Star Wars: The Old Republic Release Depends on Beta Feedback

Electronic Arts, the publisher of the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG, has talked about the title's still unclear release date, saying that it basically depends on the feedback the developers at BioWare receive during the ongoing closed beta test.

Star Wars: The Old Republic is one of the biggest games scheduled to appear this year, even if it doesn't even have a concrete release date, as EA, BioWare and LucasArts, the companies involved in the project, want to make sure everything will go smoothly when it is eventually launched.

The boss of EA's Labels division, Frank Gibeau, has talked about The Old Republic, with CVG, and how its release depends on the feedback BioWare gets from the closed beta stage, currently being run with just a select bunch of players.

"We're driving towards a date, but the very issue you raised is why we're not announcing a date yet because you want to make sure that these services can last a decade," the exec said. "It is definitely tied to the beta test feedback that's ongoing and so far, so good. We feel good about the date that we're heading towards but you're right, you could have a Crazy Ivan show up in the September/October beta test and be like, 'wow, I've got to fix that'."

Gibeau also emphasized that EA doesn't want to repeat the mistakes of other companies that launched online role-playing games, like Blizzard with its World of Warcraft, and that takes a bit of time spent on polishing up the core systems and the infrastructure.

"You've got to have a great launch and as more and more user feedback comes in we make those polishing decisions on what we're going to get right and nail," he continued. "The other thing is, the technology of standing these things up and then getting all the server farms to work together, talk to one another, store character records... it's extraordinarily complex and so we want a very stable experience."

"We don't want to happen to us what happened to WoW and a couple of other services where in the first week there were queues trying to get on to the servers, the entire service crashed - we don't want that to happen. So we need to nail and make sure that it's up 24/7 and it's high quality. We're totally focused on quality, so whatever the beta test tells us is what will be the determining variable on when we will hit."

As such, while the companies involved in Star Wars: The Old Republic are busy polishing the last few aspects of the game, players still need to hope that it will be released before the end of the year.