By now you know Bioware has been working on a mmo set in the Knights of the Old Republic universe of starwars, Star Wars the Old Republic (if you don't know, SURPRISE! You may also be interested in knowing that its the year 2008, and that mole people have taken over the world, better not go outside, they might get you). It's been "known" for a year (it wasn't official, but Bioware did everything but come out with a marching band and giant neon signs saying KOTOR ONLINE YAY!), but it was officially announced a few weeks ago. So far things announced are what you'd expect, faction based play (Republic or Sith), good/evil choices, massive worlds, and jedi/dark jedi classes.

The main thing that stood out during the unveiling was a quote from the lead designer on SWTOR, James Ohlen:

"One of the things we like to joke about is just the sheer amount of content we're doing. Our fans ask, 'Why aren't you doing Knights of the Old Republic 3?' What we're really doing is Knights of the Old Republic 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12-plus. We have that much content and that many stories...We really get to do a lot of things we really wouldn't get to do in [a] KOTOR 3."

Now some people maybe going FUCK YA MORE KOTOR! (I admit I was, that's why I'm slow on this one, had to let the pure awesomeness of another KOTOR game fade off so that I could think logically, instead of having an entire post being "FUCK YA MORE KOTOR!" copy pasted 50 times), but we might want to be careful on this one. Sure this is Bioware we are dealing with, they have proved their ability to develop amazing games (original KOTOR, Baldur's Gate, Mass Effect), but this sounds a whole lot like they may end up pulling a Molynuex (The Fable series aren't bad games....but if that old geezer could just keep his mouth shut instead of saying MOST EXPANSIVE GAME EVER and create a bar that's impossible to reach, they'd be recieved a lot better). There has yet to be an MMO that can truly deliver on an epic storyline, capable of comparing to a single player game of the same nature, and this is what Bioware is trying to deliver. If they manage to pull this off they will create an amazing game, one of the things the MMO genre lacks is a story. Yes I know, MMO's DO have a storyline usually, but its never well developed (the Missing Diplomat and Stiches quest lines are pretty good in world of warcraft, but the mechanics of having thousands of people playing at once doing the same thing just does not let a game like WOW go past bite sized questline stories).

If Bioware is able to pull this off and able to deliver this game to what they are promising (One team member stated that this game already had more content and story than ALL the previous Bioware games put together. That's more than Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, KOTOR, Mass Effect, Jade Empire, and Neverwinter Nights put together....that's A LOT to live up to). A solid sci-fi mmo could hold it's own easily in the market, but with other games announced like Star Trek, Stargate, and Warhammer 40k (all 4 of these have very dedicated fan bases), it will be interesting to see how SWTOR will fare. I enjoyed the KOTOR series a lot (I perfer the old republic timeline to Lucas's original films and newer films, but seriously who doesn't? The original timeline has been so fucked up by countless fan fictions, books, films, video games that all contridict each other, and they don't have homicidal pychopath andriods) and I hope SWTOR is able to pull off the epic storyline promised by Bioware, although with the comment that the lead designer made in the above quote (Knights of the Old Republic 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12-plus), it leaves me very skeptical.