Star Wars the Old Republic

Bioware makers of the hugely popular Never Winter Nights and KOTOR have announced their newest project in conjunction with LucasArts: Star Wars the Old Republic

SWTOR, as they're calling it, will be set approximately 3600 years before the time of Darth Vader and 300 years after the end of the Jedi Civil War in KOTOR. The Old Republic will be a Massively Multiplayer Online RPG but it will not replace the once glorious Star Wars Galaxies. LucasArts believes there is room in the market to keep both games online at the same time. Additionally, the Old Republic will have nothing in common with Galaxies other than the fact that it is set with Star Wars as its theme. Former players of SWG can rejoice as the Bioware developers are well aware of the mistakes made by Sony and the now infamous NGE debacle, which caused a huge player backlash involving a large percentile of the player base to spontaneously cancel their accounts after having been their once RPG turned into an fps hybrid.

The Old Republic is promised to be something of a typical MMO in the sense of gameplay style and mechanics. However, in an article covering the questions and answers session at the initial press conference, Gamasutra quotes the lead developer James Ohlen as saying:

all of the games in the genre that the team has played have "taught us something", he suggested that the MMO market is "crying out for novelty, for something new you can't get anywhere else," calling it a "medium that isn't really developed yet."

They have also stated that The Old Republic will be three to four times to be typical size of any Bioware game. Star Wars and video game fans can only hope that the game will be developed slowly and carefully as to avoid any repeats of past mistakes that caused the "dwindling" of the last Star Wars game's subscriptions.

Although many details about the upcoming game are being kept a secret, many of the facts already been established. The Old Republic will allow you to interact with characters that can affect the outcome of your gaming experience. Characters such as Chewbacca and R2-D2 may not be available directly since many of them do not exist yet, but it is known some characters with a likeness of wookies and androids will be available. You will be able to romance, befriend, and offend these characters, which will undoubtedly change your characters experience.

There will be several classes to play including Jedi, but it is already known that there will be incentives to play the other classes and that Jedi will be strong but not the demigods that they were in Star Wars Galaxies. There will be interplanetary travel available to the characters in the Old Republic. Another interesting statement at the questions and answers session was that there will be the ability to play on your own but that they will reward people for playing together. The likelihood is either that encounters/monsters will scale according to group size or that there will be different versions of the same objectives with a greater rewards being handed out to the people who take a greater risk. And then finally, most importantly of all, you will be able to play on the side of Republic or for the Sith Empire.

What is not known is how much the game will cost, when the game or the beta test will be available, what specific classes will be available, or what kind of computer you will need to own in order to play the Old Republic.

EA has announced that Star Wars the Old Republic will be available for the console systems at some point in the future. However, initially the only way to play SWTOR will be on the Macintosh or PC.

For more information, please check out the Star Wars the Old Republic website's FAQ for future updates. You can also count on AbleGamers to keep you apprised of any new information particularly regarding the playability of this new and upcoming game.