Game development is a bit of a black art, with every studio plotting their own approach to the creation of their games.
With BioWare developing some of the best and best-loved games in the world, one has to wonder: What makes the company so successful?
Focus on Emotion
Through their games, BioWare has always sought to create experiences that are about story and emotion. Their investment in talent and technology has always been oriented around the goal to engage players deeply.
This has resulted not only in BioWare games having some of the best interactive storytelling in the industry, but also one of the most loyal fanbases in the business.
Gamers come to care about the BioWare games they play because they are able to invest in something more than technology or action. They form personal connections to the digital characters in the rich worlds they are invited to explore.
They want to inhabit those worlds, and the worlds become part of them.
Common Pillars
All BioWare games embrace a set of common player experience pillars: being able to explore, having nonlinear and interactive storylines, and having strong action and combat with the freedom to define and progress your character.
BioWare sets out to create games that support these experience pillars.
Labor of Love
BioWare does everything they can to help the player fall in love with their games. This often comes down to details, the tuning and polish that can only come at the very end of a project.
On a macro level, a version of the game without this additional attention from the team would be nearly identical—what the player sees on the back of the box, what is shown in trailers, and even moments that are sampled would feel like the same game.
But because everyone on the team wants the player to fall in love with the game, they pour their heart and soul into making it as good as it can be.
These hundreds or thousands of little details—polished items, a tight narrative, clean art assets, optimal performance, and no bugs—result in a shipped game that players can fall in love with.
Culture of Excellence
As development on a BioWare game comes to a close, everyone on the team is playing it regularly, sharing feedback, and logging bugs they come across.
Beyond the team, play-testing feedback is being gathered from dozens of sources: focus testing, mock reviews, executive reviews, and so on. All feedback, no matter the source, is considered valid and valuable.
The team is pragmatic about taking feedback. If one or two people out of five hundred recognize a flaw or feel that something is amiss about a point in the game, scaling up to several million players means a lot of people might feel that same thing.
Being open to all feedback is a big part of what makes BioWare games so polished and successful, and this openness to feedback and criticism extends to all areas of the team itself, because after all, the team members are usually their own worst critics.
Creating Greatness
In the end, clear goals and a mature process certainly play a role in explaining how BioWare can deliver such well-crafted, successful game experiences.
But ultimately it is the passion of the developers that ensures the player experiences magic through the game.
The team at BioWare constantly pushes themselves to perform better and better, with the ultimate goal of creating great and long-lasting games for their fans.
