EA buys Bioware, their MMO delayed

Shocker! Huge videogame publisher EA purchased a company called VG Holding Corp. this afternoon, which suddenly means that the company that makes Madden and the company that made Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights are now one and the same! Both BioWare and Pandemic Studios are apparently held by VG Holding Corp, which means EA now owns them both.

And while it means we don't quite know what's happening to BioWare's Mass Effect (one hopes it doesn't become Mass Effect 2008, with new TrueTouch roleplaying), it also means BioWare's planned MMO is being pushed back. While EA plans to get 10 titles out of the two game makers (the BioWare we know couldn't make 5 titles in 4 years if their life depended on it), the MMO is being pushed to "more towards the back end of the schedule," which puts it around 2011.

Personally, for the sake of my sanity, I'm going to have a little more faith in EA than I would if you'd hypothesized this to me yesterday. I love BioWare and their games (all the way back to Baldur's Gate), and I can only hope that they'll stand strong against EA, and choose quality over quantity, a choice that EA seems to make wrongly time and time again. BioWare will still be BioWare, right? Right?

... Right?