Developing an MMO is something that we at BioWare have been interested in doing for many years, and we've just been waiting for the right time, the right project, and the right partners and intellectual property setting. We had planned for Neverwinter Nights to be a "first step" down the MMO path and now here we are building The Old Republic in the "Star Wars" universe in partnership with LucasArts!

When the opportunity arose to take what we started with Knights of The Old Republic and bring that to the online space, we decided that this was the moment we had been waiting for. Creating an MMO is new for BioWare, but we've managed to recruit a really fantastic team at the Austin Studio -- we have people on the team who have worked on practically every major MMO ever built and we've combined them with the expertise of a number of the BioWare RPG veterans. We're merging the rich heritage of storytelling from previous BioWare games with the technical know-how of how to do a MMO right, and we've got great team synergy on Star Wars: The Old Republic as a result. We think we're creating something very special, something very fresh, which adds a whole new dimension to playing games in the online space.