I hope by now the majority of Electronic Arts management and share holders are walking around with monocles and top hats. As if the developing/distributing giant wasn’t large enough, EA recently bought both well-known developers Bioware Corp and Pandemic Studios. Bioware and Pandemic have already been previously unified under Elevation Partners.

Bioware (Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights) are working on a fist full of potential hits at the moment. Mass Effect comes to mind, along with a Sonic RPG title for Nintendo DS. Pandemic (Destroy All Humans!, Full Spectrum Warrior) on the other hand are working on Mercenaries 2, and Saboteur – yet another World War 2 FPS.

If one things for certain, it’s that the world really doesn’t need another World War 2 first person shooter. Especially one being partially developed here in Brisbane Australia and published by EA. No offence intended to Pandemic but if they’re going to make a World War 2 game against all the others on the market, it better be damn good. Hopefully their new tyrant overlords will leave who have proven to be successful development teams to their own thing. Odds are in a year I’ll be booting up Neverwinter Nights 28, to hear Black Eyed Peas playing some shitty music through “EA trax”.

One advantage is the buckets of cash that are now behind the companies. It’s great to have a solid foundation behind these development groups, a sure sign for lots more titles from quality developers. A lot of people are familiar with what to expect from Bioware and Pandemic, they’ve been in the business for a while and have a lot of strong titles under their belt.

It’s a matter of time to see what EA do with their new crew. There has to be an advantage to the funding and power of EA, despite their money-hungry ethics and push to re-hash any potential high sellers (The Sims, anyone?). Here’s hoping the merger is a positive step for Pandemic and Bioware.

Neverwinter Nights 3 shouldn’t be too far off.