Anyone can apply on the game's site

Jul 12, 2010 12:00 GMT  ·  By

Star Wars: The Old Republic seems to be well on it way to a retail release, as BioWare has commenced game testing. In the piece of news on the official site there is no mention of beta, so we may assume that those lucky enough to be selected by the developers will get their hands on a quite early version of the massively multiplayer online role playing game.

There will be several phases of game testing that will start with small communities in North America and later on will expand to other territories. There will be several waves of selection, as the Game Testing FAQ states that, “Our approach is to have new testers for each testing session. That said, players who give excellent feedback or find and report good bugs may be considered for additional testing sessions.” These groups of tester may be focused on limited areas of the game and will not have access, at least at first, to the whole world of The Old Republic.

Signing up for the beta require an account on the Star Wars: The Old Republic site in which applicants need to provide more information than usually required, like the full name, the home address and phone number or zip code. Furthermore, those who want to become game testers for BioWare's first attempt at an MMORPG must allow the company to scan their hardware through a in-browser application. Nothing privacy invading though, as it apparently searches only for CPU type and peed, graphics and sound cards, operating system, and RAM.

Star Wars: The Old Republic is currently slated for a spring 2011 release, but nothing is written in stone yet. BioWare hasn't revealed as many details about the game as many of its fans hoped, but it seems to behave like a traditional MMO in terms of gameplay and like BioWare story heavy RPG in terms of the narrative, at least from the  footage released until now by the studio. Whether this type of approach to genre will work is not yet clear, but BioWare's pedigree seems to indicate that it just may be able to pull it off.