We suppose the Sims franchise has a few elements in common with the role-playing genre -- after all, it's about character improvement and, more often than not, all of the characters are startlingly, impossibly attractive. Still, it seems Maxis is getting a helping hand on Darkspore development from a more experienced RPG developer -- according to Gamespot, the studio's Comic-Con panel revealed that fellow EA studio BioWare is helping out on the project.

The capacity of this help is still unknown, but based on BioWare's strong roots in the genre, we strongly doubt they've been brought in to offer backrubs to weary programmers. We've contacted EA to find out more about this partnership, and to find out whether we can expect Darkspore to contain any romance sub-plots leading to tastefully directed sex scenes.