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Blue Milk & Cereal: Would You Attend A “BioCon”?
No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal. Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!
Today’s BM&C was seeded by an idea from Zach Lee on Twitter… thanks Zach!
Gaming conventions are always a big deal every year, and Star Wars: The Old Republic along with EA, BioWare and LucasArts attend many of them. Some are for players such as PAX or gamescom, and some are geared for the industry such as E3. These are generally huge stages upon which publishers can catch the eyes of the public, and shine the lights on their wares.
A few years back in 2005, Blizzard sort of redefined the idea of a gaming convention by holding their own – Blizzcon. Since then, they’ve held it every year except 2006 and attendance has grown exponentially. In 2005, just over 8,000 people (including myself) were there. Last year? Over 29,000. And they’ve worked to make it accessible not only on the Internet but also on pay-per-view over DirecTV.
So that got me to thinking… BioWare has plenty of franchises and some equally passionate and numerous fans. Would something like a “BioCom” be possible? A gathering of all of the BioWare games and gamers, focused on letting fans see and play the future? It’s possible that with this week’s announcement of the Guild Summit in Austin, the seeds have already been planted… come on David, 200 people is no different than 20,000! :)
Anyway, would you attend a BioCon if there was one? Would you travel to get your hands on Mass Effect 3 early? How about an early peek at the TOR expansion race? Let us know!
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Blue Milk & Cereal: Is TOR The Last Of Its Kind?
No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal. Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!
Developing a massively multiplayer online role-playing game is a complex task. There are all of the creative aspects to it, it’s a massive technical undertaking, a logistical Matterhorn to manage, and last but not least, it requires large investment in the form of human and monetary resources. There aren’t many publishers or developers who are willing – or even able to – take on that burden, float the cash and shoulder the risk.
Electronic Arts/BioWare, Activision/Blizzard, maybe Bungie and some others probably can afford to, but even they have to question the status-quo when it comes to development budgets and timelines for these games. Star Wars: The Old Republic was in development for about 6 years, give or take, with a rumored budget of over $100M. Everything from record albums, movies and skyscrapers all take less time to create. Part of the reason is because there are long-tested and improved processes for doing so.
In my opinion, the only practical way we’ll continue to see games of this scale is through development and advancement of core technology and tools to assist designers and developers adopt a more rapid development cycle. In other words, things that let them focus on creating the content rather than the technology, with a simplified pipeline.
The problem is, this set of tools and technology also has to keep up. BioWare used the HeroEngine in an attempt to avoid creating some of their technology completely from scratch, but ended up customizing it so much it’s but a shadow of it’s former self. Could a game as large as TOR rely on a third party company to advance their product? Can they trust them to even exist in the future? So even with available middleware, engines and other “starter kits” to help reduce the cost (possibly) and time (maybe) to make games, we’re still not there yet.
We wanted to get the collective thoughts of everyone in the AAJ Army… we’re suspecting many of you are MMO enthusiasts, not just TOR players, so you may have an opinion. Is TOR the last of it’s kind? What can be done for these games to keep coming? Is it even a good thing if they do?
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