I heard about this. Looks like Bioware is REALLY trying to put nails in their own coffin. After their attempt at to rekindle the sonic franchise was met with a worldwide 'meh'. They are doing something even stupider. A star wars mmo.
I've been in the cesspool of this market for a long time. Not so long as some others but long enough to know they are trying something that will fail.
They are trying to jump two massive hurdles.
1. The world has tasted a good Star Wars MMO. I speak of the early incarnations of Starwars: Galaxies. An mmo with no levels, rampant and creative class mixing, integral and useful non-combat classes that could be played as a main, not a secondary character. Even the random system of unlocking Jedi that kept them a rarity. The later incarnations dumbed it to a console-sque level based faux-fps game and destroyed its fanbase. But the world tasted a unique and different mmo, that was Star Wars, and remember it.
2. They face the Blizzard juggernaut World of Warcraft. Do not say not to compare it because all MMO's are in battle with it. 'WoW' is a anomaly, it's userbase dwarfs even the Koreans Lineage did at it's highpoint passing it by close to 4 million at last count. WoW's engine is unique in that it can run on almost any machine with it's simplistic engine and cartoony graphics and not make the user feel like they are missing anything due to a crappy computer.
They are building a game that will have to live up to what people saw Galaxies as, and draw people away from a game they are already entrenched in like X-addicts at a rave party.
~Tobe (jaded mmo vet)
