We’ve already posted extensively about the single-player Game of Thrones: The Roleplaying Game, and we’ve also reported on the development of a licensed MMO and Facebook social game.
However, for various reasons, some fans have been disappointed, having really hoped a really large, well-known studio tackled the license. But not necessarily for lack of interest. EA and Bethesda have considered it at some point… and now we learn that BioWare did as well.
Electronic Arts once had the license for developing a game based on A Song of Ice and Fire for a long time, apparently, but let the license slip without developing anything. Then Bethesda(of Skyrim fame) gave the possibility some serious consideration.
And now on to Bioware. In a PC Gamer article about BioWare’s new MMORPG Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, game director Jame Ohlen revealed the fact that BioWare had several “backup plans” in case they couldn’t work out a deal with Lucasarts regarding Star Wars. What were they?
“We had backup plans,” said Ohlen. “In all the design team was like three of us at that point, in total. So we were looking at doing a Lord of the Rings MMO, a Silmarillion MMO, a kind of a Gunslinger-esque Dark Tower MMO, a Game of Thrones MMO.”
“Each setting has different strengths, ” Ohlen added, describing the 10 page documents that the team drew up at an early design stage. “If we were going to do a Game of Thrones MMO, what kind of rules and what kind of gameplay elements would really bring that world to life? Each one had that, but we always focused on the story at the fore.”
The article’s author goes on to speculate that there may well be a draft design document for a Game of Thrones MMO somewhere in the bowels of BioWare, which would certainly be interesting to see, if it were true.
Thanks to Marcelo Córdova for bringing this piece to our attention.