Bioware founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk want to move beyond the single player experience with new RPG Dragon Age.
If you were looking to hand someone the title of ‘Monarch of RPGs’, Bioware would be pretty strong contenders. With a string of successful single-player RPGs under their belt, Bioware are aiming for something a little bit different with their upcoming title Dragon Age.
“We view it as a platform, and we’re launching Dragon Age as a huge, expansive high-quality game,” Bioware co-founder Ray Muzyka said in an interview with Gamasutra. “We’re planning for a platform around that, that you can dock new things in. Like user-generated content; we’re releasing toolsets so people can make their own content. We’re going to be releasing a lot of premium downloadable content for purchase post-release that will expand the possibility space of the universe.”
“Even though it’s a single-player role-playing game and story, it’s still a connected game,” Greg Zeschuk added “We live in this world where everything is getting more and more connected digitally, and from within the game, you’re going to be able to search through user-created content that you may want to insert in… We think an RPG is the perfect game to [create a platform] with. It’s meaningful enough that people get so attached to them, they want to play it forever. They don’t want to leave that world or leave those characters. It’s exciting. That’s really our goal with it.”
Bioware previously did something similar to this with Neverwinter Nights and RPG modding is fairly ubiquitous thanks to Bethesda. Bioware are already taking applications for beta testers for the world-building toolset, which suggests that they are serious about making user created content a major part of the Dragon Age experience.
Source: Gamasutra
