14 DAY TRIAL // The big announcement of the week has been the official unveiling of the Star Wars KOTOR MMO, which is being jointly developed by BioWare and LucasArts. We've known about the game for some time, but the official announcement also brought some tidbits of information for us hungry game news devourers.
Speaking to Eurogamer at a press event held in San Francisco, Frank Gibeau, an executive at Electronic Arts, talked about the possibility of bringing MMOs, like the upcoming KOTOR one and the already launched Warhammer Online, to gaming consoles.
“We're definitely looking at the opportunity to bring the MMO experience to console, without question. We've got this product, and we've got Warhammer at play. So we're trying to look at the primary research required to understand how would you deploy it, what the client size looks like, how big is the back-end, what the play experience looks like... Once we've got some of those questions answered, we'll be able to decide which is the right play to go after.” Gibeau stated.
Electronic Arts is not directly involved in the KOTOR MMO project, but it is now the parent company of BioWare, so it certainly has a stake in its development. As one of the biggest publishers in the videogaming business, EA is really looking to expand its potential audience, and bringing MMOs to gaming consoles, like the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, would really be a success story.
At the moment, there is no release date set for the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO, and probably late 2009 is an optimistic estimate.
Sony is also thinking of bringing MMOs to console, saying that it is even working hard on getting cross play between the PlayStation 3 and the PC to work. The Agency and Marvel Universe Online are the upcoming games from Sony said to be developed for PS3 and for the PC.
Meanwhile, the Xbox 360 has currently little in the way of MMO perspectives. Even Microsoft has admitted that this is one of the vulnerable spots of the console.