Last week we saw the id/Bethesda merger under parent company ZeniMax Media and there was much rejoicing, but what if Electronic Arts merged its two online game developers into one giant super developer wouldn’t that raise some eyebrows and be general cause for mass excitement?

Well that actually happened as the publishing giant reorganized a bit putting RPG mavens Bioware and long time MMO developers Mythic in the same division. While the two studios will remain mostly autonomous for the time being, they now both have a single reporting line up the chain to the big bosses and money men. That single leader? Bioware’s Dr. Ray Muzyka.

Dr. Muzyka’s ascencion to the head of the organization basically also points to the exit of Mythic’s longtime leader Mark Jacobs. According to Jacob’s blog the MMO pioneer is taking a sabatical for awhile and he leaves with a classy ‘I’m not going to dish on anything, I’m just going to thank folks and peacefully step aside’ sort of announcement - a classy response that we don’t get to see so often these days.

Regarding the future path of the now combined studio’s efforts, Dr. Muzyka indicated in an official response over on IGN that:

Anything’s possible. We can’t say it wouldn’t happen. There’s no active plans, currently to do that, but the teams at Mythic and BioWare I know from talking to all of them, they’re really excited about working together, so I think that fuels a lot of cool things.

Warhammer: Age of Reckoning is still holding strong in the WoW dominated MMO market while Bioware’s first effort - the much anticipated Star Wars: The Old Republic is still a ways off. Mythic has a lot of experience that could help the minds at Bioware pull off their vision of Star Wars and maybe even put a dent in the Warcraft numbers but only time will tell if this pairing will be all it seems.

dragon age origins

Bioware, long the favorites of PC RPG fans are firing up the information train to release new trailer and new screens for its upcoming magnum opus - Dragon Age: Origins. While the movies all make folks drool and the screens look exciting one key question every PC gamer asks is: “Will I have to upgrade to play this beast?”

Well as of today we have the final system requirments for the game, and its likely that anyone who owns a moderately powerful modern PC will be able to play it in at least Neverwinter Nights 1, 1995 style graphic mode. As expected the requirements for Vista are a bit higher than their XP counterpart but both have a sizable hard drive footprint - 20GB! Wow! The game will also be released on the Sony PS3 and Microsoft Xbox 360 console this October.

Here are the Specs:

Windows XP Minimum Specifications
OS: Windows XP with SP3
CPU: Intel Core 2 (or equivalent) running at 1.4Ghz or greater
AMD X2 (or equivalent) running at 1.8Ghz or greater
RAM: 1GB or more
Video: ATI Radeon X850 128MB or greater
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT 128MB or greater
DVD ROM (Physical copy)
20 GB HD space

Windows Vista Minimum Specifications
OS: Windows Vista with SP1
CPU: Intel Core 2 (or equivalent) running at 1.6Ghz or greater
AMD X2 (or equivalent) running at 2.2GHZ or greater
RAM: 1.5 GB or more
Video: ATI Radeon X1550 256MB or greater
NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT 256MB or greater
DVD ROM (Physical copy)
20 GB HD space

Recommended Specifications
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4Ghz Processor or equivalent
RAM: 4 GB (Vista) or 2 GB (XP)
Video: ATI 3850 512 MB or greater
NVIDIA 8800GTS 512 MB or greater
DVD ROM (Physical copy)
20 GB HD space

Would a Neverwinter Nights be a viable MMO? Sources at Variety say Atari is betting on it. Supposedly it’s the whole reason Atari bought out Cryptic Studios.

I question whether porting NwN into the massively multiplayer realm is really a sure thing. The most obvious obstacle is taking BioWare and Obsidian out of the equation. However, I believe that taking the modding out of the game which has already spawned many persistent worlds which are essentially mini MMO themselves will take away one of the elements that makes NwN such a fascinating setting.

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BioWare is going for guts and glory with its “no holds barred” Dragon Age: Origins trailer. This footage has all the blood and brutality of a sacrificial offering. You may want to wait until you get home from work or put your children to bed before you cue this one up. Feast your eyes on the Dragon Age Origins: Violence trailer after the break or download it on FileFront.

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There’s been a ton of buzz around the internet since the first Mass Effect 2 teaser trailer hit. After all, the text listed Commander Shepherd as ‘Killed in Action.’ Not surprisingly, this ignited a firestorm of comments from fans of the first Mass Effect game, many of whom couldn’t believe that Commander Shepherd was dead. To be fair, I can’t really blame them.

After all, Mass Effect was originally conceived as a trilogy, and to have the main character die between the first and second games would be…disconcerting, to say the least. It definitely wouldn’t be what gamers are accustomed to, as we usually get to play as one character throughout subsequent games. Some gamers were mollified by Bioware’s advice to keep all your ME1 save games, although they didn’t tell us why, or what those saves might net us in ME2.

Anyway, Hudson says today in his blog post that they’ve been working on ME2 for over 18 months now. Interestingly, he also details how they went about using plauer feedback in creating ME2. Hudson says, “The first thing we did in designing Mass Effect 2 was to listen very carefully to what people were saying about how they played the first one – what they loved, what they wanted to see improved, and the countless anecdotes that describe players’ personal experiences with their unique paths through the story. We read forum posts, reviews, watched people playing the game on YouTube, and literally noted and categorized every piece of feedback we could find, to help us target an overall evolution of the gameplay to the way people actually experienced it. In other words, when you were talking, we were listening.”

He also mentions how they will be unveiling the game at E3 this year, and thanks Mass Effect players for their support. But the most important piece of information is dropped right at the end of the post.

He adds, almost as an afterthought, “Oh, and I’ve heard some rumors that Commander Shepard is dead. Better not be. We had a lot of big plans made, so if someone’s gone and killed Shepard then things are going to take an unexpected turn… ” Judging from this, I’d say you can count on seeing Shepherd once again in the sequel. The question I have for you is this: How much publicity was generated by that teaser including the KIA statement for Shepherd? My answer would be a lot.

If you haven’t seen the ME2 teaser yet, or just want another look, you can find it after the break.

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BioWare and Lucas Arts have offered up a video documentary on the upcoming Star Wars the Old Republic MMORPG. This seems to be the first in a series as it is titled Video Documentary #1. Hopefully we can look forward to more in the future.

Members of the Old Republic development team including James Ohlen, creative director and lead designer, Daniel Erickson, principal lead writer, and Jeff Dobson, art director, show players new concept art and screenshots. There’s also plenty of footage from preproduction gameplay. You can view the SWTOR Video Documentary #1 on the Star Wars the Old Republic website.

The Dragon Age: Origins website has been updated with information on The Grey Wardens class. This band of consummate warriors can be stalwart guardians or tyrannical egomaniacs. Whatever their personality, they certainly look good in action as you can see in the new video of The Grey Wardens.

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Simutronics, which is a creator of online game development platforms has joined forces with BioWare, to bring you the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO using the HeroEngine. The HeroEngine, according to their website, is a developer kit which was specifically created for online games. This si not something built in house by the actual game developers, but is something anyone building an MMO can use and allows for development in real-time, enabling teams in different geographic locales to build the world and play the game live on the server simultaneously.

Most people who follow gaming are familiar with the HeroEngine, and have known for a while that BioWare would be using it on their MMO, but for the people that don’t– what the engine does is make instantaneous updates and changes to the game environment, which drops the need for nightly builds and code crunching, which supposedly cuts down on time spent on the development cycle.

Now that we got that little bit of “news” out of the way, how about EA’s CEO John Riccitiello saying during a conference call that Star Wars: The Old Republic will charge customers for micro-transactions rather than subscriptions?

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Electronic Arts is being targeted by another class-action law suit over the DRM included with Spore, SecuROM. This time, California resident Alex McQuown is hoping to use Spore to take down SecuROM once and for all.

The grievances listed in Alex McQuown’s class-action suit against EA are much the same as the other suits with three big differences. His lawyers at Finkelstein Thompson claim that SecuROM damages computers costing consumer time and money to repair the havoc caused by its installation. The suit also asserts that EA has needlessly caused its customers grief. The figures prove that piracy of games that carry SecuROM has risen dramatically. The biggest difference in McQuown’s suit is that he invites every U.S. citizen that has purchased an EA product with SecuROM to join the class.
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Bioware has released some new screenshots for their upcoming RPG for the PC, Dragon Age: Origins which is looking pretty darn good–and I am not just saying this because I am an RPG nut.

The developer is also promising to release a constant stream of media content from their game between now and the expected March 23, 2009 release date. The next set of screens are set to be revealed this month sometime, and will introduce players to “The Blight”:

The Chantry teaches that it is the hubris of men that brought the darkspawn into our world. Mages sought to usurp Heaven, but were cast out, twisted by their own corruption, only to return as monsters–the first of the darkspawn. They plague the underground caverns and tunnels once inhabited by the dwarven kingdoms. When they discover one of the Old Gods, ancient dragons slumbering in the depths of the earth, it rises as an archdemon to lead the darkspawn as they spread like locusts across the surface lands, destroying all in their path: a Blight. It has been four centuries since the last Blight, but the darkspawn are amassing once again.

Dragon Age: Origins will also be made available for the PS3 and Xbox 360, but console users will have to wait until November 3, 2009 to get their hands on a copy.