BioWare: "We're not looking to kill WoW"

November 28th, 2006, 17:16 Posted By: wraggster

BioWare has admitted that its not looking to kill the mighty World of Warcraft with its hotly anticipated MMOG currently in development.

"There hasn't really been anything that's been built to beat it [WoW] yet - but we just want to be competitive," the developer's Gordon Walton, co-studio director at BioWare Austin, revealed in an interview on 1up.com.

"Will some people who play WoW play our game? Of course. But we'd be better off if we got new customers, too. It's not a zero-sum game out there".

BioWare's MMOG project has been shrouded in secrecy previously, but breaking silence on it in the interview the dev additionally spoke about the philosophy that's forming the backbone of its game.

Rich Vogel, co-studio director of product development explained: "The key points we're gonna do that no one's done before in an MMOG are bring story, character and emotion to it". Elaborating on the story element, James Ohlen, creative director at BioWare Austin informed that the dev wants to bring "what BioWare's famous for to the online space, and one of the things BioWare's famous for is storytelling".

He continued: "Most 'storytelling' in MMORPGs is just FedEx quests - you know, you have to go get some eggs -- and it's presented in a format that's just a bunch of text thrown at you in paragraph for ...and that's not so exciting. We want to bring a level of storytelling that's equal to the single-player box games that BioWare has done. I think we can do that. One of the big challenges will be making our storytelling work in an environment that has multiple players."

BioWare still might be refusing to discuss the game's setting, but the developer did go on to reveal the likes of plans to have a good selection of visual customisation for player characters, how it'll be possible to solo in the MMOG and that end-game content is a major part of the design plan and different to WoW's end-game model: "...we don't want players to be stuck grinding through the same content over and over again".

In fact, the developer made it clear that it doesn't want to encourage playing through the same content over and over in general, but rather that it wants "to encourage players to continue to make progress in their story, to do new quests, consume new content, constantly move forward," James Ohlen divulged.

And when will we see BioWare's MMOG released? Well, it'll be out when the developer's 100-percent happy with it.

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