Considering that BioWare's first MMORPG endeavour was unveiled nearly two years later than Dragon Age, which itself will probably not be released before 2008, you can bet that it's going to be a looong, looong time before we'll be able to bask in the virtual sun of their massively-multiplayer online game. Be it fantasy, science-fiction or whatever theme they have in mind for it. Yes, they did start talking about it, but they have yet to reveal anything specific about the actual setting of their debut MMO.

As part of a huge cover story on Dragon Age, the December 2006 issue of Games for Windows magazine also features an interview with a few guys from BioWare Austin - where the MMORPG is being developed, away from the company's Canadian headquarters, and quite close to Sony Online Entertainment's backyard (by no coincidence...). 1UP was generous enough to publish the whole interview, in which James Ohlen (creative director), Gordon Walton (co-studio director), and Rich Vogel (co-studio director of product development), are mostly answering questions about the general philosophy behind their game. While inevitably relating to Blizzard's World of Warcraft, and how they *don't* want to go down that way (i.e. grinding instances forever and ever).

As traditional with any BioWare RPG, expect some heavy storytelling in this one as well, along with "a good selection of visual customization" for your character ("probably gonna have more visual customization than you've seen in a BioWare game before"), and "big plans for end-game content":

"We think it's a very important aspect of the game, and we don't want players to be stuck grinding through the same content over and over again - I know when I hit level 60 in WoW, I pretty much quit. So whatever end-game model we have, it's not going to be that."

But just because they're so set on making it better than World of Warcraft, at least in terms of storytelling, it doesn't mean that they plan to overthrow Blizzard. "We just want to be competitive. We're not looking to kill WOW", Gordon Walton admits. And in fact, all three of them are currently playing World of Warcraft, so don't be too surprised if you see bits and pieces "adapted" to their ambitious needs.

Finally, in other BioWare news, for those of you hoping to see a Linux port of Dragon Age, you're not the only ones. Although that forum thread has already been closed after it hit ten pages of comments, with the solemn promise that the community's input has been passed along to the dev team. Cross your fingers!

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)