Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO Revealed
DateTime:7/8/2009 5:21:12 PM

Star Wars: The Old Republic will take place hundreds of years after the events of the first two Knights of the Old Republic titles, but will still be around 3,500 years before the Star Wars movies. "Doing an MMO is something we've wanted to do for probably over a decade," said BioWare Co-Founder Ray Muzyka. "We wanted to wait until we had the right partners, the right team, and the right IP"

LucasArts executive producer Tom Nichols has been involved with the project since the beginning. "This project originated a couple years ago when BioWare spoke up and said, 'Hey, we'd love to do another project with you guys,'" explained Nichols. "We were thinking about working on new, additional projects in the online space, and Galaxies was three or four years old, and we started to look into the future about what we might want to do in the MMO genre. And I think the timing was pretty serendipitous that way, since BioWare wanted to work with us, they wanted to do an MMO, and they had a lot of experience playing MMOs."

Could The Old Republic be the real World of WarCraft killer? Despite Warhammer Online's impressive launch numbers (750,000 users and counting), the Star Wars universe could be a major attraction to many of WoWs 12 million+ subscribers. Either way, Electronic Arts admitted that the main reason they dropped $860 million on BioWare/Pandemic last year was to be co-owner of the then-unnamed MMO project.