NEW YORK – The team behind Mass Effect and Dragon Age says that multiplayer and online interactivity will play integral roles in many of its upcoming games.
Speaking to Wired.com at a Manhattan event last month, BioWare CEO and co-founder Dr. Ray Muzyka said the developer is exploring new ways to add online features to its role-playing games.
"The way we look at multiplayer online features is that they shouldn't be dilutive or weakening the experience," Muzyka said. "They should be additive, they should strengthen it, they should enhance it."
"Multiplayer ... can't be tacked on," BioWare co-founder and vice president Greg Zeschuk said at the same event. "That's one of the pitfalls that some of the people who have done multiplayer have made. 'Oh, what's on our marketing checklist? Gotta have multiplayer, check the box.'"
Muzyka said that multiplayer could mean a wide variety of different things: competitive or cooperative gameplay, but also such features as a leaderboard that compares players' statistics and progress.
BioWare has also been looking into ways to link their games to social networks like Facebook and Twitter, letting players share news and information with their Internet circles.
"It's a way to bring your friends into the experience and share it with them," Muzyka said.
Multiplayer takes center stage in BioWare's latest game, Star Wars: The Old Republic, which it released last month for PC. As a massively multiplayer online RPG, The Old Republic has no single-player components; you cooperate with and compete against other people in a virtual, persistently online recreation of the Star Wars universe.
The developer's next game, Mass Effect 3, will also feature the franchise's first multiplayer experience. Rumors suggest that the next Dragon Age will follow a similar course.
So is BioWare trending away from single-player-only experiences like previous games Dragon Age: Origins or Mass Effect 2? According to Muzyka, that just depends on your definition of "single-player."
"I view it as a broad definition," he said, pointing to post-release downloadable content and leaderboards as examples of online features that the developer is pursuing in its games. Extra game content that players download can be single-player, but Muzyka still groups it together with social experiences as a general idea of "online connectivity."
BioWare VP Zeschuk added that multiplayer "makes the whole experience better" for a game like Mass Effect 3. The upcoming RPG will feature an optional cooperative mode called Galaxy at War, in which you can team up with other players to fight off marauding Reapers, earning bonuses and unlocking areas that you'll be able to access in your single-player campaign.
"There's actually a compelling, rational gameplay narrative that explains why it's there," Zeschuk said. "That's one of the differences in how we want to approach [multiplayer]. We don't want to tack it on. We want to make sure it's thoughtful and integrated really well."
Future BioWare games could feature integration with social games on Facebook and mobile phones, Muzyka said. With new studios in Sacramento and San Francisco dedicated to social gaming, the developer is dead set on expanding its popular franchises into new realms.
"We've seen a lot of overlap between players of traditional console and PC games and players of social games," Muzyka said. "They play it maybe in a different way, with different time constraints – but there are a lot of core gamers who really enjoy that."
"Our approach to that is going to be building deep, rich experiences that are going to appeal to core social gamers," he said. "If we extend some of our existing IPs, by definition that'd make some of our IPs multiplayer."
