Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic, along with a few other high profile late spring titles, should be one of the Xbox games that will make you forgive the recent drought in quality and quantity we've all been going through. The developer behind the popular NeverWinter Nights on PC is putting all of that expertise and focus on the Star Wars universe and giving us the first Xbox RPG of 2003. Sure it's set 4,000 years before the Star Wars films, but lucky for us that still means we're getting lightsabers, spaceships, wookies and droids. All the basic ingredients you need for a worthwhile Star Wars game.
Sure we've seen those pieces come together before with disastrous results, but there's a buzz of excitement about KOTOR and for good reason. We had the chance to talk with Drs. Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, co-CEOs of Bioware Corporation and they gave us several thousand words worth of good reasons below. All we did was lob a few basic questions at them to get things rolling.
IGN: There's every indication that KOTOR is going to offer tremendous freedom for role playing fans and it just happens to be set in the Star Wars universe. What kind of limits to this freedom can we expect?
Ray Muzyka: We really tried to identify some fun paths for players to play through and I think there are at least three ways players can approach the game in terms of "replayability." One of the ways is in terms of the Dark side and Light side of The Force. They can play the main character they create as either a Light side guy or a Dark side guy and the game will have a different play pattern and even a different ending depending on what they choose. Another difference in play pattern is which skills they choose for their party members and how they choose to approach the world with those skills. For example, with computer use and repair you might be able to hack a computer or build a droid to attack your enemies. Maybe you'll be able to persuade your enemies in a conversation rather than fighting them or you might choose just to fight them. Another approach might be just to use stealth and sneak past them. So those skills will provide quite a measure of replayability for the way you want to approach problem solving. The third kind of replayability is kind of more for fun than anything else. Sometimes you have different options in dialogue and some of them are chosen for you based on your class and some are based on your gender. Gender particularly, there's a few conversations in cantinas for example where you get treated differently depending on if you're male or female. That's just subtle thing, it doesn't really affect the gameplay in a big way. But it's really fun because you might be talking with a buddy about how you saw something cool in the cantina and he'll say "I didn't see that, I saw this." You'll develop some differences in play style that you'll be able to talk about with your friends, hopefully. I know I have with people in the office who end up surprised with a few things. They're both fun and offer exciting things to see so you almost want to create a different gender character, try different sides of The Force approach and try replaying it different ways different times.
Greg Zeschuk: I think one of the things we did in approaching our RPG, is we don't want to put limits on it. We kind of make the story, figure out what we want to do that's fun and we just see where it fits. In the case of Knights of the Old Republic, it's a pretty big game even without the replayability but the replayability makes it really easy, I think. Even to further emphasize what Ray was saying about the characters in your party you have your lead character that you can swap with the other characters you get. I end up really torn choosing who I want in my party because this guy's really cool or this guy's really funny and attacks well. It's a cool experience that I liken to say Final Fantasy X. You saw everything with your characters riding with you all the time. In Knights, it's separate. A certain group will act a certain way and another group will act a different way and if you act evil it will go a completely different way. Our focus isn't to put limits on the game, it's more to figure out what feels right. The game is pretty long, say 40-60 hours, and that's not including if you're spending time messing around playing Pazaak, the card game. It's very interesting game and I think that's what's going to surprise a lot of players, the depth.
IGN: You're saying 40-60 hours of gameplay just to get through it once, bare-bones?
Zeschuk: Yeah. We're thinking 40 if you just go along the main path and about 60 if you go around and do a variety of off-the-track quests and stuff like that. It's a pretty big game to begin with and the you add in all of this variety and you're going to need that six months to play it.
IGN: Do you have to choose either the Light or Dark side of The Force? Can you be a gray, indecisive, middle-of-the-road Jedi?
Muzyka: You can be neutral most of the game but you have to make a choice near the end of the game towards either the Light side or the Dark side. You do have to choose at the end. But you can actually be neutral through most of it and that actually gives you a blend of some of the not the extreme Light side and not the extreme Dark side force powers, but a nice blend of both of them. If you choose to go really Light and not really Dark, you get more Light Force powers and more of the extreme ones becoming available to you.
Zeschuk: The Force powers are interesting because we sort of split it into two with the Light versus the Dark but the Light side is also sort of more of a buff oriented set of powers, while the Dark are sort of more combat oriented. That's not to say the Light powers can't be combat oriented as well but the Dark ones are a lot more damage oriented. It's going to depend on how you want to play the game. If you want to play it where you support your party members and you want to do a lot of healing and other sort of actions like that then you'll want the Light side. If you want to be more aggressive then the Dark side will be the way to go.
IGN: So then how do you prevent the game from becoming one where the Light side is all nice, happy righteous and the equivalent of an "easy" difficulty setting but the Dark side is more aggressive, combat-oriented and "hard" difficulty setting since you have to do everything yourself?
Muzyka: Sometimes it's a little bit harder to be on the Light side of The Force because it may be easier to just plow through a combat sequence rather than trying to take the high road and maybe helping the people out that need it. It might be a little more work to be Light side sometimes and it might be a little more work to be Dark side sometimes.
Zeschuk: Some of the Dark side quests will have an impact sort of beyond the immediate setting. One of the examples is there's an underwater level where there's fish that you need to poison or figure out some way to drive them off. If you do it the Light side way, you figure out a way to drive them off without poisoning then the material that goes into healing packs, which is actually made on this planet, will be plentiful in the future. Your Dark side effect is to poison the fish and poison the area which diminishes the availability of the material to make healing packs which will affect you later. It's not that we're specifically making it harder to play the Dark side, but there has to be some sort of reaction to your action. I think that's one of the things we're trying to do in this game as well. It's not as simple as "these are all discreet areas that aren't interrelated." There are global effects that occur when you do certain things. That's actually getting back to the whole concept that we try to add to our games, that there's this sense that there's something bigger going on and you can impact the world at large.
IGN: Can you explain how this story that's driving the game is integrated with all of this freedom we're going to have? With all of the side quests and minigames how do you balance that with moving us forward through the plot?
Muzyka: The way it works is, we want to get players an accessible entry point to the game. There's a tutorial, it starts out integrated with the story as well. So that you're learning how to play, it introduces you to the interface and the storyline and then you go to the first world of Taris. That's actually a fairly big chunk of gameplay, but it's pretty clear what you need to do. There's a lot of nonlinear options available still and some branching subquests, but not really huge sections branching off. But after Taris, you go to a couple of other worlds which in rapid succession sort of open up and you get the opportunity to explore larger areas all at once. We kind of want players to get their feet wet gradually at the beginning of the game, throw out a little bit of nonlinearity evident right away and then that rapidly expands in a much more nonlinear fashion when you get your ship, the Ebon Hawk, to travel around in.
Zeschuk: And the traveling isn't like literally space flight driving. You pick a location you want to go to and you go there. It's kind of cool because it's not like traditional console kind of console RPG thing where you can go to A to B to C to D, but you can never go back. In Knights of the Old Republic you can go back and forth, depending on what's going on, so you don't feel like you're on a train track going in one direction. Your ship is your base of operations so you can do a lot of cool things there like upgrading your weapons, you can also talk to all your party members and learn a little bit more about them and get a little bit more personality involved. You can do that in the game too, but the Ebon Hawk is actually a good dialogue path to open up with them as well. It's a pretty cool area.
Muzyka: You can build your own lightsaber, change the color crystal and damage and all that. You can assemble a scope on your rifle blaster like Han Solo or you be like Darth Vader if you want to be evil. Really you're trying to make the play pattern appeal to people who like the movies. That's really important to us, that it's a satisfying experience for people who've wanted a role playing game in the Star Wars universe.
Why do you think it's taken this long to get to a point where we can have all of these things we've always wanted out of a game based in the Star Wars universe?
Muzyka: Simon Jeffrey from LucasArts, when he approached us with this idea a few years ago, said that he wanted to build a new franchise and he really had the goal in mind to make this successful through quality. He's been tremendously supportive, as has LucasArts, throughout this entire project. We really have to give credit to LucasArts for having the insight to say "it's time to make a role-playing game and it's time to make it great." And that they wanted to partner with us to help achieve that is a great honor for us.
Zeschuk: It is a very daunting project. All these things we've described, in our imaginations we can see what they might be like. As a developer we recognize how difficult it is to match the imagination of our fans with the actual game. I think that's a challenge that we've faced with a lot of the D&D games we've worked on in the past. And we admit that that challenge is even greater with a Star Wars game. The right circumstances just came about and we're excited to be coming out with Knights of the Old Republic very soon. As you said, we could've seen this a long time ago, but now is the right time for it. Maybe it's a function of the technology of the Xbox or whatever but we realize now that this is the way that we can satisfy people. We're excited about it as well.
IGN: Speaking of excited, is there anything you've experienced in making KOTOR that you will be able to apply towards your next Xbox game?
Muzyka: Absolutely. I think there's a lot of things that we've learned that were really helpful working on this title. Because we learned a lot about the Xbox architecture and graphics features and certainly about how to think about approaching a console RPG, an epic, really deep diverse console role-playing game.
Zeschuk: We did a couple console games before like MDK2, but that was really different; a sort of light action-adventure game. But this is different, we learned a lot with Knights of the Old Republic.
Muzyka: The whole thing is different, like how you approach a journal and make it really powerful. We've put a lot of attention towards the inventory screen, the journal screen, the save-load screen where you can save anywhere in the game.
Zeschuk: Lots of little things too like red doesn't work very well on a television. Typically when you make games we just have an idea that it's easy to make stuff red, but it comes across poorly over a TV. It's actually a poor display color. It's not that big a deal but you when you damage a character you can't have a red number floating above their head. In an action game you don't have to have as much text as in a role playing game. Even with all the voice over lines --we had more than 20,000 lines of voice over and effects in the game-- every character you meet speaks to you with full voice over and animation. All the aliens speak in alien tongues with English subtitles. Even with all of that voice over support you still have to make sure the supporting text you use is legible.
Zeschuk: These may seem like nitpicky things but they're all important things in a role-playing game. There's a lot more stuff you need in a role-playing game that you don't necessarily need in a lot of other games.
Muzyka: Our philosophy at Bioware is you kind of have to look at all areas of the game. There's the scope, the epic fell, the storyline, the character development, the sound, the music, the interface elements and little details on the graphics, so that all those things together, little small things across the game, assemble into a greater whole. If a game's going to be truly epic and great, it's going to have all the little details perfect, not just the big ones. The little details are the ones that make a difference between a good game and a great game and we're really not satisfied unless this is perceived as a great game.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Pardon me while I drool...
Sure we've seen those pieces come together before with disastrous results, but there's a buzz of excitement about KOTOR and for good reason. We had the chance to talk with Drs. Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, co-CEOs of Bioware Corporation and they gave us several thousand words worth of good reasons below. All we did was lob a few basic questions at them to get things rolling.
IGN: There's every indication that KOTOR is going to offer tremendous freedom for role playing fans and it just happens to be set in the Star Wars universe. What kind of limits to this freedom can we expect?
Ray Muzyka: We really tried to identify some fun paths for players to play through and I think there are at least three ways players can approach the game in terms of "replayability." One of the ways is in terms of the Dark side and Light side of The Force. They can play the main character they create as either a Light side guy or a Dark side guy and the game will have a different play pattern and even a different ending depending on what they choose. Another difference in play pattern is which skills they choose for their party members and how they choose to approach the world with those skills. For example, with computer use and repair you might be able to hack a computer or build a droid to attack your enemies. Maybe you'll be able to persuade your enemies in a conversation rather than fighting them or you might choose just to fight them. Another approach might be just to use stealth and sneak past them. So those skills will provide quite a measure of replayability for the way you want to approach problem solving. The third kind of replayability is kind of more for fun than anything else. Sometimes you have different options in dialogue and some of them are chosen for you based on your class and some are based on your gender. Gender particularly, there's a few conversations in cantinas for example where you get treated differently depending on if you're male or female. That's just subtle thing, it doesn't really affect the gameplay in a big way. But it's really fun because you might be talking with a buddy about how you saw something cool in the cantina and he'll say "I didn't see that, I saw this." You'll develop some differences in play style that you'll be able to talk about with your friends, hopefully. I know I have with people in the office who end up surprised with a few things. They're both fun and offer exciting things to see so you almost want to create a different gender character, try different sides of The Force approach and try replaying it different ways different times.
Greg Zeschuk: I think one of the things we did in approaching our RPG, is we don't want to put limits on it. We kind of make the story, figure out what we want to do that's fun and we just see where it fits. In the case of Knights of the Old Republic, it's a pretty big game even without the replayability but the replayability makes it really easy, I think. Even to further emphasize what Ray was saying about the characters in your party you have your lead character that you can swap with the other characters you get. I end up really torn choosing who I want in my party because this guy's really cool or this guy's really funny and attacks well. It's a cool experience that I liken to say Final Fantasy X. You saw everything with your characters riding with you all the time. In Knights, it's separate. A certain group will act a certain way and another group will act a different way and if you act evil it will go a completely different way. Our focus isn't to put limits on the game, it's more to figure out what feels right. The game is pretty long, say 40-60 hours, and that's not including if you're spending time messing around playing Pazaak, the card game. It's very interesting game and I think that's what's going to surprise a lot of players, the depth.
IGN: You're saying 40-60 hours of gameplay just to get through it once, bare-bones?
Zeschuk: Yeah. We're thinking 40 if you just go along the main path and about 60 if you go around and do a variety of off-the-track quests and stuff like that. It's a pretty big game to begin with and the you add in all of this variety and you're going to need that six months to play it.
IGN: Do you have to choose either the Light or Dark side of The Force? Can you be a gray, indecisive, middle-of-the-road Jedi?
Muzyka: You can be neutral most of the game but you have to make a choice near the end of the game towards either the Light side or the Dark side. You do have to choose at the end. But you can actually be neutral through most of it and that actually gives you a blend of some of the not the extreme Light side and not the extreme Dark side force powers, but a nice blend of both of them. If you choose to go really Light and not really Dark, you get more Light Force powers and more of the extreme ones becoming available to you.
Zeschuk: The Force powers are interesting because we sort of split it into two with the Light versus the Dark but the Light side is also sort of more of a buff oriented set of powers, while the Dark are sort of more combat oriented. That's not to say the Light powers can't be combat oriented as well but the Dark ones are a lot more damage oriented. It's going to depend on how you want to play the game. If you want to play it where you support your party members and you want to do a lot of healing and other sort of actions like that then you'll want the Light side. If you want to be more aggressive then the Dark side will be the way to go.
IGN: So then how do you prevent the game from becoming one where the Light side is all nice, happy righteous and the equivalent of an "easy" difficulty setting but the Dark side is more aggressive, combat-oriented and "hard" difficulty setting since you have to do everything yourself?
Muzyka: Sometimes it's a little bit harder to be on the Light side of The Force because it may be easier to just plow through a combat sequence rather than trying to take the high road and maybe helping the people out that need it. It might be a little more work to be Light side sometimes and it might be a little more work to be Dark side sometimes.
Zeschuk: Some of the Dark side quests will have an impact sort of beyond the immediate setting. One of the examples is there's an underwater level where there's fish that you need to poison or figure out some way to drive them off. If you do it the Light side way, you figure out a way to drive them off without poisoning then the material that goes into healing packs, which is actually made on this planet, will be plentiful in the future. Your Dark side effect is to poison the fish and poison the area which diminishes the availability of the material to make healing packs which will affect you later. It's not that we're specifically making it harder to play the Dark side, but there has to be some sort of reaction to your action. I think that's one of the things we're trying to do in this game as well. It's not as simple as "these are all discreet areas that aren't interrelated." There are global effects that occur when you do certain things. That's actually getting back to the whole concept that we try to add to our games, that there's this sense that there's something bigger going on and you can impact the world at large.
IGN: Can you explain how this story that's driving the game is integrated with all of this freedom we're going to have? With all of the side quests and minigames how do you balance that with moving us forward through the plot?
Muzyka: The way it works is, we want to get players an accessible entry point to the game. There's a tutorial, it starts out integrated with the story as well. So that you're learning how to play, it introduces you to the interface and the storyline and then you go to the first world of Taris. That's actually a fairly big chunk of gameplay, but it's pretty clear what you need to do. There's a lot of nonlinear options available still and some branching subquests, but not really huge sections branching off. But after Taris, you go to a couple of other worlds which in rapid succession sort of open up and you get the opportunity to explore larger areas all at once. We kind of want players to get their feet wet gradually at the beginning of the game, throw out a little bit of nonlinearity evident right away and then that rapidly expands in a much more nonlinear fashion when you get your ship, the Ebon Hawk, to travel around in.
Zeschuk: And the traveling isn't like literally space flight driving. You pick a location you want to go to and you go there. It's kind of cool because it's not like traditional console kind of console RPG thing where you can go to A to B to C to D, but you can never go back. In Knights of the Old Republic you can go back and forth, depending on what's going on, so you don't feel like you're on a train track going in one direction. Your ship is your base of operations so you can do a lot of cool things there like upgrading your weapons, you can also talk to all your party members and learn a little bit more about them and get a little bit more personality involved. You can do that in the game too, but the Ebon Hawk is actually a good dialogue path to open up with them as well. It's a pretty cool area.
Muzyka: You can build your own lightsaber, change the color crystal and damage and all that. You can assemble a scope on your rifle blaster like Han Solo or you be like Darth Vader if you want to be evil. Really you're trying to make the play pattern appeal to people who like the movies. That's really important to us, that it's a satisfying experience for people who've wanted a role playing game in the Star Wars universe.
Why do you think it's taken this long to get to a point where we can have all of these things we've always wanted out of a game based in the Star Wars universe?
Muzyka: Simon Jeffrey from LucasArts, when he approached us with this idea a few years ago, said that he wanted to build a new franchise and he really had the goal in mind to make this successful through quality. He's been tremendously supportive, as has LucasArts, throughout this entire project. We really have to give credit to LucasArts for having the insight to say "it's time to make a role-playing game and it's time to make it great." And that they wanted to partner with us to help achieve that is a great honor for us.
Zeschuk: It is a very daunting project. All these things we've described, in our imaginations we can see what they might be like. As a developer we recognize how difficult it is to match the imagination of our fans with the actual game. I think that's a challenge that we've faced with a lot of the D&D games we've worked on in the past. And we admit that that challenge is even greater with a Star Wars game. The right circumstances just came about and we're excited to be coming out with Knights of the Old Republic very soon. As you said, we could've seen this a long time ago, but now is the right time for it. Maybe it's a function of the technology of the Xbox or whatever but we realize now that this is the way that we can satisfy people. We're excited about it as well.
IGN: Speaking of excited, is there anything you've experienced in making KOTOR that you will be able to apply towards your next Xbox game?
Muzyka: Absolutely. I think there's a lot of things that we've learned that were really helpful working on this title. Because we learned a lot about the Xbox architecture and graphics features and certainly about how to think about approaching a console RPG, an epic, really deep diverse console role-playing game.
Zeschuk: We did a couple console games before like MDK2, but that was really different; a sort of light action-adventure game. But this is different, we learned a lot with Knights of the Old Republic.
Muzyka: The whole thing is different, like how you approach a journal and make it really powerful. We've put a lot of attention towards the inventory screen, the journal screen, the save-load screen where you can save anywhere in the game.
Zeschuk: Lots of little things too like red doesn't work very well on a television. Typically when you make games we just have an idea that it's easy to make stuff red, but it comes across poorly over a TV. It's actually a poor display color. It's not that big a deal but you when you damage a character you can't have a red number floating above their head. In an action game you don't have to have as much text as in a role playing game. Even with all the voice over lines --we had more than 20,000 lines of voice over and effects in the game-- every character you meet speaks to you with full voice over and animation. All the aliens speak in alien tongues with English subtitles. Even with all of that voice over support you still have to make sure the supporting text you use is legible.
Zeschuk: These may seem like nitpicky things but they're all important things in a role-playing game. There's a lot more stuff you need in a role-playing game that you don't necessarily need in a lot of other games.
Muzyka: Our philosophy at Bioware is you kind of have to look at all areas of the game. There's the scope, the epic fell, the storyline, the character development, the sound, the music, the interface elements and little details on the graphics, so that all those things together, little small things across the game, assemble into a greater whole. If a game's going to be truly epic and great, it's going to have all the little details perfect, not just the big ones. The little details are the ones that make a difference between a good game and a great game and we're really not satisfied unless this is perceived as a great game.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Pardon me while I drool...
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