BioWare - Dev Dive
21In this first episode of Dev Dive we bring to you, info on the developers, BioWare.
BioWare was founded in Edmonton, Canada in 1995 by three friends who met in medical school. Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, and Augustine Yip got their start by designing medical educational programs, but quickly realized they had to find a better outlet for their creativity. They were eventually joined by Trent and Brent Oster, and Marcel Zeschuk, taking their shared love of video games and knowledge of programming from school to produce their own games. Now, coming up on their 25th anniversary, the company has a reputation for ambitious roleplaying games with immersive storylines and deep character development. Their games have won awards of all types and sold millions of copies.
Depending on how old you are, you’re likely at least familiar with their more recent hits, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Star Wars: The Old Republic, but if you’re my age - or older - you know that BioWare was blowing the minds of video game players since the mid-90s. We’re going to cover their library of games today - a library shockingly devoid of many duds. Let’s dive in.
The Early Works
The BioWare team pooled their own funds and got started with Shattered Steel, a first person giant robot fighting game in the vein of the MechWarrior series. They used a demo of the game that they developed to get interest from publishers, and they reached a deal with Interplay. The game drew attention for its destructible terrain (something we take for granted now) as well as zone specific damage, meaning you could target specific areas of an enemy, instead of dealing damage to the enemy as a whole. The game, released in 1996, was well-received, but was kind of viewed as a “popcorn” game: enjoyable, but not really in-depth or challenging. It wasn’t until their second game that BioWare found their voice.
That second game was none other than Baldur’s Gate. Released in 1998, Baldur’s Gate was the product of the BioWare team’s love for pen-and-paper roleplaying games, specifically Dungeons & Dragons. At the time, Interplay (the publisher of Shattered Steel) had the license to use D&D, so they handed the project off to BioWare. The game was built in the “Forgotten Realms,” a setting familiar to D&D players, and functioned using D&D’s rulesets, meaning combat was decided by the digital equivalent of rolling a 20 sided dice to see if attacks or other actions achieve their goal. In many ways, Baldur’s Gate established BioWare’s reputation for in-depth, story driven games, thanks to its abundant quests and a load of side quests. It also introduced custom-crafted characters, certain character classes being able to use certain classes of items, and the game pausing when combat is about to initiate - a feature you’ll see in KotOR and Mass Effect. It also has a feature in which your character becomes “encumbered” - meaning you’ll slow down significantly - if you have too many items in your inventory. If you’re familiar with Mass Effect, you’ll notice that feature didn’t survive to their more modern games, because you can carry so much stuff…
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