BioWare

BioWare Becomes its Own Label, Good for UO?

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According to Gamasutra, BioWare has become its own label under EA.

This is really big news.

What’s happening is that there is now a “superdivision” of sorts called EA Labels, and that will have the labels EA Games, EA Sports, EA Play, and BioWare under it. In the past, BioWare was under EA Games, and now it’s been given a much more prominent role. Frank Gibeau is heading up EA Labels – he formerly ran EA Games.

This is part of a bigger initiative on EA’s part, according to EA’s CEO:

“We’re focusing on building our intellectual properties/franchises into year-round business,” he wrote today.

“We are already seeing big returns on our investment in change. That’s why this is precisely the right time to update our organization.”

And yesterday, BioWare San Francisco was created out of EA2D. The EA2D Studio created Dragon Age Legends and Mirror’s Edge 2D, so it makes sense given that BioWare is taking over all of the RPG and MMORPG titles.

As the article mentions, this is now the sixth BioWare location, or maybe studio depending on your view:
* BioWare San Francisco
* BioWare Edmonton
* BioWare Montreal
* BioWare Austin (Star Wars: The Old Republic)
* BioWare Mythic in Fairfax Virginia (Ultima Onilne, Darkage of Camelot, Warhammer Online)
* BioWare Customer Service office (Ireland)

What does this mean for UO? Really good things I believe. To me, it means that full control over UO will be handled by RPG/MMORPG folks from BioWare. I think it was already happening to an extent. BioWare has already shown an enthusiasm for the Ultima franchise, work is being done on UO to grow it going into the future, plus the Ultima Forever project, and on Dark Age of Camelot. Dark Age of Camelot recently received a new website at DarkAgeofCamelot.com and has dropped the Mythic label, carrying only the Origin.com, EA, and BioWare labels. It’s similar to UltimaForever.com. BioWare appears to be taking full control of its franchises.

I was actually going to sit on this for a few days since I had another article I was working on that tied into it, but it really deserves its own story.

Founders of BioWare Speak About MMOs

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Gamasutra has posted an extensive, 4-page interview with Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk. Many UO players may not necessarily recognize the names, but they are the founds of BioWare, and Dr. Muzyka is the head of BioWare and Dr. Zeschuk is the Vice President and “Group Creative Officer” at BioWare. that’s very important to UO players as Ultima Online is a part of BioWare (BioWare Mythic) within Electronic Arts.

Obviously the majority of the interview is going to revolve around Star Wars: The Old Republic, the upcoming MMO from BioWare, but I think it’s important to note how they view the MMO industry and MMOs, as both of them are in a position to influence UO. The so-called Ultima reboot also falls under their domain.

The interview even starts off discussing their influence within BioWare:

Ray Muzyka: We set vision statements. We talk about core values a lot, and we try to live them. We set a vision. Our vision for our group within [parent] EA, for BioWare, is create, deliver, and evolve the emotionally engaging games in the world.

Some of this is really ironic, given how UO is treated by EA at times:

Ray Muzyka: We talk about them a lot. Yeah, we take them seriously. Like, we make decisions in that context. Our employees, our customers, our investors, we try and deliver things that are really aligned with all three of those groups to have a sustainable business long term. We try to make decisions that reflect quality in the workplace, quality in our products, entrepreneurship. We try to be very humble, high integrity with how we deal with all the people we work with, and all those stakeholder groups.

There is discussion of the various studios within BioWare, including BioWare Mythic under which UO directly falls, working across the studios to help one another, but it sure doesn’t feel like UO is getting much help, even though we know UO developers have helped out with Star Wars:

RM: It’s very collaborative, too, where different team members will help one another even across studio groups. So, we have Edmonton, Austin, Montreal, Virginia, and Ireland, the five studios within BioWare, and of course our great partner studios within Electronic Arts.

A lot of people are contributing trying to make the games as good as they can be and give feedback and play them and sometimes work on different projects from different locations. So, it’s very much a team. It’s a large team, it’s a distributed team, but we have a common sense of purpose and identity and shared common values. Everyone’s very passionate about their craft.

RM: Great support from EA to build our games.

GZ: There’s a lot of EA support in all our stuff.

RM: In fact, that’s one of the reasons we joined EA, like the inspirational leadership from guys like John Riccitiello. He’s still inspirational to us. He’s a mentor to us. The opportunity to become a publisher, as well as a developer. So, we’re doing all aspects of that now. We’re working with the sales and marketing teams directly, the development teams. That’s pretty exciting. You know, it’s a way to get closer to our consumers and the ability to pursue new things. Like when we joined EA, we had two studios, right?

It’s a very interesting read, but at the same time UO players will be slightly frustrated, as UO doesn’t get directly mentioned and all of the wonderful things they talk about, the support they are getting from EA, etc., none of that appears to be trickling down to UO. One would think that when they talk about their stable of games and how important MMOs are, that UO and Dark Age of Camelot would get mentioned, even in passing, but no, that’s not to be.

I think UO has some support – we are getting artwork, quest, and new player system upgrades. But the people at the top of BioWare have had ample opportunity to discuss UO publicly, or at least offer some public support of UO, and it just doesn’t happen. I don’t want to say they are pretending that UO, and DAoC, don’t exist, but it feels like it.

Read the full article at Gamasutra