PixlBit

Gamers have logged over 60 million hours already.

With the year almost over and most of the games industry taking some much needed time off, Star Wars: The Old Republic seems to dominate the conversation. We here at PixlBit feel that a great deal of time is needed with the game before giving our readers a comprehensive and fair review of the game. With that said, we have some interesting information for you regarding BioWare’s Next Big Thing, including the first rumblings of expansions.

To begin with, it looks as if SW:TOR has had a relatively successful launch, beyond the issue with high-traffic servers hitting eager gamers with as much as a 2 hour wait before logging in. According to a press release from EA, The Old Republic has already sold over a million copies. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to Word of Warcraft’s legendary subscription numbers, but is on par with many established MMORPGS.

What's more interesting are some of the stats that have come from the community at launch (as well as the early access players). Players have already reportedly logged over 60 million hours into TOR so far, with 5.5 million hours played over Christmas weekend alone. Even though our own Rob Ottone got a distinct Sith vibe from the launch event in NYC, the numbers are split pretty evenly: over 850,000 Sith Warriors and over 810,000 Jedi Knights have been created so far.

Those lightsabers have been pretty busy, too—EA reports that over 3 billion NPCs have been killed so far.

But wait, there’s more! During an appearance on a recent episode of Gamespot’s podcast, SW: TOR lead writer Daniel Erickson had some interesting things to reveal about the writing process for the game. He spoke about speculation that there were problems when a new writing position popped up at BioWare Austin. “No, no, we need to grow the writing department,” he says. “We have deliverables we have to deliver now.” Deliverables like expansions, of course. “The writing department and concept artists and all those people have actually moved on to post-release content a long time ago,” says Erickson. He goes on to say that, while the development team was in crunch mode to get the game released, the writing team was in crunch mode to get the content for the first expansion ready to go.

What could that first expansion be? New races? New classes? Force sensitive droids? Let the speculation begin!