Article:
BioWare and The Old Republic: Top 5 Misconceptions

Being a fan of both BioWare and the Knights of the Old Republic series, it’s not unimaginable that I spend a small portion of my free time (of which lately there seems to be precious little of) reading up on the The Old Republic and even BioWare itself, both from “professional” gaming sites and front line forum communities.

Well, to make an intentionally short intro even shorter; a great deal of what I read just happens to be wrong and as much as I’d like to correct every single iota of misinformation floating out there on the great internet ether, I’m going to limit myself to what I felt were the top (or at least most prevalent) five.

5) BioWare Austin is not BioWare Edmonton

I suppose, from a purely technical stance, that’s true. They are two physically separate studios. Still, something tells me when the naysayers pull out the “BioWare Austin is not BioWare Edmonton” card they aren’t speaking from a purely technical viewpoint. I imagine they take issue with the fact that many BioWare fans are looking forward to The Old Republic because of the pedigree of BioWare Edmonton, a pedigree they apparently feel Austin is undeserving of profiting from, and a pedigree they feel does not apply since none of BioWare’s experience is in the MMO genre.

Thankfully, we aren’t required to go into a long drawn out explanation of why it’s rather foolish to believe that the management at BioWare would just hand over the keys to their biggest project (and quite possibly the biggest gaming project ever) to a group of unknowns (as opposed to hiring professionals who have worked on previous MMOs to shore up the original KotOR team, which by the way is exactly what BioWare did). I’d probably have felt silly explaining such a basic concept, even if said concept seems to have an uncanny ability to escape the notice of many who post online in various mediums.
Instead, I’ll let Ray Muzyka, CEO/GM BioWare (all four studios), take the floor for a moment:

• There's support going on across the (BioWare) group. It's one group. I'm the group general manager, and Greg's the creative officer. Together with the group operations manager, marketing, there are (general managers) at every studio. It's very much a team orientation. There’s a lot of collaboration, a lot of sharing of best practices, a lot of offers of help. We make the MMOs and RPGs for all of EA. People are really passionate about making them, and people are doing everything they can across different areas of the BioWare group to enable people to be successful…
  
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