SWTOR Release Date to Depend on Beta Feedback

To those wondering about an exact release date for Star Wars: The Old Rupublic, the answer is “holiday 2011″. But in an interview with CVG, EA’s Frank Gibeau revealed that though they intend to launch the game before year’s end, the specific date will largely depend on fan feedbacks for the beta, which is set to begin this Friday, September 2nd.

“It is definitely tied to the beta test feedback that’s ongoing and so far, so good. We feel good about the date that we’re heading towards but you’re right, you could have a Crazy Ivan show up in the September/October beta test and be like, ‘wow, I’ve got to fix that’.”

The reason according to Gibeau is because EA and Bioware want to avoid the same pitfalls, in the form of technical glitches, that plagued Blizzard’s world of Warcraft when it first launched back in 2004, and that they want to ensure the game’s quality before putting it out to the market.

“We don’t want to happen to us what happened to WoW and a couple of other services where in the first week there were queues trying to get on to the servers, the entire service crashed – we don’t want that to happen. So we need to nail and make sure that it’s up 24/7 and it’s high quality.”

“We’re totally focused on quality, so whatever the beta test tells us is what will be the determining variable on when we will hit.”

Source: CVG