BioWare "aggressively" exploring new MMO development

"Blizzard maintains the illusion of only building great games because they refuse to release the games that aren't great."

It'd be nice if other development companies adhered to this 'illusion'.

Blizzard is great in that way :)

Lots of games get cancelled from a lot of developers, just most go on to create crap any ways. Blizzard haven't released a whole new game since like 2002/2003 so who knows if they can deliver any more. They've sure done a great job at ruining WoW.

Blizzard likes saying they won't release games until they're ready but that's not really the whole secret behind their success. What Blizzard, and a couple of other developers, are extremely good at is reinvesting into their products after the release. They constantly improve things and keep on working with balance issues.

It's very obvious in world of warcraft, a game that released without things like battlegrounds and very broken classes (tell a druid today they had to level in bear form and pop out to heal twice doing each kill because catform simply didn't work and they won't believe you etc.). But Blizzard is still releasing patches for Starcraft and Diablo 2 as well.

Bioware, unfortunately, have never been very good at that. You'll still need to find fan fixes for the pc version of Mass Effect for silly things like adding more sound channels in an ini file, and EA support isn't exactly recommendable. But who knows, maybe they'll step up now that they'll be dealing with a community which is very accustomed to awesome support.

You could make the same claim about nothing groundbreaking coming out of Blizzard. What they both do is ruthlessly prune their games of what people aren't finding fun. Which is obviously debatable since different people like different things, but on the whole, you can see as games advance the changes. Game systems that they obviously looked at and said 'you know what, this adds nothing to the game. Cut it.'

I realize what constitutes a good game or even a great game can be very subjective, my wonder game can also be your steaming pile of dung. That aside, Bioware is pretty much the only company I will buy games from without finding some way to try the game first, either by demo or at a friend's house or something. I've never played a Bioware game that let me down, and furthermore, they seem to constantly improve.

Baldur's Gate 2 was better than Baldur's Gate, Mass Effect 2 was better than Mass Effect, etc.

I can't say that about a lot of developers.

Ooh, I'd jump on that in a heartbeat.

Totally burned out and uninterested in Star Wars stuff, but give me a quality Mass Effect MMO, and BioWare will get my $15/month.

and redid the inventory system, can't forget about that.

I'll admit they might of overdid it though, since now the only way to find credits in that game is through hacking and bypassing, salvaging medpacks and heavy ammo, and missions. The only issue with the first game's inventory system was the complete and utter lack of foresight in allowing those things to stack. If I had 50 generic blasters, please just say so, don't make me sell them individually, or have to break them down to omni-gel one at a time...

Do like the freedom of gear (besides the DLC/collector edition gear), and the combat is better this time around.

Totally agree.

I would so cream my pants if they did a Forgotten Realms MMO. Only Bioware could pull it off and make it feel like a real D&D world and not that crap that Turbine published.

Please do not.... EA will milk everything Bioware make till there is noting left and I think they already lost the rights to make games base on "Forgotten Realms" , like they did Dragon Age and did not include the Forgotten Realms settings....

The only way a new FR game will happen is D&D 4.0, which is a turd-sammich. Of course, a game with Pathfinder 3.5E would be awesome but will never happen. Here's hoping Wizards pulls their head out of their ass and goes back to 3.5E style with D&D 5.0 and we can finally get a decent game again.

I would expect a Dragon Age MMO before a D&D one, but hell they have lied before. They said they weren't interested in other people's IP anymore but then they announce SW:TOR.

THIS, this, moar of this :D