You may have missed this story last week (we wouldn't blame you if you were busy fighting off the living dead), but there was a big announcement in the world of MMO games. BioWare, makers of Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate, and last year's terrific Mass Effect, announced in conjunction with EA and LucasArts that they were going to make their first MMO, set in the same universe as their critically acclaimed Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic game. Massively's got tons of news about it if you're interested (and even though we won't see it for years and years, I definitely am).

But LucasArts didn't stop there -- years before the game is even scheduled to come out, they're ready to say the game will be bigger than WoW. Now, we get it -- WoW's the 800 lb. gorilla of MMOs, and thus they make the biggest target you'll find. But please, can we see some actual gameplay before the hype machine gets rolling?

If they don't actually release the game until WoW's servers are turned off, then sure, they'll be bigger than WoW, and hey, maybe if BioWare is able to make their game casual and accessible enough (we're looking at you, Mass Effect inventory system), they'll be able to come close to WoW's current peak of almost 11 million players. But LucasArts, let's get the game working before we start bragging about how big it's going to be.

It's a fact that the majority of what we do in World of Warcraft is kill things. Nearly all the supplementary activities we engage in, from shopping to crafting, are all basically to help us improve the effectiveness of our violent capabilities. Many players have noted that if WoW were at all real, then nearly every one of our characters would be considered a genocidal maniac for all the people and creatures we have killed, and yet we view ourselves as heroes.

The idea is, of course, that most of the lives we take are really evil anyway, so we're actually doing the real good guys a favor. We kill tons of demons, ghosts, zombies, dragonkin, giants, and rabid beasts -- even most of the humanoids we kill are bandits or wicked cultists of one sort or another. This way we do lots of killing, but still feel as though we are heroes.

There are some situations in the game, however, that turn things around for us, in which our character is not the hero. While there are some higher-level instances such as the Black Morass, or the new Caverns of Time: Stratholme, in which one could argue either way whether what we're doing is good or evil, most of situations in which you are clearly the bad guy, as far as I am aware, have to do with the undead, and to a lesser extent the blood elves as well. Of course, you can argue that in general, undead are just misunderstood, and the blood elves are just tragically misled, but as in the case of quests in Hillsbrad that ask you to go slaughter human farmers, or help develop a new plague, there's really no denying that your character is doing something "morally wrong."