14 DAY TRIAL // Fans of the Star Wars: The Old Republic might continue to be frustrated by the fact that the game still does not have a clear launch date but they can take comfort in the fact that the developers at BioWare do not plan to place any sort of geography based restrictions on the video games.
Stephen Reid, who is a senior community manager working for BioWare, has posted on the official game forums saying, “There are no plans to ‘region lock’ or ‘IP block’ players from the game. You may experience some latency issues if you’re not playing in a launch territory.”
He added, “Anyone who pre-orders The Old Republic and redeems their pre-order code will be eligible for Early Game Access. Those eligible for Early Game Access will be able to download the game client before it starts.”
This is good news for those potential players who are not part of major gaming markets and even for those on medium sized countries like Australia and New Zealand, where the game is not set to arrive in boxed form for some time.
The lack of a region lock means that anyone can use the Origin digital distribution service from Electronic Arts or another similar channel to order Star Wars: The Old Republic and get to play the game on launch day without too many problems.
Having a good Internet connection to mitigate the lag issues that might pop up will help the overall experience.
A lack of region lock makes perfect sense for a game like Star Wars: The Old Republic, which uses the MMO model and will get significant sales from digital distribution sources.
The game has been in development at BioWare for some time and will be fully voiced and place an emphasis on storytelling.
An exact launch date announcement might be made at Gamescom next week.