As someone who has played MMOs but isn't an MMO guy, sometimes it seems to me that many of the individual elements of MMOs end up being less deep versions of elements from other games. The story might be completely adjunct, the combat is kind of static compared to what you'd get in a game that's actually about combat, and so on -- that they wouldn't hold up if they weren't in an MMO.

DE: I think, across the board of the industry, you're going to see that changing. What we're seeing is a game genre that has been very expensive, trying to do something that's so big. For example, will the helicopter flying in Grand Theft Auto ever be as good as in the Apache [flight sim]? (laughs)

Right.

DE: Right? Like, when you try to do more, your system gets less [capable]. Absolutely. But as the market grows, and one of the great things we've seen is new MMOs very often are expanding the market. They are not cannibalizing other games.

The market is much larger than we think it is. More people are come online, and more people are playing these games, more people are interested in them. I think what we'll actually start seeing is the bar rising in all of these departments, because it only takes one game to come out and do great online combat for people to say, "Oh, well, I'm not putting up with that anymore."

That's how game design works.

DE: Absolutely. Somebody's going to push the bar. And probably in the first game, people are going to push the bar in very particular places to begin with. Plus, it's always easier to say, "Hey, let's do that [existing thing]," than it is to say, "Hey, let's create something out of whole cloth."

And because the genre is so young in its modern incarnation, a lot of things are still being created from scratch. This means a lot of experiments, a lot of bold pioneers who are going to go out and die in the wastelands.

There will be a few people who are going to get really lucky and successful and say, "Hey, look at this great thing we brought to the genre." And then everyone else will try to do it, as well.

Internally is that how you guys are thinking about this game?

DE: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that's the goal, right? We want people to play this game and say, "Wow! I never thought there would be story in an MMO, and there is and I love it and I'm going to play this story forever." That's the big exciting part, right?

Like we have all these classes, and all these classes have their own content, and all this content connects together as you're playing through the different classes. Now you're getting to see and understand different parts of the world that you might have not understood previously.

So by the time you're playing the third class, you can say, "Oh, I get that! That's because of such and such." And you feel smart and you understand the mythos and the world. And hopefully, it will create something that just amazes people and they've never even considered before.

And on the other side, for people who are like, "Wow, God, I really wanted another BioWare game," they have just gotten a little slice of heaven.

Again, as you've noted, the story in MMOs tends to be very segmented, and it doesn't feel like a thread that your character is actually progressing through.

DE: Correct.