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The Old Republic fans are a bunch of people in love. They are in love with the concept behind the game Bioware is making. Star Wars universe populated by you and your friends in which everyone gets to be a hero. How can you blame them? That is why the moment someone mentions that there could be any kind of trouble with the game there are cries of terror showing up all over the official forums and fansites. There are several things that happened simultaneously these past few weeks that caused the current wave of doomsayers. We wanted to address these in this two part editorial describing the causes in part one, that you are reading now, and offering some explanations and suggestions in part two that will follow shortly.

Causes

1. During the convention season we were treated with loads of new game information. For the first time people were able to sit down and play the game. We also saw some higher level gameplay footage for the first time and were shown Revan’s dungeon. Space ships and advanced classes were also explained in detail. Following up on all that info we were also given a lot of info about the Smuggler and the Jedi Knight. Next three updates were about a planet, biographies and a timeline. If it was any other time of the year these would be enough, but after the eventful convention season all of it feels lackluster.
2. Advertised release date is getting very close. Here’s the math that is scaring fans. Everyone is expecting the game to come out in April, May the latest. Any date later than that is unexpected (even May is cutting it close) because summer is dead season. This gives us 6 months tops before the game’s release. Based on Bioware’s own policy that they don’t talk about it before its done people are thinking the following: “If they are not talking about so many core systems that means they are not done yet. Will they be done by release (in such a short period of time)?”. And MMORPG gamers are already tired of all those rushed out releases that ruined so many potentially great projects (who said Warhammer online, Age of Conan, Star Trek Online, APB – OMG are there that many?)
3. EA Louse. He is a “whistle blower” from inside Mythic (the makers of Warhammer online) that whines about how life ain’t fair and how management is to blame for WAR failing and him losing his job. Since Bioware and Mythic are both parts of EA and some parts of Mythic started helping out with SWTOR some time ago he made a statement about SWTOR. According to him the project already spent 300 million dollars and that it will be the biggest failure in the history of video games. This coming from a guy that works on a game that spent $50 million and has 100k subscribers right now.
4. There is a rumor floating around that at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference people were saying that there is trouble in TOR land and Bioware is flying people into Austin office to help out.

Enough to put anyone caring about the game into full on panic mode, right? Fear not fellow TOR fans, there are two sides to every story and we will be going in depth on The Cures in our Part 2 of this article tomorrow.

Part 2 of the article has been published and you can read it here