I’ve been following an interesting development in the gaming community this week. It started three days ago when someone claiming to be an EA employee (going by the handle EA Louse) decided to start a blog and blow the whistle on EA and specifically the management of Bioware Mythic which was an EA merging of Bioware and Mythic Entertainment to produce Dark Age of Camelot, Warhammer Online, and Ultima Online. Some of the same people are working on Star Wars: The Old Replubic according to EA Louse. You can see the original blog here.
What’s the big deal? Well, it caught a lot of attention from their claims that because of the reasons that Warhammer Online was a failure, it’s also going to cause Star Wars: The Old Republic to fail. They cite reasons such as an enormous budget, and nothing more than a WoW clone with complete voice-overs (20GB install???) to show for it.
It’s an interesting situation from both sides of the isle. On one hand you have a lot of current and former EA employees patting this person on the back for saying it like it is, but on the other side you have people saying that nothing is verifiable and it’s just the ramblings of someone that’s bitter about the company and ranting because they are going to be laid off.
Whatever the case, it’s certain that EA and Bioware Mythic are far from being perfectly managed. I don’t put a lot of stock into the exact things that EA Louse says, but I think that it does portray certain broad generalizations about what’s been going on over there. I hope that he’s wrong about The Old Republic going to be an epic failure, but there is no way that they can determine that. Ultimately it will be the fans that determine it. I try not to get too excited about the upcoming MMO because I know that however well it’s done, I’m at least going to have a fun month or two playing it when it’s finally released in Q1 of 2011.
I’m curious to hear what some of your opinions are on the situation.
