A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… I think you get the idea. Star Wars/MMO fans have been eagerly awaiting the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic, and the current release date of December 20th 2011 can’t come soon enough for any of them, including myself. This next-gen MMO promises to be THE new kid on the block, taking a run at the subscriber base of World of Warcraft and any other MMO in its path.

Now for those of you gamers who may not be entirely familiar with the game, here is a little back-story. As you can tell by the title, the game is in the age of the Old Republic, approximately 300 years after the timeline of the original “Knights of the Old Republic” games, and roughly 3500 years before the “Star Wars” movies themselves are set to take place. For all you lore nerds, The Jedi are held responsible for the success of the Sith during the 28 year-long “Great Galactic War” which led to the Treaty of Coruscant prior to the Cold War, and this made them choose to relocate back to Tython, where the Jedi Order was initially established, to hope to seek further guidance from the force. In the meantime, the Sith control Korriban, and have rebuilt a Sith Academy. You are able to choose Republic (Light Side) or Sith (Dark Side) as your factions of choice. Within these factions you are able to choose from 9 different races, and of these 9 races, 8 different classes are currently available. In addition, each of the 8 classes has the ability at level 10 to go into a specialized or “advanced” class. These classes will have abilities and spells specific to that specialized class.

I was lucky enough to receive a beta invite for this game, and all I can say is that I’m completely blown away. The amount of work into this production, and the astounding attention to detail, is mind-blowing. Gone are the endless walls of quest text, and in their place are beautiful cut scenes FOR EACH QUEST. Additionally, in these quest cut scenes, players are able to choose at several points within them, which direction they want to go based on how you want your force alignment to be. For instance, say the quest giver is talking and says “Ok, so there is this cave over there and I need you to get this for me” to which you can choose to respond in 3 ways, 1: What’s in this cave? (generally for light side users) a middle option like 2: “Sounds dangerous” or for the dark side users an option like 3: “Are you too lazy to get it yourself?”. The amount of time and effort put into developing the lore, the voice acting, cutscene cinemas, it is no wonder the game is said to have a budget of over $135 million dollars, making it one of the most expensive video game productions of all time. It is safe to say, however, that once you play this game, you’ll believe it’s worth every penny, the game is beautifully done.

I apologize if any of you took any part of this preview as a spoiler, but rest assured no pivotal story information was revealed. My anticipation for this game has been enormous, and upon playing it, it met and greatly exceeded every one of my expectations thus far. I’ve been playing MMO’s for a long time, always looking for the next best thing. World of Warcraft took that spot for a very long time, I played it from vanilla stages back in 2004, up until recently. I’ve been hoping that Star Wars: The Old Republic would live up to its hype and that it could be the next real big MMO, and after playing it, I feel it’s safe to say, Old Republic will be the next mega subscriber-based MMO.

May the force be… well you get the point.

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