We sat down with Bioware's founders to talk about the studio's celebrated past and promising future

You think you’re just having a nice old jabber with the twin heads of one of the world’s greatest videogame studios, when out comes the doctor joke. It’s distinctly un-hilarious and takes you right back to that point in your childhood when you were sitting in a white room with a taciturn, bespectacled man administering a painful Hepatitis-B shot – jarring, and not exactly conducive to the flow of conversation.

The joke is dusted off when we suggest that Neverwinter Nights’ single-player campaign was regarded by some as inferior to those BioWare presented in previous games – anaemic, even. “I would disagree,” Ray Muzyka counters, “from triple-A Alberta beef to tons of spinach salad, Neverwinter Nights was given plenty of ‘iron’ throughout its creation.” Yeah.

And then you remember: these guys are doctors. It’s the kick-off for pretty much every interview with Muzyka and his partner, Greg Zeschuk, so you really should know better by now, but it takes some time to adjust. Sure, neither Muzyka nor Zeschuk have had the time to go all Hawkeye on the infirm recently, but the dual-identity slips out sometimes.

It’s not surprising, then, that pretty much everything about BioWare comes in twos: the two founders; the partnership with Pandemic; the fact that for every good story path there’s an evil one; the corresponding double endings; or even the two companions who are allowed to leave the ship/tavern/safe house with you at any time, as has been the convention since Neverwinter Nights: Hordes Of The Underdark.

This year is a major turning point for the studio, still located in its original home in Alberta, Canada. No, Zeschuk and Muzyka aren’t returning to test their allegiance to Hippocrates, rather, BioWare is releasing Dragon Age: Origins, its first RPG to reportedly abandon the dualistic model. Oh, you’ll be confronted with the moral dilemmas and achingly difficult decisions that typify BioWare’s interactive narratives, but they’re more varied this time, and as in 2007’s hidden gem The Witcher, you’ll likely be picking from the lesser of several evils. You’ll get to take three companions with you, too.

“Every game we do we’re always striving to make better than the previous ones,” Muzyka explains, “and Dragon Age is one where the morality and alignment, the way the world looks at you, and the way you look at the world… There’s a lot more nuance to it. And your companions really are the lenses through which you see the rest of the world. Each of them has their own opinion of you. There’s no black-and-white system of good and evil here – that’s up to you to determine. You’re going to have to do some things that are kinda grey.

Your companion characters can like your actions – they might even become your best friend or even a romantic interest – or they may hate them and become your enemy. The system in Dragon Age is one of the more interesting ones we have"

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