Two of game developer Bioware’s largest franchises are arguably Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. The former is on schedule for a Q4 release in the form of a highly anticipated massively multiplayer online role-playing game — and now the latter may be targeted as BioWare’s next MMORPG in development.
In an interview with Game Informer magazine, Mass Effect‘s series lead Casey Hudson said his fellow developers would like to find an effective way to share the Mass Effect experience with friends, as they have with SW: KotOR, but that they haven’t discovered a suitable solution for that need.
“We haven’t yet come up with a way to do that, so we don’t have anything to announce at this time. But, obviously, multiplayer is something we want to do more of in the future as a company. Players expect that with Mass Effect, too. “Part of what you’re trying to do is save the universe so you can live in it,” he said. “That’s part of the promise for any great IP. It has to be a world worth saving. Mass Effect has that quality to it. If you get rid of the Reapers and win that, wouldn’t it be amazing to just live on the Citadel or just take a ship to Omega? That makes sense.”
BioWare’s focus on the Mass Effect series is right now to work on the third installment of the popular science fiction action-RPG title, which will include such enhancements as larger skill trees, weapon mods and more than two endings. No multiplayer, however, will be included in Mass Effect 3. The ideas that will have been built up through three iterations of the game might very well make an MMORPG possible, even ideal, but it would be several years before such a game might see the light of day.
[Source: Tom's Hardware]
