Single player vs. Multiplayer

Firingsquad: What are the biggest reasons for making your own engine?

Greg: Unique gameplay experience. As I mention above, I feel that unless you make huge modifications to existing engines you're not going to get a totally unique gameplay experience. Given the competition in today's market there's no point in making a game that isn't unique in some way. Making a new engine or heavily modifying an existing engine (almost the same amount of work) leaves you more or less at the same endpoint. Taking an existing engine and slapping new art into it isn't going to sell in today's competitive market. The wise game consumers always want something fundamentally new and unless you provide them something new and exciting they're not going to play your game.

More parachuting

Firingsquad: MDK2 has been slated as a single player only game, which has raised some questions in the gaming community. There are very few games left that are single player only - the last big title like that in this genre was Thief. Do you think it's more of a challenge to deliver a good game nowadays if you only have single player as an option?

Greg: I think that when you do a game that is both single player and multiplayer that you're splitting your development effort. I think most people are starting to choose where to put their development time ­ look at all of the multiplayer-only games being made ­ Team Fortress 2, Quake 3, Tribes, Unreal Tournament. The developer of those games are choosing to spend their efforts doing primarily multiplayer games with single player simulation of multiplayer games. We're choosing to do the opposite of everyone else (a wise BioWare trait for success) and focusing on making a great single player game.

I feel that a game featuring a good story, interesting characters and involved, puzzle and action oriented gameplay can be a success.

My bottom line with MDK2 is: if you want to play the most compelling single player game around buy MDK2. If you want great multiplayer buy one of the above games, they're all going to be awesome.

A monster of some sort

Firingsquad: Speaking of which, even though MDK2 has no multiplayer, does the Omen engine have the capability? Could a possible expansion or mod have multiplayer?

Greg: The Omen engine absolutely has multiplayer capability. In fact, one of our unannounced projects is a primarily multiplayer title that uses Omen as its base technology.

If we wanted to convert MDK2 over to a multiplayer game it would be possible but it would be a huge amount of work.