Star Wars: The Old Republic "will more than compete" with genre leading subscription MMO World of Warcraft, according to developer BioWare.
Co-founder Ray Muzyka said yesterday that the studio is growing increasingly confident in the title following "a fantastic response" from beta testers.
"These are some of the basic pillars we're building the game around, and our testing program really reaffirms to us that we're hitting all those goals, so we have a very carefully planned milestone series and we're tracking really well.
"We're actually getting more and more confident as we progress and the results from consumer testing are incredible, a fantastic response - really high net promoter scores, extremely high desire to subscribe from the player base, and in fact it increases over time. The higher the level they get in the game, the more they want to play and the more they want to tell their friends."
Muzyka continued: "There are ten of millions, tens of tens of millions of potential consumers for this game because Star Wars is the biggest IP in the world and that's a factor that can't be underestimated.
"In addition to that... World of Warcraft has helped to grow the audience for us and as a seven year MMO now, we're launching some really innovative differentiating features that I think we'll have an opportunity to capitalise on. I have tremendous respect for the folks at Blizzard, but I think we're building a product that will more than compete."
EA CEO John Riccitiello said this week that announcing a release window for The Old Republic would be irresponsible to the publisher's shareholders as it would give competitors an opportunity to disrupt the launch.
Check out the epic Star Wars: The Old Republic E3 trailer here.
Comments
1 comments so far...
AegisK on 9 Jun '11 said:
The Old Republic "would" more than compete with WoW if EA didn't insist on releasing it exclusively on Origin. If it was a matter of buying the game on Origin to buy the game, that's fine. EA gets the money directly, its only fair with these big titles. BUT they want to COMPETE WITH STEAM. What happens when Activision wants their own DDS? Will we need to run a third program too? I don't want to encourage this, so I won't be buying The Old Republic or Battlefield 3 unless Origin is successful and we have to suckle on EA's breasts to play a game.