How Bioware Makes A Community Work

Gamasutra has an article discussing the procedures that Bioware uses to maintain and grow their online communities based around their games. From the article: "Fans as content creators are another asset. 'if you build it, they will build it as well...' Some members want to add to the community in very real and meaningful ways, and some of them possess 'mad skillz.' '90% of what sustains a community,' Watamaniuk stated, 'is the community itself. You provide the framework for their work. If fans are there creating content, it means that you don't have to create 100% of the content yourself.'"

Comments

Forums

[devilsadvoc8]

Bioware's forums are a great example of success. As described in the article, they listen to all of the complaints and stories of exploits, bugs, wishes, etc. As they were developing expansion packs, the developers would frequently drop in the forums to squash rumors that weren't true, help tease the fans about new features and explain what could and could not be done with the engine. It helped to keep the masses from unrealistic expectations and keeps flames to a minimum.

They also support the modding community quite well which is especially important for a D&D based RPG.

Re:"Support content creators [unless they use Linu

[BioGeorg]

Last I heard, Bioware wasn't even giving hints about their proprietary package formats, let alone a full specification, so it's all been through reverse engineering.
Excuse me? Sounds you heard a lie last time, you might want to check your sources / and or hearing before you post something like this next time.

http://nwn.bioware.com/developers/

For those too lazy to check, the link contains the official documentation on the games "proprietary" data file formats (and tons of it), sourcecode examples, explainations and help from the tools programmers, etc.

I guess none of the talented artists are using Macs, and none of the talented scripters are using Linux; they are all using Windows, right?
Last time I checked you couldn't create art content with the windows toolset either, you need to use Max or NWmax for it. As a scripter, you can use vi if you want to, there are standalone compilers available for NWScript if you feel like it.

The reason why there is no toolset for linux and why there will never be one has been discussed over and over on our forums and we have been pretty open about it. The development environment that was used to create the toolset was supposed to have a linux version but the company producing it cancelled linux support during NWN development. No secrets here, just business. A full port of the toolset after that point was and certaintly is now cost prohibitive.

We still release client and server patches, for all supported operating systems 3.5 years after the game was released with the next patch (a big content patch with new art, sound, a load of new scripting functionality, etc) coming up sometime in the coming months, but BioWare Corp. is also not a charity, so maybe it is time to revisit some of the expectations you have there :).

Regards
Georg
BioWare