BioWare - Star Wars: The Old Republic Announced

Sorry about that sentence, I'm tired.

I could imagine some artistical influence from the current Clone Wars TV series ...

Apparently you can fall/switch between jedi and sith according to this podcast at ign.

25 writers? It's my experience that hardly anyone reads anything anymore. I don't know but my estimation of MMO player's basic abilities, to read and have intelligent things to say, is rather low. Maybe this will be like 'pearls before swine.'
But good luck to the game it may prove to be amusing.

I am going to give it a Yawn, and a Gah!

I wonder if the rhetoric about the game being bigger than all other Bioware games combined is true. Because that's pretty darn big. That means more content than:

BG + BG Expansion + BG2 + BG2 expansion + NWN + NWN 2 expansions + Jade Empire + Mass Effect

The development cost on this thing has to be astronomical. They better get that big subscriber base and keep it.

According to EA, this MMO will "beat WoW", which means a fairly incredible amount of content is needed (in addition to gameplay etc etc). A rough estimate of my time spent on WoW shows the scale we're talking about here: 5000+ hours over four years.

That's over 50 times Baldur's Gate 2, not because of actual content, but due to the all the timesinks. I expect this is what they refer to, as the story element alone is certainly not going to be bigger than many SRPGs combined.

Also, MMOs often have costs in the "astronomical" category - somewhere between 30.000.000$ and 50.000.000$ is certainly realistic (if you include marketing and so on, and not just development).

And yes, you need quite a player base to support such a massive project.