Bioware On The MMO Competition

Star Wars: The Old Republic developer Bioware has revealed it has kept a close eye on the MMO competition throughout the development process.In an interview with IncGamers, Bioware’s creative director James Ohlen stressed that there is much to be learned from rival MMOs.“Obviously World of Warcraft is the biggest game out there, and they’re developed by Blizzard, who’s [sic] just amazing,” he said.“That game is incredible and you can learn a lot by playing it and just seeing what they did and the smart decisions they made. There’s other games – NCsoft is very good at building some games; Aion is a very, very pretty game that came out recently.“Obviously Warhammer from Mythic, that’s a very good game, you can learn a lot from that. We play all the games as they come out. Every time a new MMO comes out, we sit down, play it, and try to learn as much as we can from it,” he added.Ohlen went on to explain that creating a game in a vacuum can lead to problems.“You can’t compete in a genre without knowing what’s out there, otherwise you’re going to be reinventing the wheel everywhere,” he said.“You need to take a look at some of the hard lessons that other developers have learned and then focus on developing some new stuff that’s going to differentiate you from those guys.”According to Ohlen, storyline and combat are the two major factors which differentiate The Old Republic from the competition, find out more in the full interview.