14 DAY TRIAL // BioWare has been one of the most innovative developers in the world of video gaming in the last few years, creating two full new franchises with Dragon Age and Mass Effect, and one of the leading developers working there has said that the teams are aiming for a more diverse video game market.
Manveer Heir, who is a senior designer working at BioWare Montreal, has told Gamasutra that the characters created in video games need to be more than the currently dominating white heroes and that good writers should be able to build narratives linked to diversity.
Manveer Heir said in a longer interview that, “I think we just need to have more writers in the industry in terms of more mature writers. This is not everyone in the industry. I do not want to diminish writers. There are a lot of amazing writers. I’ve worked with a lot of really amazing writers. But I’ve also come across bad writers unfortunately, like you would everywhere.”
He added, “So, if we make sure that we try to promote and push with our good writers… we give them the backing that they need, the support so that they don’t feel like they’re left on an island. And that we also challenge them. We challenge each other as an industry.”
Heir believes that depending on the sexual orientation, the race or the gender of a character the way players interact with the world can chance in significant and in surprising ways.
At the moment BioWare is working on two big projects: Star Wars: The Old Republic, the MMO that should be out before the end of the year, and Mass Effect 3, which has been delayed to the first few months of 2012.
Both experiences have the potential to allow gamers to experience game worlds from a number of points of view depending on the way they build their characters.