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Bioware Developing an MMOG
Gamasutra reports that Canadian developer Bioware has opened a studio in Austin, Texas. The new studio will be the base of operations for development of an as yet unnamed MMORPG. From the article: "Joining the Austin team as lead designer is James Ohlen, BioWare's creative director, whose previous credits include lead or co-lead design roles on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II. Also leading the BioWare Austin team are MMO veterans Richard Vogel and Gordon Walton." That's some serious firepower. Can't wait to hear what that's about.
Hopefully BioWare will take a page from Second Life and avoid the mistakes made by WoW. In a recent speech at the Game Developers Conference, a designer noted that the players of Second Life contribute over 20,000 design hours per day to the content of the game, which would otherwise cost Linden Labs $400 million per year to produce in-house. To be the "next big MMO", BioWare's game needs to empower players to create their own content and produce player-driven conflict. Otherwise, it'll just be another linear "RPG on rails" a la WoW.
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Hopefully the inclusion of people who have worked on games like these guys have will bring some fresh air to the MMO space. I guess I just have a problem paying for games that aren't really all that much different than everything else.
Unfortunately I don't see any MMORPG ever becoming MAJORLY story driven. Why? Because it is not as satisfying for the majority of their players to actually have to think through the story to progress. Remember, all MMORPGs are in essence...are glorified Skinner Boxes. Having to think through the story is simply a barrier in their clicking through of menus to get their reward. And like you said, it doesn't matter what the story is if the end result is that the quest itself is a generic "kill X, return with Y and be rewarded with Z".
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Bioware is one of my all time facorite RPG creators. But the MMOG is such a huge undertaking. Just look what it's done to Blizzard (aside from making them even richer). They've got a huge MMORPG fanbase, but for the moment it has seemingly nullfied any strong motive to create good solo RPG and RTS games. I can't blame Blizzard. I just hope Bioware doesn't follow down that road.
While the storlines in WoW are nice, they suffer from the same problem all persistent worlds suffer from, they are persistent, a.k.a. static. No matter how many people raid the Scarley Monestary Cathedral, no matter how many times I personally kill Scarlet Commander Mograine, he's still standing there the next time I walk into the cathedral, the Scarlet Crusade suffers no setback. If I complete a quest, I get some text talking about what is happening as a result, but that result is completly ficticious, nothing ever changes.
Of course, you can't expect the world to actually change for every quest, it would be unmanagable. This was tried with Ultima Online with rather poor results. Origin would have a would event occur and a few high-level players would do it so fast, few other people had heard about it before it was done. So, unless you were one of the hard-core players, and powerful enough to get involved, the quests might as well have not existed.
So, while the writing that went into WoW is very good, it still is not a story driven game. The backstory is there to provide a framework to hang the "go here, kill X number of Y monster quests" on.
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