Star Wars: The Old Republic will be massive

According to EA Games boss Frank Gibeau, BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic features over 200 hours of gameplay for each character class. That doesn’t include “crafting, the raids, the multiplayer.”

“I don’t pay much attention to that talk, I get a lot of questions from analysts and press about it,” said Frank Gibeau, referring to the rumoured budget of $300 million for Star Wars: The Old Republic. If anyone can recoup that bill it’s BioWare, right?

“What I try and concentrate on is, is it a good game and is it ready to go? You look at a game that has 200 hours of gameplay for each of the six classes, and that doesn’t include the crafting, the raids, the multiplayer.”

“It’s vast. It’s a gigantic game. And that costs money,” he continued.

“But when you get one of these launched they persist for a long period of time. Ultima is on its first decade and it still has tens of thousands of subscribers and is widely profitable for us. It’s just the nature of the beast that you have to build this amount of content.”

“Do I wish it wasn’t this expensive? Absolutely, but I think everybody does. At the same time it doesn’t really do us much good to comment on how much it costs. Ultimately what matters is whether it’s a good service and do people really like the game?”

Star Wars: The Old Republic still carries a tentative release window for later this year but no major beta push has cast serious doubt that it will by making the jump until sometime in 2012.
Source | Strategy Informer