Abalieno/HRose informs us that Bioware are to make a virtual world. Well, he actually says that they're giving us a fantasy MMO, but I can hope that that translates into a virtual world. Bioware, after all, are the people who gave us, arguably, too much world in Knights of the Old Republic, and gifted us the surrealistically huge playspace of Baldur's Gate. Surely, I whisper to my precious, they will give us player houses and cities and all sorts of Raph Koster-ish delights. Surely? After all, project lead appears to be James Ohlen, who was involved in all those great Bioware RPG titles.
But I'm less certain than I might be. Here's why: World of Warcraft.
WoW will suggest a certain approach: do the basics, do it well, and release a limited feature set when balanced. This is a danger, but I hope that Bioware are canny enough to know that they cannot produce yet another diku and hope to just steal the game away from Blizzard.
What interests me are two other names that have been hired for the task: Richard Vogel and Gordon Walton. Vogel was senior prducer at Origin on Ultima Online, which was, 7 or 8 years ago, already more of a world than Blizzard have yet created. A world of gankage, but still a world. He worked there with sandbox-Tsar Koster, and both went to SOE, not that we should judge them for that: I suspect that the influence of each was visible in the high targets of Star Wars Galaxies. In any case, I hope that he'll pick up where UO and SWG left off: a world with games.
Gordon Walton has been at both EA and SOE, and as a result I loath his prior affiliations, but he's a creative type, and once again someone deeply involved with the SWG experiment. So long as he and Vogel didn't get too badly burned by that episode, then hopefully they'll be capable of coming up with a real treat. And I trust Bioware to just as great a degree as I distrust SOE.