14 DAY TRIAL // What we know
Star Wars: The Old Republic is an MMO which is being worked on by BioWare, with involvement by LucasArts and publishing duties assumed by Electronic Arts.
The game is set a few thousand years before the events depicted in the two movie trilogies that George Lucas created, in a world where Sith and Jedi are much more numerous and Light and Dark are in a precarious equilibrium, somewhere between all out war and convert conflict.
The game aims to create more structured experiences that current MMOs, with BioWare saying that important NPCs will be fully voiced to help with player engagement with the universe and with complex stories that take time to deliver and require gamers to take important decisions that will affect the evolution of the galaxy.
Gameplay seems fairly traditional at the moment and the developers are claiming that one of their main aims is to have a good balance between classes and sides on launch day.
Star Wars: The Old Republic is only being prepared for a PC launch at the moment and the game currently does not have a clear launch date.
Why it matters
Despite its years of domination or maybe because of them, the video-game industry is still excited when the possibility arises that World of Warcraft might be toppled from its position of power in the MMO world.
And this year the biggest challenge is clearly Star Wars: The Old Republic, powered by its very well known game universe and by the involvement of companies like BioWare, Electronic Arts and LucasArts.
After games have tried taking the Blizzard behemoth on using its own weapons, The Old Republic is significant because it plays to BioWare's strenghts, delivering a game which seems to be heavy on the story element while not delivering any great innovations to the gameplay side of MMOs.
It remains to be seen whether grind happy players will be interested in actually caring about characters and making informed decisions in an MMO, but if they do, then World of Warcraft could have a worthy adversary.