, Karpyshyn is brutally honest in his assertion that "dialogue is so often one of the last things we do!

"There's so much you have to do before starting on the dialogue, especially with a new game like Jade Empire, as you have to establish the world. So for Mass Effect we spent about nine months planning everything out before we started to lock down characters or the story. It's trying to establish what's your setting, what's the tone, your art style, and your narrative style."

Laidlaw adds that it's important that writers also ensure they ask themselves what the game is actually about: "You have to think what are we trying to do? What are we trying to say? What is the point of this story? If you think about Mass Effect, a prime theme of the game is 'Is it us versus them, or is it us with them?', which could very easily be carried into an allegory for modern times. It helps us set a purpose for the story and the characters."

BioWare create character bibles for most of the personalities in their games, and settle on three levels of importance - major, medium and minor. "Minor characters are typically the barkeep, where I'm not so worried about his family history, as in any interesting personality quirks he has - he's short and round, maybe has asthma..." says Laidlaw.

"But as a character grows in significance to the story we flesh them out a lot further, largely because we want these characters to be 3D, to resonate properly. You have to make sure that they have enough depth to go beyond [does lame tough guy voice] 'I am a guy with a gun!'

"The bibles then allow the artists to get a real grasp on the characters so they can then come in and provide concept art and models, and give their feedback," continues Karpyshyn. "Quite often you'll find they actually take what you were doing and emphasise a particular element that you had mentioned, such as push a character's appearance to be more humorous or more sinister - and it really helps us create that link between what you see in the game and the words that we're putting into the characters' mouths."

LUCK BE A LADY
The RPG presents a unique problem for writers, in that the main character can be male or female, or even non-human. Aside from moral outrage from deluded Murdoch-owned news outlets when same-sex couples and alien types bump pixellated uglies, just how difficult is it for writers to cope with having a lead character who can be so different from player to player?

"It's problematic in that you might have to imagine the character is a woman, but it's also awesome!" continues Laidlaw. "The best part of this kind of writing is knowing that you have to account for those kinds of variations. We're entering into a kind of deal with a player - we're going to give you a playground, a space of possibilities this wide where you can be a man or a woman, you can be a raging dick or a fantastically nice guy. We're not going to let you do absolutely anything, but we're going to tell a really good story between these boundaries."

Branching narrative and side-missions are also an important element for RPGs, and a unique aspect of videogames, which some writers find difficult to deal with.
"I think that's probably the hardest part about writing for videogames," confirms Karpyshyn. "Fortunately at BioWare, because we've been doing this a long time now, we've kinda got used to it, but that's why it requires a full team of four or five writers for one of our games."

A lead writer such as Karpyshyn would have the responsibility of ensuring everything - including side-missions - fit with the tone and themes of the game.

Also, there's the tricky skill of ensuring that if anything major happens in the subplots, it's accounted for in the main plot, without creating a feeling that it's disconnected, or that you've developed an over-complicated matrix of choices for the player.

"There's a real art to it, and that's the thing that new writers have the most trouble with - understanding how the player choices affect all these multiple plots that we have, and how you keep them on track for the main story, while still allowing them the freedom of choice."

A LONG TIME AGO...
Knights of the Old Republic was a hit for BioWare both critically and commercially, and for PC ZONE one of the greatest Star Wars games ever created. But working within an established and well-known universe has a unique set of challenges compared to developing an original setting.

"One of the advantages of using your own material is that you have a lot more freedom, you can kind of do anything you want," explains Karpyshyn. "But with that comes a lot more responsibility too, because in establishing your world, you really have to try to make sure that the audience understands what you're doing, and that they get what they're looking for out of the experience.

"When you're working with an existing setting, such as Star Wars... well, we were huge fans so we knew what the audience wanted. You take a much bigger risk with a new creation, but if it pays off, it's very satisfying to know that you've made something entirely new that people respond to, which I think we've managed to do with both Jade Empire and Mass Effect."

The plot of Knights of the Old Republic was, like all of BioWare's stories, created internally by the game's lead designer James Ohlsen, project director Casey Hudson and Karpyshyn.

"We felt it was important that there was a revelation or twist to capture that Star Wars feel, the 'I am your father' thing, as it's an integral part of the whole experience. We tried several different ideas - some worked, some didn't.

"George Lucas' role was more giving us approval and feedback on ideas, and LucasArts were really good to work with. They came to us because they liked the way we did things, and they were respectful enough to let us do our work rather than trying to impose something on us."

KOTOR's revelation - that moment in which your character's insidious past is revealed - is a fantastic jaw-dropping moment, and the team believe that it was in the execution of the idea where the game really succeeded.

Karpyshyn: "In simple terms it's 'Oh, you have amnesia,' which has been done to death. It's not so much a specific element of a story, but how you present it and all the little details that go with it.

"We knew from the very beginning that the twist was going to be a critical element of the story, so we spent a lot of time laying the foundations with things that kind of gave you clues to it, so that it fit, and didn't look like we'd pulled it out of thin air and sprung it on you. There were clues that when you play it a second time you see much more clearly."

KOTOR is a personal favourite of mine, so I take the opportunity to admit to the guys that the first time I completed it, I did so without unlocking the fantastic HK-47 robot (this is a bit like watching an episode of EastEnders that cuts out any scenes with the chubby woman who lives with Phil Daniels' alcoholic ex-wife).

"I'm sure there would have been a time when Karpyshyn would've winced at that comment, but I'm sure he's well past that now," laughs Laidlaw. "Frankly that's a minimum of two full months' work on that character, but it's really cool that you could play through the game and have a fundamentally different experience.

"We always think of it as a calculated risk whenever we're designing stuff - are we comfortable with the player missing this? How much time did we spend on it and how cool is it that it's possible to not see? A lot of the time it's finding a balance, but for the guy that finds the hidden stuff, it's so worthwhile and rewarding."

MMO MONEY
Mass Effect is the most graphically impressive of BioWare's titles, with huge environments, detailed landscapes, and some of the most expressive facial animation seen in a videogame.

However, is it essential for the development of the RPG that the visuals are great? After all, there have been some great RPGs with poor graphics, and vice versa.

"I think it's two legs of the same body," continues Laidlaw. "Graphics are still not perfect, but in Mass Effect they're so much closer than they've ever been before. We're not over-writing it as much as we were because we don't have to. In Neverwinter Nights it was a person with a fixed facial expression bobbing his head, whereas there are real subtle moments in Mass Effect when characters are looking at one another, and you can absolutely tell what they're thinking - we couldn't do that before."

As for the voice acting for the characters, directors are hired by BioWare to translate the writers' visions into a language that the actors can understand.

"It's important we stay closely involved so that it doesn't turn into something that feels cartoony or over the top, and that it matches the mood and the story we're trying to tell," Karpyshyn chips in. "If we have these realistic-looking characters, you want to make sure the acting is realistic and suits what you're seeing on-screen."

Finally, I ask about the MMO that BioWare's Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka announced recently, and whether a story-driven online multiplayer RPG is going to be infinitely more difficult to create.

"In an MMO you have thousands of people simultaneously doing dances and stuff - that's a nightmare from a rules standpoint, and a nightmare in terms of world consistency," says Karpyshyn.

"But it's like one of those nightmares you wake up from with a 'Yeah!' - a good quality nightmare, an 'I just kicked Freddy Krueger in the nuts!' kind of thing. It's a massive challenge, but not so different to what a single-player RPG has - instead it's a matter of a grander scale.

"I mean, I'm not on that MMO project, they might all be in tears down there! No, actually the MMO team are all a bit giddy they're all 'Look at what we're doing!".

As for exactly what they are doing... well I suppose that will have to wait for another time.

Jamie Sefton